Wil - Interjected Future

Wil

TIL Poor man's quoting in Python

Today I Learned

TIL Poor man's quoting in Python

In Lisp, you can quote an expression to delay its evaluation while passing it around as a value. In Python, this means in practice, I want a function that looks like it's executing, but reality, I'm delaying its actual execution. I can use decorators to achieve this. # A thunk-based Efx

Lab note #051 Cell composition and lazy evaluation

Lab note #051 Cell composition and lazy evaluation

Last week, I merged the runtime worker into the kernel worker. Originally, I wanted that to run multiple kernels at once, so users can run languages in a mix of cells, or they can run more than one cell in parallel. It was too hard to trace execution over a

Lab note #050 Prior art of a React-like runtime

Lab note #050 Prior art of a React-like runtime

I fell short this week in that I didn't do what I said I was going to do. Instead, of writing code, I went down the incremental rabbit hole. It was innocuous at first, but ended up being a full deep dive, mostly into the work of Steven Wittens (aka

Lab note #049 Survey of Reactive and Incremental Programming

Lab note #049 Survey of Reactive and Incremental Programming

For a while now, I've been circling the drain on the Tools for Thought space and all the topics related to it. One large topic is reactivity, and not too far behind is incremental computation. They're two sides to a coin, so it's hard to disentangle them from each other.

Lab note #048 Basic Effects Done, Reactivity Next

Lab note #048 Basic Effects Done, Reactivity Next

I spent most of the week getting a basic algebraic effects runtime working. The initial version is single-threaded, synchronous, no typing, with a single yield from handlers. For now, it's good enough for building the proverbial skateboard. Only during implementation did I run into design questions I wouldn't have had

Lab note #047 Progress on Notebook

Lab note #047 Progress on Notebook

My progress on Crafting Interpreters halted when I was researching how Algebraic Effects were implemented, once I realized that I might not need all the gory details. The part I wanted to get to was understanding how closures were implemented, especially if they were relevant to getting Algebraic Effects to

A mental model for `yield from`

A mental model for `yield from`

❓Prompt: teach me the difference between yield and yield from in python. I understand yield from can replace the iterative nature of reading from a generator to get all the results. But as I understand it, it also covers a lot of other edges too, when you send stuff into

Lab note #046 Algebraic Effects for Notebook Cells

Lab note #046 Algebraic Effects for Notebook Cells

The notebook that I want to build and use has pure functional cells. Functional cells are where the output only depends on the input. * No need to figure out the correct execution order for the notebook cells to get it in a working state. * For any change, only dependent cells

Lab note #045 From Database to Notebook

Lab note #045 From Database to Notebook

I spent the last month doing some contract work, both to pay the bills and get some perspective on how web devs are working nowadays. I've been away for about two years and some things have changed. I worked on a Next.js stack, and I'm honestly a little horrified

Launching a Digital Zine

Launching a Digital Zine

While I've been working on systems programming and local-first software, I've resisted diving into building with LLMs for the better part of 8 months. But I think it's too much of a fundamental shift to ignore. I won't be ignoring the groundwork that I've been doing on CRDTs and Prolly

Empowering End Users with Local Models

Empowering End Users with Local Models

I pulled down Llama 3.1 7B for a long flight recently. It seemed magical in the same way downloading all of Wikipedia seems--like taking an entire universe with you. The missing piece is the context to steer the LLM. We need a Microsoft Access of RAG and LLM system

Lab note #044 Sailing by cache-oblivious data structures

Lab note #044 Sailing by cache-oblivious data structures

As part of biasing towards action, I thought it was time to reimplement the Prolly Tree in Zig. I wanted to focus on being cache-friendly this time, now that I have lower-level control. But that resulted in a deep dive into data-oriented programming. The question is how to represent a

Where is the sandbox in your code base?

Where is the sandbox in your code base?

I was watching Casey Muratori and the Primeagen the other day, and they were talking about the high-level architectural design of the core data inside of Primeagen's game. What Casey says sounds counter-intuitive for anyone from a traditional OOP software background. He suggests not committing to an organization of data

Lab note #043 Merkle CRDT protocol

Lab note #043 Merkle CRDT protocol

My adherence to immutability has put me on the hard path for everything so far. Not just for the unicit Prolly tree, but also for the CRDT. Most practical CRDT libraries use an op-based CRDT or a delta-based CRDT, but many do not keep the entire history around. I think

Visual Programming Should Start in the Debugger

Visual Programming Should Start in the Debugger

Just like CAD didn't make everyone an industrial designer, visual programming isn't going to make everyone a programmer. Whether textual or visual, there'd still be a lot of underlying concepts (and how they are composed) to learn. But still, I think it's underexplored. Most visual programming paradigms focus on coding--the

Lab note #042 LLM Zine

Lab note #042 LLM Zine

I started working on making an LLM Zine. Not to worry, the work on the database is still in the works, but this has been a burgeoning interest and opportunity. LLMs are a fundamental technological breakthrough, and the effects of this technology will take at least a decade to work

Recurse Center Return Statement

Recurse Center Return Statement

💡The Recurse Center encourages recent graduates to write about their experience in the form of a Return Statement. Below is mine. The 12-week experience at RC did remind me of the story of the tall, strong, and unbendable Oak that towers over the short, thin, and flexible Reeds. On an

Lab note #041 Two flavors of Op-based CRDTs as a baseline

Lab note #041 Two flavors of Op-based CRDTs as a baseline

I've now implemented an Op-based and a Pure op-based CRDT. I couldn't quite make the leap before to merkle-based CRDTs. While vectors clocks are mechanically simple, I wasn't quite sure how they mapped to a merkle-DAG node if replica IDs weren't available. After seeing them in action, I'm fairly certain

Lab note #040 Hitting a wall and going back to basics with CRDTs

Lab note #040 Hitting a wall and going back to basics with CRDTs

This continues my exploration into CRDTs, beyond the typical tutorials. The more I looked, the more threads there were to pull on. I currently have a couple of lines of questioning to answer: * How do we compose CRDTs so they both converge to a single state without coordination but with

Lab note #039 Semantics of Composed CRDTs

Lab note #039 Semantics of Composed CRDTs

After the implementation of the Prolly Tree, I set about writing an immutable map. It was pretty straightforward as most of the heavy lifting is done by the Prolly Tree implementation. The immutable map just keeps a simple list of roots after every change. There are a bunch of improvements

Lab note #038 Prolly Tree Incremental Insert Finally Done

Lab note #038 Prolly Tree Incremental Insert Finally Done

It took a long time, but the incremental insert for a Prolly Tree is finally done. I don't think I've ever spent this long as such a little part of code. The two aspects that had me struggling were the bottom-up breadth-first traversal, and how to replace the swath of

Lab note #037 Replacing a swath of nodes

Lab note #037 Replacing a swath of nodes

The punchline first: the incremental insert is finally done on the Prolly Tree. I don't think I've ever spent so much time on such a small, core piece of code. It was also a lesson for me to lean into the struggle and talk about it. Last time, I talked

Lab note #036 Bottom-up Breadth-first Traversal

Lab note #036 Bottom-up Breadth-first Traversal

A problem was that traversal in a layer would be backward. I'd need to traverse left-to-right to match the build process when building the Prolly Tree from scratch. No problem, I'll just loop through the children backward when processing top-down.

You’re struggling to keep customers loyal. How can you use marketing automation software to help?

You’re struggling to keep customers loyal. How can you use marketing automation software to help?

❓What is this? LinkedIn sometimes suggests that I take an unpaid gig as an advice columnist. Here, I take them up on it, especially if my answers run contrary to typical answers.It's easy to fall into the trap of Seeing like a State [https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/

Lab note #035 A quagmire of replacement nodes

Lab note #035 A quagmire of replacement nodes

I've been stuck on the incremental insertion of a key in a Prolly Tree, and feeling like I'm in a bog. The version where a Prolly Tree is built from scratch was relatively straightforward. I was able to write it in a day. The incremental version has undergone four or