programming
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
lab notes
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
programming
đź’ˇThe 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 notes
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.
lab notes
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 notes
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 notes
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
lab notes
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.
lab notes
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.
QnA
âť“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/
lab notes
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
lab notes
Last week, I built Prolly Trees from scratch and probed some of its properties. This week, I started building a Prolly Tree incrementally, by inserting one key at a time. It was more challenging than I suspected at first glance, seeing as I implemented it three times. In a typical