zellyn

And really well-reasoned arguments. And a decades-long sterling reputation for cantankerous but insightful contrarian takes. And references in the article to astonishingly well researched articles by people who have talked to NASA engineers and read non-public documentation. It’s like anyone can be taken seriously these days…

I was so sad when Google shelved their Sabre replacement. Could have run the whole industry.

Ah, that makes sense. Thanks for the details. I see now that your article basically had all the information I needed to figure this out if I’d thought a bit harder!

Also, nice work: this makes the world just a little nicer!

Does SQLite not have a lemon parser generated for its SQL?

When I ported pikchr (also from the SQLite project) to Go, I first ported lemon, then the grammar, then supporting code.

I always meant to do the same for its SQL parser, but pikchr grammar is orders of magnitude simpler.

If you can incorporate Quamina or similar logic in there, you might be able to save even more… worth looking into, at least

I love this. Nice work!

It’s fun to look at your code samples, have absolutely no clue what any of it means, and think about just how many non-English-speaking programmers must have felt that way looking at our all-English programming languages.

Except lisp: that’s just inscrutable symbols like cond and cons and car and cadr and a bunch of parens! :-)

See also: https://wokwi.com (ESP32 equivalent)

[Edit] Which also does Arduino.

For those arguing that humans rely on vision alone, one additional argument:

If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.

A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)

+1 yo wanting to see the cognition logo with contrast. It was set up as the target, but no payoff!

Lovely article, and the dynamic examples are :chefs-kiss:

Please, start a blog! Hugo + GitHub hosting makes it laughably simple. (Or pick a different stack; that’s just mine.)

Even if you’re worried it’ll be sparse and crappy, isn’t an Internet full of idiosyncratic personal blogs what we all want?

If you want help or encouragement, reach out: zellyn@ most places

Thank you! I’ve always procrastinated tracking finances, but as a programmer who believes in reproducible builds, this just clicked.

I just downloaded a bunch of qfx and csv files, and got Claude Code to do this. Took an hour to create the whole system from nothing. Then of course I stayed up until 2am getting CC to create Python rules to categorize things better, and trying to figure out what BEENVERI on my bank statement means

(If you do this, make Claude generate fingerprints for each transaction so it’s easy to add individual overrides…)

Getting Claude to write a FastAPI backend to serve up a “Subscriptions” dashboard took about 3 minutes, plus another minute or two to add an svg bar graph and change ordering.

Crazy times.

trifling.org is an entire Python coding site, offline first (localstorage after first load), with docs, turtle graphics, canvas, and avatar editor, vibe coded from start to finish, with all conversations in the GitHub repo here: https://github.com/zellyn/trifling/tree/main/docs/sessions

This is going to destroy my home network, since I never moved it off the little Lenovo box sitting in my laundry room beside the Eero waypoint, but I’m out of town for three days, so

Granted, the seed of the idea was someone posting about how they wired pyiodide to Ace in 400 lines of JavaScript, so I can’t truly argue it’s non-trivial.

As a light troll to hackernews, only AI-written contributions are accepted

[Edit: the true inception of this project was my kid learning Python at school and trinket.io inexplicably putting Python 3 but not 2 behind the paywall. Alas, Securely will not let him and his classmates actually access it ]

I’m horribly biased but I think it’s a combination of: (1) knee-jerk reaction to similar-looking but low-value comments, and (2) most people not having played around with LLM coding agents and messed around with their own agents enough to immediately jump to excitement at simple, safe sandboxing primitives for that purpose.

And +1000 on linking to your own (or any other well-written) blog.

I’ve long thought it would be unsurprising if we eventually found evidence of certain kinds of telepathy. It would just be too damn useful, and tuning up one exquisitely complex magneto-electro-chemical instrument in close proximity to another similar one seems like a good way to at least get resonance. Who knows?

Guess it beats doing it every 250ms for every topic…

I enjoy the [GoL -> our “reality” -> outside-the-simulation] comparison. It really drives home how unlikely we would be to understand the outside-the-simulation world.

Of course, there are other variants (see qntm's https://qntm.org/responsibility) where the simulation _is_ a simulation of the world outside. And we have GoL in GoL :-)

The Developer Voices interview where Kris Jenkins talks to Ryan Worl is one of the best, and goes into a surprising amount of detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgzmxe6cj6A

tl;dr they write to s3 once every 250ms to save costs. IIRC, they contend that when you keep things organized by writing to different files for each topic, it's the Linux disk cache being clever that turns the tangle of disk block arrangement into a clean view per file. They wrote their own version of that, so they can cheaply checkpoint heavily interleaved chunks of data while their in-memory cache provides a clean per-topic view. I think maybe they clean up later async, but my memory fails me.

I don't know how BufStream works.

The thing that really stuck with me from that interview is the 10x cost reduction you can get if you're willing and able to tolerate higher latency and increased complexity and use S3. Apparently they implemented that inside Datadog ("Labrador" I think?), and then did it again with WarpStream.

I highly recommend the whole episode (and the whole podcast, really).

Ditto on my MacBook Air

It feels really simple, and Ansible feels like… a whole thing. I’m probably just going on vibes here, though!

This is my annual plug for the little-known bundlewrap: https://bundlewrap.org

It hits a really nice sweet spot, letting you automate things, without making everything too complex.

Recently, I've taken to just asking Claude Code to do things via bundlewrap. It seems to be about as easy for it to create bundles and templates that update systems, etc. as it would be to just update systems, etc. except you're left with something you can check in.

Here's the result of me asking it to set up Caddy to serve a website from my little Lenovo box in the laundry room: https://github.com/zellyn/bundlewrap-config/commit/d5f92ebb0...

What weird shadow-universe do you inhabit where you found Python developers telling you the tooling was just fine? I thought everyone has agreed packaging was a trash fire since the turn of the century.

I once tried to start enumerating gate types for Trinary.

In binary, with two inputs, there are 2^2 = 4 total possible inputs (00, 01, 10, 11). Different gate types can give different outputs for each of those four inputs: each output can be 0 or 1, so that's 2^4 == 16 different possible gate types. (0, 1, A, B, not A, not B, AND, OR, NAND, NOR, XOR, XNOR, A and not B, B and not A, A or not B, B or not A)

In ternary, with two inputs, there are 3^2 = 9 total possible inputs, so 3^9 = 19,683. I'm sure there are some really sensible ones in there, but damn that's a huge search space. That's where I gave up that time around! :-)

ps I still miss the alternate universe where Kenton won the open source deployment battle :-)

Agreed. There was a point where I thought AMIs would become the unit of open source deployment packaging, and I think docker filled that niche in a cloud-agnostic way

It definitely has LLM vibes…

I recently had an interview like this. Felt like half the answers I gave were of the form, “You can do scaling/sharding/partitioning thing X here, but once again, for an internal app I’d try really hard to avoid doing any of that”. If you’re interviewing with capable, experienced developers, they’ll appreciate that answer (at least, I got the offer on this one!)

> the MacRumors home page crashed after some scrolling

I know there’s a ton going on, with GPUs and rendering and all kinds of things, but I guess because Rust’s memory safety and “no null pointers!” are so constantly hyped (especially in conversations about Go), that I’m always surprised when you fire up a Rust app and do something and it crashes out…

[To be clear, I’m a big fan of modern sum types, and like to imagine an alternate reality where Go had them from the start…]

Oh nice! I play Loopy while listening to podcasts or sometimes watching Netflix, and the bugs causing right edge to require double long-hold and left edge to require fanatical precision always drive me nuts, so this is very welcome!

Any way to change the yellow to something tamer, and reduce the line widths slightly?

The California Memorial Stadium is built directly on a fault line, right?