Mokka mit Schlag

The last couple of times I tried to use a coding agent in anger to come to grips with a large existing C or C++ codebase for a desktop application, they failed miserably. Either the code base was too large or too complex, or there wasn’t enough C and C++ training data in the dataset for the LLM, or for some other reason, it couldn’t even begin to do something reasonable. Most recently, when I tried to use a coding agent to vibe code a macOS desktop app and a simple one at that, it failed miserably. It could not produce anything that could even build and run one simple test. But that was about four months ago, and that’s a long time in the world of LLMs. So I figured I’d give it another try with another problem that has recently come to my attention.

Specifically, I’m going to try to see if any available coding agent can analyze https://github.com/transmission/transmission/issues/8401 to figure out why the Transmission UI routinely goes into a spinning beach ball state on the Mac. Let’s begin.
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In 2026 we’ve gotten so used to being able to look up information about individuals via social media, Wikipedia, and other sources that it’s quite jarring when you discover people who are in some sense well known but just aren’t there. Lately it struck me that there are a number of people from the latter half and earlier in the 20th century that would be far better documented if they had just lived today. They’re not super famous people like presidents or Nobel Prize winning authors or scientists, but they are mid-level people about whom there would be a lot of information today. State legislatures, authors, scientists who weren’t necessarily Nobel Prize winners but did important work. Here are just a few examples of people I would really like to know a lot more about, but as far as I can tell, the information just isn’t there.
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I’m going to respond to Michael Xue here because, as is all too common, the comment form simply isn’t working.

Spoken like a true mathematician. Harvard Reform might indeed have left a generation of students less prepared for advanced mathematics than ever before, but it’s not as if there’s any shortage of advanced mathematicians today, and more importantly it’s not like future mathematicians were then or now the primary audience for calculus classes. I’d estimate that well more than 90% of students who actually use calculus do so in physics, engineering, economics, and other scientific fields. Mathematics for mathematics’s sake was always a small minority. I learned calculus the old way, but I never understood it until I taught it the new way.

Newton, Leibniz, Euler, and Gauss didn’t need epsilon delta proofs. Neither do students of calculus, with the sole exception of the small minority who are trying to become pure mathematicians, and they can pick it up in their first real analysis course.

Yes, I know I’m a little late to the party, but I’m about through the end of Season 1 of Severance, and there’s one meta question I’m asking myself. No, it’s not what is actually going on, how does severance work, or what the purpose of the Lumon Corporation is, though these are all reasonable questions. My question is more what kind of show am I watching? In particular, am I watching a show like Lost and Dollhouse or am I watching a show like The Prisoner or The X-Files? Because if it’s the latter, I’m going to hate myself for getting sucked into this.
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Over the last couple of days I was working on a relatively complex software integration project for image generation with stable diffusion. I had dozens of different pieces from multiple websites to download, configure, integrate, and debug. None of it was particularly well documented. In the past, I would have read what documentation existed, most of which was out of date, experimented a lot, and asked a number of questions on Reddit or other forums. This time, instead of bothering a lot of people online, I decided to use LLMs and chatbots to assist me and explain to me in detail what I needed to do when and how to accomplish my task. The results weren’t pretty.
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Bertrand Russell once wrote to the eminent mathematician and philosopher
Gottlob Frege to ask him how his system would handle the set of all sets that are not members of themselves.
Frege famously wrote this in the epilogue to the second volume of Basic Laws of Arithmetic:

A scientific writer can scarcely encounter anything more undesirable than, after completing a work, to have one of the foundations shaken. I became aware of this situation through a letter from Mr. Bertrand Russell as the printing of this volume neared completion.

In fact, today Frege is perhaps better remembered for this failure than for all his other work combined. At least this was an interesting mistake that taught mathematicians something. It’s much worse to publish a two-volume 500 page proof only to have an undergraduate notice an obvious mistake on page 2.

Russell’s paradox is a simple way of expressing the statement, “This statement is false” into the set theory Frege had laid out. It’s commonly responded to by removing the Principle of Unrestricted Comprehension, as well as some other changes eventually made in Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory instead of what mathematicians now call naive set theory. How successful this is I’m not sure since Godel’s Theorem still applies, even with ZF. Regardless, today I found myself thinking of an alternate problem with the Principle of Unrestricted Comprehension. What about the set of all sets that do contain themselves?
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