rtpg

Anyone have fun stories of things they built with tcl/tk? I feel like there's still room for tiny apps with it in theory, but I tend to have the problem of wanting to stuff "arbitrary rich text" into my things (-> web tech suddenly works quite well)

In your mind why do people use computers? The universe is filled with non-technical people who not only have laptops but even go out of their way to buy docks and huge screens and ergonomic keyboards etc

Now, lots of those people have all the data "in the cloud" (a trend that's been around for a very long time), but the actual mechanism for interacting with things exists, right? People want a large screen just to read things.

At one point all the AI churning is supposed to lead to _some_ output for _someone_ right?

I will say that the middle layer is not great. I have an XMPP bot and the "interaction with the network" stuff really is ugly and unfun.

I think the protocol itself is... I mean it's fine, I guess? Protocols are tricky because a lot of stuff is bolted on and it's not really super stateless as a protocol. But like all the Python XMPP client libs (for example) are all real janky.

The protocol is complex enough to where the "simple and easy" client libs require way more up front design.

Not super aware of what Djikstra's work on concurrency you're referring to are. I've had to try to implement things from CS research papers directly and have always had a _bit_ of trouble (disclaimer: I'm dumb), and appreciate this book getting down to the implementation details in a bit of a fool-proof way.

Of course this book is a bunch of "research papers" stapled together in some sense but the act of curating is quite nice

I'll throw out that duck duck go has been "good enough" for me for many years now. I set it as my default and am not confronted with most nonsense like this. There's still some stuff, but way less of it.

Takes 15 seconds to change defaults on the various devices. Sometimes DDG doesn't find the thing and I put "!g <search term>" and it'll throw me to google, so I still find what I need

> This included what was probably the most interesting part, writing the tricky recursive code to implement the match statement.

Back in school I found this book[0], "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages". Flipping through it was very neat because it kinda demystified the nuts and bolts of implementing the "fancier" functional programming features for me.

Chapter 5 is about implementing pattern matching.

You read this kind of stuff and realize how easy things become when you just tackle a problem with the right mindset and abstractions. And this is a book from 1987! We've always had decent answers for a lot of the stuff.

I think it's interesting to flip through if you're a language implementer, though helps to be comfortable with reading some stuff sideways and not understanding every detail.

[0] https://simon.peytonjones.org/assets/pdfs/slpj-book-1987-sea...

Is this a real thought?

I think people with objections to googles business model simply don’t join the company in the first place. We’re decades from Google+ and other various “oh maybe Google isn’t perfect” events, the advertising is a known entity.

There has been a shift, and people are reacting to it

Yeah I feel like NYC is a good parallel. It's "America" but it's also very much its own place

> Tokyo is big enough that you rarely have to leave and see the rest of the country. I don’t think we have to judge countries by their countrysides.

Go see the rest of the country, it's nice! Well, I like Nagano at least. Good opportunities to go touch grass a bit.

> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.

Think about why he compares gypsies to wolves, and talks about "self-preservation".

You might want to be pedantic and try to say he's not comparing them to wolves. He is the one who put those two sentences next to each other. You can choose to ignore the thing that feels obvious to others.

I know a lot of people are decently close to DHH in their feelings on this issue. I think that being publicly loud about these opinions that most people keep to themselves simply leads to wondering what his _actual_ deep opinions are. Think about what you say in private compared to what you say in public, and consider that he is writing in public.

A sentiment being common or not is a bit besides the point about whether it's authoritarian or fascistic or whatever.

If you remove the context and the implication from his post, you can make the argument that it's "just" a post saying "enforce immigration laws".

The problem is that the context and the implications are part of his post. He is communicating who he is and what he believes, and for you it's mostly a question of whether you're going to listen to it.

This whole line of discussion is had about DHH in particular decently often, and I find it kinda funny because even beyond all of this I've always heard that he's just kind of a disagreeable person anyways. But I suppose this industry pulls in a certain kind of annoying person.

I think a lot of that is more "Tokyo" than "Japan" though. My general experience outside of the metropoolis (and even within Tokyo proper, there are good chunks that are properly dead beyond a certain time) is that the evenings are nice and dark.

This isn't even really limited to the countryside, plenty of decently large cities will have most all of their evening activity be focused on a handful of streets.

This is fine, of course! I do think a lot about how much of the image of Japan is mostly the image of Tokyo itself. Not the largest city in the world anymore but quite close.

Tokyo is def very cool though. Huge city that you can actually move around in easily enough means that no matter how microscopic of a subculture you belong to there'll be _some_ people out there in the same category. And very fun to walk around in. Really a great joy to just be able to walk in the middle of a street and not really worry about cars.

What does your logging situation in particular look like? Pretty curious to experiment with my idea more deeply

Yeah I definitely understand the value of the stateless desktop.

I do think that, for example, the fact that browsers hold history is generally a useful thing, though, right? For me it's less about persisting the application state itself as it is about holding onto metadata for later inspection.

Yep.

There's also a thing of wanting "http referer"-style things but at the desktop. I want things that tell me _from where_ I clicked into a page in the browser (like "oh you got here from Slack (at this spot)"

Desktop history, clipboard history... all associated to certain contexts. Would be quite nice IMO

> He talked about the desktop building blocks, basically the familiar WIMP model plus the desktop clipboard, as the way that users move data around. Expert users can move data around quickly, he said, but there's a problem: the desktop is stateless. He called this the curse of direct manipulation; there is no working memory to the desktop. ""If you copy a few too many things to the clipboard, oh sorry, it's gone"". > > Jenson theorized that the reason there are so many desktop environments, window managers, and Wayland compositors for Linux—as well as alternative clipboard managers—is because the desktop isn't quite working right for users. He thought it was really about working memory: ""How do I manage my data in such a way that I can remember it across all of these things and actually use it."" His perspective shifted to asking ""what would we do to working memory to improve the desktop UX?""

I feel this so much.

I think that there's a "better" windowing system where all of your stuff sticks around way more than it used to. Clipboard history, but also just "oh you have these windows open while working on this task".

People have really leaned into coding harnesses + chat windows as a way of grouping together work. I think there's a more general idea in this space. Don't make me explicitly keep track of things, just hold onto it all for me!

There's some universe where my desktop is basically a Notion-like thing, and I can just throw things into semi-persistent workspaces (that I close out when I'm done). Desktop Environments that make this work nicely will be quite cool IMO

(A simple and dumb version of this is the BeOS "group various windows together, even though they aren't from the same application" stuff. Very cool stuff IMO

I don't know about the malleable software claim. Sure, people can build out their own thing. Malleable software in itself requires software that is designed to be malleable in the first place.

And perhaps people will not be willing to accept the initial friction that malleable software brings (see people who complain about Emacs or Salesforce or JIRA)... and end up just kinda churning indefinitely on re-implementing things over and over again.

"Internal IT teams" striking aback against SaaSes, perhaps. We'll see

I think it's an interesting thought experiment: could an LLM call be a "cheaper" grep?

Especially for deterministic activities it just feels impossible to imagine general LLM tech handling the problem better, despite everything being said.

But hey, tech is filled with "smashing the generalist hammer works better than the specialized tooling". Would be odd though!

Qt Quick and Qt Creator isn't RAD per se but I feel like it gets you close.

I use my bookmark tab. I am not particularly interested in storing a copy of almost any of the links I have in my bookmark tab (why would I want a copy of some Grafana instance?)

I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"

to be fair all CI providers I've had the pleasure of working with have gnarly performance profiles for the boxes they provide.

I don't think it's out of malice, but I do feel uncomfortable with the fact that the people who sell me the CI coordination software also sell me the minutes for the boxes that run the CI software. There's _some_ alignment of interests but not as much as I would want!

The same major memory makers got prosecuted for cartel behavior by the DoJ a little over 20 years ago[0].

One might say "well what specific law have they broken" and I don't know and I don't know if they have, but at the very least the power of the State _could_ be used to force behavioral changes in some ways or another.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRAM_industry_price_fixing

This article linked back to the intercept's snowden archive articles [0], and while this article paints the Intercept in a bad light it lead me to reading a couple of these.

While I heard many of the headlines the reporting is very in depth, including a bunch of smaller details worth poking into. I'd recommend people who are interested and who haven't done so yet to just read a couple of these.

[0]: https://theintercept.com/series/snowden-archive/

I didn't say they were wrong, I said they were not high-quality.

Every company works in their own way, but I highly doubt the original source would have a big paragraph at the top instead of a more "structured" comment. Or maybe even nothing at all!

Here's a "counterexample": the pistol code for half life 2[0]. Comments are pretty sparse because it's all relatively self explanatory. The comments that are present are to point out things that are not so.

You end up with something that's easy to work with and where you're not trying to read a paragraph of text that enumerates a bunch of properties of the code in the file in no particular order.

Some things are important context for the whole file. Some things are important context for a fragment of code. Some things ... are simply not that important to note.

[0]: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/source-sdk-2013/blob/master...

the comments are really not high-quality. There's a lot of words in places where only a few would be much clearer.

This isn't to say it's impossible to guide good context-aware commenting style from.an AI, but there would be much terser/usable comments on all of the weapons source for example.

The biggest problem with this stuff is, as usual, that the people guiding the AI don't know what "good" decomps etc look like IMO. AI tool usage tends to reflect ones own tastes and understanding.

I don't think they just used it for styling unfortunately, the entire thing felt like this.

Why can't people just write shorter bullet pointed lists of things and post that? Just post what you put into the AI!

Experimentally, at least one major programming language (Rust) places mutability into the type system.

Whether or not something belongs into a type system is ultimately determined by the type system. We can choose whether or not mutability is considered a part of a type.

> When we speak of "type of a variable", we mean this variable can only be assigned (bound to) values of certain type. This has nothing to do with whether it can be reassigned (i.e. mutability).

This is a bit too simplistic IMO. You're talking about name bindings, the article is talking more about things like interior mutability.

Rebinding a name is ... generally not a type system concern by my understanding.

This stuff reminds me of people who are full into XP and pair programming, where you end up agreeing to pull in more or less any work done by two people together. Not the worst model in the world.

I am disappointed by the "agent chat"-centric design for the future. There is important value in highlighting what's important, and jettisoning the unimportant. Written artifacts are good when they're nice and cut down. And it's not really about the sequence of events (well, most of the time)

Instead of "agent chat", I feel like a written page (that could be interacted with through agents) is a much more interesting way of working through a problem. Capture the final idea, and minimize the fluff around it.

And if nobody is going to read it anyways, why have the chat in the first place?

And of course the glib comment that I can't help but make:

> Teammates can ask the same agent why you chose a Mutex instead of an RwLock.

you know in this hypothetical neither human involved has much of any idea what is going on. Skill atrophy is real, folks! Be careful.

People rushing to throw a thing out into the world, rushing so much that they don't even bother to use it or look at it themselves.

The same people who are likely seeing tens of the same sort of pages and immediately closing them because "who cares".

I mean I guess I'm looking at this too. But at this point the most interesting projects in the world to me are ones with bad CSS.

Book covers, seeing what kinda stuff is being talked about, the general vibe of the space itself.

Lots of fun to be had wandering about, and unless you're looking at a thing where the script is really indecipherable you can kinda figure out what the topic du jour is even in foreign languages.

It's fun to look at book covers and imagine what's in the contents too.

I feel like this is close to a good idea.

What I would want to see is a version of this that lets me write an app that can write to the DB through an API, and then have a google drive-esque "host this for me" thing.

A focus on local-first really misses the point IMO. Like sure it's good it can be run locally, but really most people have a distribution problem. Be a distribution solution!

The thing I would do involves having the hosting just be available by dropping the capsule into the google drive/dropbox-y thing, and then having it be that you can just copy/paste the file to someone _and it carries over the data and everything by default_.

For a lot of people the "thing" is the app + the data. Sometimes you want to decouple them but a lot of times you don't want to.

I think it would be very rare for someone to want to share the single-file bundle just without data.

have there been any "here's a nicer wrapper API" services out there? Or is the complexity somewhat upstream of "real" complexity/differences in reporting.