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iamwilon Incremental – A library for incremental computations

https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/an-opinionated-ma...

Can help map out the landscape.

iamwilon Why developers are ditching GitHub for Codeberg and self-hosting alternatives

Anyone tried tangle as a replacement? Verdict?

I think Evan's pointing at something, and everyone's looking at the finger. I don't think this is really about Elm at all, but the preparation for Acadia.

In his talk, Economics of Programming Languages https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZ3w_jec1v8, he does reveal a peek at what he's been working on for the past seven years: a query language with functional ideas applied to them.

He points at the boundaries in web apps that typically destroys type information: - language <-> storage - storage <-> wire

What if we could preserve the type information across these boundaries? What would that buy us? One answer he had was easier migrations. They'd just be a type diff, rather than hand-written SQL.

So I think the right question is, can we infer what Acadia is going to be like given the changes he's shipping with Elm? What does incremental compilation give query languages?

iamwilon The Third Hard Problem

I think I've always called this "Ontology is hard". It's genuinely useful when it's used as a tool for clarification. It's constraining when it's used as a tool for modeling.

iamwilon I caught the car

You didn't need to say anything. Plenty of people would have stepped up to defend you. Now, the sarcasm looks defensive. This could be another blog post in a couple months.

iamwilon Opus 4.7 knows the real Kelsey

If this works with writing, it should also work with code. `git blame` should be enough training data to de-anonymize open source programmers. Maybe that'd be addition information to point out who Satoshi is.

iamwilon Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games

Blow originally did Order of Sinking Star as a quick side project. He thought that by using these pre-existing games as a starting point, he'd get it done quicker. But then he decided to experiment with the combinatorics of these mechanics that the game blew up so much in scope that the original starting point didn't help at all.

iamwilon Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games

It's a puzzle maker's puzzle game. The reason why it's so lauded is because the design is so tight. Kinda like how there's certain buildings the public thinks is ugly, but architects all like it because it tickles that part of the architect brain. It's a game that gives you that ah-ha moment. Kinda that moment where you walk from the forest into a clearing, but for your brain.

The game is hard. I only kinda got the hang of it, and I didn't quite get to that ah-ha moment. You have to be willing to sit with it and think. I think with sokoban games, you can often just almost random walk your way to a solution, because the state space and its transitions is easy enough to wander into. But I didn't find that to be the case with SSR. You have to be able to reason about the state space changes, I think because the state space isn't exactly euclidean, so it's harder to wander into the solution.

iamwilon Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games

LMGTFY. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokoban

iamwilon Stephen's Sausage Roll remains one of the most influential puzzle games

Sokoban is a common word within puzzle game fans and devs. That article wasn't written for people that didn't like those kinds of puzzles in the first place.

iamwilon Show HN: I made a calculator that works over disjoint sets of intervals

This is great. You might be interested in Matt Keeter's work on Implicit surfaces, and using interval math for its optimization:

https://youtu.be/UxGxsGnbyJ4?si=Oo6Lmc4ACaSr5Dk6&t=1006

iamwilon FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self

The bug is in the software in our heads, if anything. We learned a little too much, that we're thinking further ahead than we would have when we first started out. So you need to purposefully shut off that part of your eval, so that you get started on anything at all.

If you design with the LLM, then it can make this easier by prompting it to help you not talk yourself out of things.

I found that gstack's /office_hours to be good about encouraging, while being firm. I've only done one of the modes, but it didn't dismiss my pushback when it was just based on my intuition. It took it as a baseline, and tried to evaluate it by taking it seriously. If that's any indication, the other modes for side projects should be just as supportive.

I think LLMs can make it easier to be more ambitious. Non-techies are blown away by being able to build web pages? I'm blown away that I was able to root my 1st gen Kindle Fire to repurpose it as a remote terminal to ssh into my laptop to talk to claude code. I've been trying to root the thing for years and could never find the right instructions to make it work.

iamwilon FaceTime with My 19-Year-Old Self

It's easy to talk yourself out of doing things when you know a little too much. Sometimes, it's good to get back into the mode where you knew nothing and do things for their own sake, just to get the engine started again.

iamwilon Having Kids (2019)

The quip I keep going back to is: "All joy, no fun."

iamwilon Optimizing Content for Agents

I didn't find llms.txt useless at all. I was able to download all the library docs and check it into my repo and point my coding agent to it all the time.

iamwilon The Brand Age

I kept thinking that he'd eventually compare it to writing software by hand, and how we're at the end of one golden age. But he never did. So I wonder what the impetus for the essay was.

iamwilon I pitched a roller coaster to Disneyland at age 10 in 1978

Isn't that what happens when they post their projects on HN?

iamwilon "Hate brings views": Confessions of a London fake news TikToker

Doesn't make it excusable. I get it's hard to uphold principles when the stomach is empty. But it's clear the person in the piece wasn't thinking about much else, though he was also clearly not in the streets and starving.

iamwilon Show HN: Moltbook – A social network for moltbots (clawdbots) to hang out

Claude -> Clawd -> Moltbot -> Openclaw

Only a few things have claws. Lobsters being one of them.

iamwilon Chuck Klosterman on why we've never actually seen a real football game

I'd be interested in what kind of eSports game is condusive to VR spectating.

I tried doing Dota spectating before, and rigged up a mod for Minecraft vlogging/spectating, and concluded it wasn't quite like being at a stadium, or watching it on Twitch in a way that was interesting.

iamwilon Ask HN: Share your personal website

I write about reactivity, local first, visual programming, start ups, and a smidge about game design.

https://interjectedfuture.com

iamwilon Developers Are Solving the Wrong Problem

Of course they have no literal heads. Please use a more gracious interpretation when reading.

iamwilon Developers Are Solving the Wrong Problem

I have a hunch we'll eventually swing back when we find the limits of vibe coding--in that LLMs also can only hold so much complexity in their heads, even if it's an order of magnitude (or more) greater than ours. If we make it understandable for humans then it'll definitely be trivial for LLMs, which frees them up to do other things. I mean, they don't have infinite layers or units to capture concepts. So the more symmetrical, consistent, and fractal (composable) you can make your code, the easier time an LLM will have with it to solve problems.

iamwilon A website to destroy all websites

The solution offered is pretty weak. I don't think it addresses why the internet took the shape that it did. Publishing without centralized services is too much work for people. And even if you publish, it's not the whole solution. People want distribution with their publication. Centralized services offer ease of publication and ease of distribution. So unless the decentralized internet can offer a better solution to both, this story will play out again and again.

iamwilon Welcome to Gas Town

> For instance, I know Project A -- these are the concerns of Project A. I know Project B -- these are the concerns of Project B. I have the insight to design these projects so they compose, so I don't have to keep track of a hundred parallel issues in a mono Project C. On each of those projects, run a single agent -- with review gates for 2-3 independent agents (fresh context, different models! Codex and Gemini). Use a loop, let the agents go back and forth.

Can you talk more about the structure of your workflow and how you evolved it to be that?

iamwilon Package managers keep using Git as a database, it never works out

This sounds like a missing piece of software in the OSS world. If you have the inclination, you should write it.

iamwilon Logging sucks

Content marketing and lead generation is getting more sneaky

iamwilon OpenSCAD is kinda neat

Ah OpenSCAD. I wrote a tutorial a long time ago about the 10 things you need to know to get started.

https://cubehero.com/2013/11/19/know-only-10-things-to-be-da...

iamwilon Show HN: Picknplace.js, an alternative to drag-and-drop

I was expecting that the line item would move with my mouse movement, not with my scroll.

iamwilon Jonathan Blow has spent the past decade designing 1,400 puzzles

He didn't need to finish it in order for it to have an impact. Makers of FilePilot and Animal Well both attribute Handmade as being big inspirations for them to go the way they did. They said, they got the most value from the first 50 eps or so. You'll hear lots of them on the Wookash podcast.