lab notes
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
lab notes
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
lab notes
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&
lab notes
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
ai-chat
ā¯“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 notes
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 notes
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
Essays
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
Essays
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 notes
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
programming
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
lab notes
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