Essays
There are some programmer that love types and there are others who eschew them. When reasonable people fall on both sides, it's good reason to look for a latent variable that better explains the underlying motivation or cause. Latent variables, by definition, are hard to measure or observe
Essays
A couple of months ago, I had to reload everything I knew about reactivity back into my head. I discovered that I missed a large corner of the development around unstructured reactivity, by way of Signals. From arguments about signals vs. functional components on Twitter and in post comments, it
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
Essays
🔰If CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) are new to you, check out this previous post. There's a simple way to understand CRDTs: It leverages algebra to unmix the inevitable mixing of data when syncing over an unreliable network. Why are networks unreliable? For one, it'd be
startups
Despite the disdain for "GPT-wrappers," it's currently where the value is accruing in the supply chain of value to the end-user with LLM-driven apps. Unless something changes with the foundational model companies approach the market, the GPT-wrapper application layer is where the value accrues, hence where
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
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
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
programming
💡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
techno-optimism
Recently, the Rabbit r1 launched. It's a new handheld device that promises a new primary interaction model with compute: by talking to them in the context of the real world. In turn, they would help us perform actions to help us with unstructured, but menial tasks throughout our
programming
👉When I had mistakenly thought that Prolly Trees weren't uncit, I thought maybe an interesting way forward was to leverage the same mechanism CRDTs use to converge. Below is a mathematical description of what I called a Lattice Merkle Tree, still incomplete. I had time-boxed this, so I