Alexis King@lexi_lambda

computers can be understood • DMs open (but responsiveness varies) • she/her, ⚢

 Chicago, IL
Based in United States
lexi-lambda.github.io/
Joined October 2012
921 Photos and videos
“Put up in a place where it's easy to see the cryptic admonishment T.T.T. When you feel how depressingly slowly you climb, it's well to remember that Things Take Time.” — Piet Hein
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The recording of my talk from @ssw_conf is now up. :) piped.video/watch?v=0BXuYlNr…

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Constructive Data Modeling - Alexis King | SSW 2026

Abstract: The type systems provided by mainstream languages have gr...

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It's not possible to understand this blog post without understanding that some people really dislike Rust, memory safety, and the whole idea of programming languages eliminating classes of bugs by rejecting programs.
Frank
@jedisct1
Jul 9
Andrew Kelley Thoughts on the Bun Rust Rewrite andrewkelley.me/post/my-thou…
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I can totally believe the claims about Bun. And obviously psychological analysis over Twitter is unprovable. But I've seen this sort of thing a lot over the years.
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Yes, it is certainly a “the worst people you know are fighting” kind of situation…
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Replying to @lexi_lambda @samth
"We used an LLM to port everything to a version where everything unsafe had to be explicitly identified" is an equally valid way to describe the port
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It’d be nice if this were the attitude at play here, but that has not been my impression from following this story, I’m afraid.
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Replying to @lexi_lambda
I really don't think the attitude of the Bun people is relevant here. My claim is that Kelley is mad about the idea of Rust being safer than Zig, which is explicitly a reason given in the Bun blog post.
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I am sure it will not surprise you that I do not like Zig and I am no fan of Kelley’s attitude on the nature of safety, but I am not convinced it is a major motivator for this blog post. I have other sources that corroborate the claims about Bun and Jarred. It’s quite the mess!
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Replying to @lexi_lambda
I think some people (like the creators of Zig) think that it's fundamentally a mistake to try to rule out memory safety problems at the language level, and furthermore they're offended that people want to do that, instead of just writing correct programs in the first place.
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Sam, I hate to be the one to tell you this, but I don’t think “we asked an LLM to port everything to Rust containing over a thousand uses of `unsafe` and then merged the PR” is the work of someone who values safety. (If anything I think the Zig folks seem to value safety more!)
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Alexis King retweeted
Impure Pics@impurepics
Jun 22
@lexi_lambda talks Racket, nonogram/picross puzzles, puzzle solvers, a functional picture combinator library on top of OpenGL, and programming for fun. Enjoy. piped.video/LwpnwQGNC9Q

Why Racket is so fun (w/ Alexis King)

Alexis made a puzzle game that solves and allows you to solve nonog...

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Has anyone written about the concept of double-entry programming? I.e. programming as if it were accounting
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yes retrocomputing.stackexchange…
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good lord
Paweł Szulc@EncodePanda
Jun 15
LOL @lexi_lambda, I'm arguing (sic!) with Claude about how ridiculously stupid function it has written in Go, and this just happened: I have not mentioned you once in that conversation.
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It's crazy that it can write code that's this impressive, but it still writes like ... that
Jarred Sumner
@jarredsumner
Jun 10
Replying to @jarredsumner
for example github.com/oven-sh/WebKit/pu…
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it is really funny how every sane programmer I know basically agrees that LLMs are sometimes extremely useful for writing code but should never, ever, under any circumstances be used to produce English
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I am pleased to announce that I will be presenting at @ssw_conf next month. I hope to see some of you there! :) softwareshould.work/

Software Should Work

An independent conference on software reliability in Columbia, MO on July 16-17, 2026

softwareshould.work
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I will not be taking questions at this time.
Playing X? I'll Show You Something Interesting meme template. In the first panel CEichn’s dad asks “Playing with types? I’ll show you something interesting”. In the second panel he says “The two types of programming languages are Lisp and C. All languages fall into these to categories. Haskell [logo]? Lisp. Java [logo]? C.” Calvin replies “Yeah…”. In the third panel Calvin’s dad continues: “Ruby [logo]? Lisp. Python [logo]? C. Despite having C-like syntax, JavaScript [unofficial logo, annoyingly there is no real logo for this??] is a Lisp.” In the last panel Calvin is kept up by the horrors of what Brendan Eich has wrought.

ALT Playing X? I'll Show You Something Interesting meme template. In the first panel CEichn’s dad asks “Playing with types? I’ll show you something interesting”. In the second panel he says “The two types of programming languages are Lisp and C. All languages fall into these to categories. Haskell [logo]? Lisp. Java [logo]? C.” Calvin replies “Yeah…”. In the third panel Calvin’s dad continues: “Ruby [logo]? Lisp. Python [logo]? C. Despite having C-like syntax, JavaScript [unofficial logo, annoyingly there is no real logo for this??] is a Lisp.” In the last panel Calvin is kept up by the horrors of what Brendan Eich has wrought.

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lol I made almost this exact post in a discord server a few months ago
calvin’s dad: hey check this out. all languages are lisp or haskell. java? lisp. c++? haskell. javascript? lisp. rust? you might think it’s lisp because of the macros, but it’s actually haskell

ALT calvin’s dad: hey check this out. all languages are lisp or haskell. java? lisp. c++? haskell. javascript? lisp. rust? you might think it’s lisp because of the macros, but it’s actually haskell
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The reason people don't like this explanation is that it implies that Americans are idiots.
G Elliott Morris
@gelliottmorris
Apr 14
The index of consumer sentiment isn't broken; models that try to predict it just don't have the right input variables. I fix that and find that, yes, high nominal price levels explain why the vibes are so off. It's the prices, stupid gelliottmorris.com/p/2026-04…
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Was that really up for debate?
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Replying to @scheminglunatic
The C Standard Cannot Be Replaced And Will Never Be Destroyed langdev.stackexchange.com/a/…
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racket-nonogram now supports automatically generating “mega nonogram” puzzles from standard puzzles
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while working on this I have begun to understand why there are no mega picross implementations on the internet
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I appreciate your continued dedication to the GHC Notes concept.
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it’s just a very nice way of writing comments!! I don’t really understand why it isn’t more common tbh (well, okay, I do: it’s because most programmers seem to hate writing comments in general. but you know, skill issue)
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been working on a racket implementation of nonograms/picross that supports networked co-op github.com/lexi-lambda/racke…
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for the record, I do not consider this an improvement
Alexis King@lexi_lambda
1 May 2021
Anyone else ever think about how fucked up it is that there’s no easy way to type em dashes on English keyboards outside of macOS? I feel like they are kind of an essential punctuation mark, comparable to if keyboards somehow didn’t have any way to type semicolons.
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I have published my first new blog post in four years lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2…
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