What I did at Recurse Center

ykonstant

Let me guess: the webpage simply contains a link to itself.

rus20376

This place sounds like an adult daycare. Has there been a business started based on work done there? Publishable research results? (that second one is actually a pretty low bar, and yet if there is something it is not easily discoverable)

triyambakam

I always shudder hearing about RC. It feels like both wrong ends of career and hobby intersecting and the whole experience sounds dank and clammy.

rtpg

> This included what was probably the most interesting part, writing the tricky recursive code to implement the match statement. Back in school I found this book[0], "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages". Flipping through it was very neat because it kinda demystified the nuts and bolts of implementing the "fancier" functional programming features for me. Chapter 5 is about implementing pattern matching. You read this kind of stuff and realize how easy things become when you just tackle a problem with the right mindset and abstractions. And this is a book from 1987! We've always had decent answers for a lot of the stuff. I think it's interesting to flip through if you're a language implementer, though helps to be comfortable with reading some stuff sideways and not understanding every detail. [0] https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/slpj-book-1987-sea...

jdelman

Reading this conjured some feelings in me. At various points in my career, I’ve wanted to take a sabbatical and go to RC. Having spent the last year in the agentic coding world, the idea of writing code by hand seems quaint and outdated. Many have spoken of this feeling of loss so I’m not saying anything new here, but for some reason reading about RC in 2026 specifically cemented the idea that I’ll probably never write anything by hand again.

gwern

> The goal of the game is to give hints to a secret word without giving the same hint as another player; it was shocking how often all the agents playing would give the same hint, even at temperature 1. We resolved this by giving them all “personalities” which were really just topics; for example we’d be telling one agent to think about things in the context of sports, so their clue for “shell” might be “defense” or something, whereas the agent told to be a hippie might say “cancer” for the zodiac’s crab. Mode-collapse is characteristic of pretty much all chatbots post-davinci-002 and a major challenge to anything creative or game-like.

jan_m_savage

This is what school should have been like. Instead, we got factory-style non-thinker exam-taker pencil-pushing excel-cruncher-wannabes.

eclectric

Always wanted to do this. Anyone attend from India remotely?