Essays
Underlying great creations that you love—be it music, art, or technology—its form (what it looks like) is driven by an underpinning internal logic (how it works). I noticed this pattern while watching a talk on cellular automaton and realized it's "form follows function" paraphrased
lab notes
I spent a good part of this week writing and rewriting a blog post, as part of my commitment to publish more this year. I wrote about 10k words, only to keep about 4k of them. Must be the sunk cost fallacy, because it feels bad to delete entire pages
lab notes
With the release of OpenAI's Deep Research and its testimonies on Twitter, I finally slapped down $200/month for Pro subscription. Deep research is what I do all the time by hand anyway, I figured I'd get a lot of mileage out of it. The second
ai-chat
❓This was a report from GPT3o-mini with Deep Research💭What are the different ways to do handler look up in programming languages that support algebraic effects? I know sometimes, they're also called "abilities" in some languages. A starting point of languages that I know support algebraic
Today I Learned
useEffects have a lot of footguns, especially with the dependency list. This is one of them. If I have a web worker that I need to communicate with, I need to have a message handler. The message handler needs to change the state of my frontend application. It's
lab notes
I'd finished up looking into reactivity (with the exception of data type enforced reactivity, like differential dataflow), and I pulled out code with pedagogical sample code implementing signals and autotracking. * iamwilhelm/pedago_signals: A pedagogical implementation of hybrid push-pull signals in Python * iamwilhelm/pedago_autotracking: A pedagogical implementation
ai-chat
❓This is post is the result of a Socratic conversation I had with GPT-4o about what "syntax represented by the free monad for a functor that provides a signature." meant. After the question and answering, I asked it to write an outline of all that I learned and
I almost never remember what I did in a year. Having written reviews for 2021 and 2023, I've found it helpful to both have a record to look back on as well as a point to review and reflect. I think this should be a habit every quarter,
ai-chat
❓Oleg Kiselyov has a post and corresponding talk, "Having an Effect", about how to represent side effects in a language. While I watched the talk, I conversed with GPT4o about any questions I had. At the end, I had it write a blog post summarizing our conversation, with
lab notes
I'm a little indisposed this week, but I did find some time here and there to do research into effects. I spent the time reading and watching a talk about effects by Oleg Kiselyov. The short version is that side-effects can be formulated as a communication protocol between
lab notes
I'm back, after a little hiatus from writing the notes. Last time, I discovered that I should have been looking more deeply into other reactive models before I embarked on a functional component (React-like) model to model data pipelines. The impedance mismatch should have been indicative that something
lab notes
Last week, I started looking at Signals. When I stepped back and looked at the entire front-end ecosystem, it seemed like many of them outside of React (Solid, Vue, Svelte, Preact), converged on some variation of Signals. There is even a Javascript proposal to include Signals in the language. Given