candrewlee14

Ghostty has my daily driver for a good while now, I’ve been super happy with it. It’s been especially fun watching Mitchell deftly build a community at just the right speed for its development stage. Thank you for all your hard work and responsiveness.

Serious unintended consequences of ordering… Reminds me of the hungry judge effect [1] - judges tend to be more harsh before a break and more lenient after.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungry_judge_effect

I experienced AR for the first time with the Vision Pro, and I came away with the same impressions; it’s not quite ready for mainstream but “magical” really is apt. I was a big skeptic on AR/VR in general before, but the demo for Vision Pro convinced me. I wrote about it here.[1]

[1] https://candrewlee14.github.io/blog/2024-03-07_apple-vision-...

Very interesting to me that our dreams make some of the same mistakes. Some of the usual reality checks to know if you’re dreaming:

- looking at your hands

- looking at clocks

- trying to read

It’s funny that diffusion models often make those exact same mistakes. There’s clearly a similar failure mode where both are drawing from a distribution and losing fine details. Has this been studied?

I'm at a 1/4 of that. I love it and I'm just hoping it sticks around long enough to get me to 40 ;)

Throughout my career thus far, I’ve consistently been advised to get really good at writing if I want to make the biggest impact I can.

With that being said, I’ve been doing some practice!

Recently, I tried the Apple Vision Pro and I wrote about my experience. If you’re interested about my formerly-skeptical opinion on the future of AR/VR, check it out :)

Thank you, I really appreciate this :)

This is fantastic, thank you so much for the thoughtful response!

I happen to be super interested in systems programming (OSes, DBs, PLs), but I've worried that those fundamentals might be superseded by AI, whether through a higher-level abstraction or just better automated code generation. Glad to hear an experienced opinion to the contrary.

I think I'll need to come back and read this a couple more times to pull out all the advice here, I appreciate this much to chew on :)

Totally agree, it’s the textual equivalent of the visual uncanny valley. Communication in general is obviously not gonna go away. Certain kinds of corporate copy-writing where the tone matches the LLM is probably not as resistant. It’ll be interesting to see to what extent that uncanny effect will be reduced over the next decade.

Do the web browser offerings of those apps not cut it?

Sounds something like charm’s vhs: https://github.com/charmbracelet/vhs

Anybody have anything like a "hall of fame" for easy-to-read beautiful working code?

Aarch64 is supported (M series chips) if that’s what you’re worried about.

It's always fun for me to see C. elegans meet software. This is amazing.

My undergrad degree capstone project was a flow-based visual C. elegans strain builder[1]. The team worked with two researchers who taught us a lot about genetics and basic C. elegans biology. They are a fascinating model organism, and it was a super fun project to work on. Even though it's got a very small potential userbase, it did have a potential userbase (which was more than you could say about most capstone projects). We used some interesting technology to build it (Tauri[2]: Rust + Web Frontend), learned some biology along the way, and ended up with a great prototype.

Since none of the software team had any background in genetics, modeling the data was pretty difficult. We'd meet with researchers, they'd teach us new genetics concept, we'd build our models, then the next week they'd say "OH we forgot to tell you about this caveat", then we'd go back to the drawing board, update the schema (thank heavens for migrations), rinse and repeat. It was a lot of fun though :) I couldn't have asked for much more out of a capstone project.

[1] https://worm-world.github.io/ [2] https://tauri.app/

Agreed about Go-like interfaces. I don’t think it’d fit Zig to make them dynamic at runtime the way Go does, but even just as a compile-time constraint it would make building a composable ecosystem like Go’s much easier. See writer: anytype.

Of course its simpler, I just wanted it to make sure the comment still related to her work on this :) In summation, what she’s done is awesome.

SvelteKit is such a breath of fresh air, glad to see it used on this.

jart is a genius. What they’ve done with Blink, Cosmopolitan C, Redbean, and now llama.cpp is incredible. It gives me hope for the future of systems/low-level programming.

Thank goodness we’ve had record breaking snow this year, so the lake lives to see another day!

I can’t help but feel like our brains didn’t evolve to understand the scale of competing against thousands of others to get admitted to college slots and get jobs. Once the internet opened the world to make comparisons against the hierarchy of everyone online, compared to a once much smaller local community, lots of mental issues have shot up. Things like body dysmorphia, imposter syndrome, etc…it just doesn’t seem like our brains can handle the scale of the hierarchy now. That’s just a personal theory of course

Ending alfalfa farming would likely help a lot. The water usage is insane for such a small part of Utah’s GDP.

Thanks for the clarification, totally missed that. Makes much more sense. I’m with you on the concurrency model. What was the reasoning for a runtime per core?

Forgive me, completely missed that this is a backend framework. I mistook this for something like Leptos, a Rust frontend web framework. Makes more sense now, thanks!

I am a big fan of Rust… but I don’t understand how this type of framework would be a better choice than something in the JS/TS realm: Svelte, Solid, React, Vue, Angular, etc. I’m not calling those frameworks ideal, but it seems like working in the native lang of the web in a more mature ecosystem would be a better choice for almost anything. Is this a proof-of-concept framework, is anyone using this in production? When would it make sense to pick this over the alternatives?

Python does a great job at putting together powerful scripts quickly. But I have a really hard time opening up a big Python codebase and making sense of it quickly. No static types can make data pretty hard for me to follow. This may just be something I need to improve at, but I have a distinctly better feeling working with unfamiliar code with static types. Python makes me feel I’m at the will of the documenter to be informed, whereas the types self-document in many cases in other langs.

I agree that structs should enforce using all fields or have provided some defaults at declaration, a result type would be nice, FFI is much harder than most other PLs I’ve worked with, and if your use case is a bad case for the GC, you’re in trouble.

At the same time, I really like go. No other AOT-compiled language I know of makes concurrency so easy: `go foo()`. It’s wonderfully simple and I love that using the language doesn’t cram my working memory. It feels like all the space is there for my problem. It isn’t the right tool for some jobs, and of course, you’re perfectly entitled to your opinion. But I think it’s a welcome tool in the toolbox.

I recently had to implement Raft in Go, and I don’t know of a better language for that. Feel free to inform me otherwise. The race condition checker, RPC libs, and simple concurrency let me focus on the algorithm implementation. The iteration speeds for me were super fast too since Go keeps compile times snappy.

These are all useful tradeoffs for me to keep in mind when deciding the right tool for the job. I wouldn’t consider these “lies” personally, but maybe I do have the wool pulled over my eyes :)

Check out Zig’s `Vector` type. I don’t think I’ve seen SIMD built as elegantly into any other systems language.

It’s important to note too that the performance comparison is for the interpreters (not using JIT).

If Arm continues changing its licensing, I’m sure there will be plenty more RISC-V devices hosting websites soon.

Perfectionism with a hint of imposter syndrome. I’m a college student right now with not a lot of extra time on my hands, but occasionally I have an idea for a blog post. When that idea comes, I search for other blogs on the topic and think, “wow, what a great blog post… I don’t think I’d be adding much in my own words.” Then I don’t write anything. Anybody struggle with this? If so, how do you overcome it?