rudedogg

This regresses the incentives back to what we had with search engines where what I need (answers) and what OpenAI needs (money from ads) are at odds.

Search engines used to be very useful too until the endless profit a/b testing boiled us all

I just ran this through a simple change I’ve asked Sonnet 4 and Opus 4.1, and it fails too.

It’s a simple substitution request where I provide a Lint error that suggests the correct change. All the models fail. I could ask someone with no development experience to do this change and they could.

I worry everyone is chasing benchmarks to the detriment of general performance. Or the next token weight for the incorrect change outweigh my simple but precise instructions. Either way it’s no good

Edit: With a followup “please do what I asked” sort of prompt it came through, while Opus just loops. So theres that at least

Dang, I was really excited about this too.

I guess I'll either stick with sqlite-vec or give turso another look. I'm not fond of the idea of a SQLite fork though.

Do you know if anything else I should take a look at? I know you use a lot of this stuff for your open-source AI/ML stuff. I'd like something I can use on device.

If you look at even the Claude/OpenAI chat UIs, they kind of suck. Not sure why you think someone else can't/won't do it better. Yes, the big players will copy what they can, but they also need to chase insane growth and getting every human on earth paying for an LLM subscription.

A tool that is good for everyone is great for no one.

Also, I think we're seeing the limits on "value" of a chat interface already. Now they're all chasing developers since there's a real potential to improve productivity (or sadly cut-costs) there. But even that is proving difficult.

Zed isn’t special, I doubt Sublime Text has thousands of dependencies. It’s a language/culture problem.

Edit: Ghostty is a good counter-example that is open source. https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/tree/main/pkg

Is this kind of an Elm replacement?

I think another split is between:

- people who have gone down the webview path, and know how difficult it is to do well

- people who have been told they can simply package their webapp into a native application

You can probably guess which group has more people

I enjoy reading your comments here. Thanks for sharing your knowledge, I'll watch the talk.

> Yes, and arenas may give such usage patterns a similar CPU/RAM knob to tracing collectors, but this level of control isn't free. In the end you have to ask yourself if what you're gaining is worth the added effort.

For me using them has been very easy/convenient. My earlier attempts with Zig used alloc/defer free everywhere and it required a lot of thought to not make mistakes. But on my latest project I'm using arenas and it's much more straightforward.

> Getting sweaty chasing around esoteric memory management strategies

I’m advocating learning about, and understanding a couple different allocation strategies and simplifying everything by doing away with the GC and minimizing the abstractions you need.

My guess is this stuff used to be harder, but it’s now much easier with the languages and knowledge we have available. Even for application development.

See https://www.rfleury.com/p/untangling-lifetimes-the-arena-all...

This is wishful thinking. It’s the same as other layers we have like auto-vectorization where you don’t know if it’s working without performance analysis. The complexity compounds and reasoning about performance gets harder because the interactions get more complex with abstractions like these.

Also, the more I work with this stuff the more I think trying to avoid memory management is foolish. You end up having to think about it, even at the highest of levels like a React app. It takes some experience, but I’d rather just manage the memory myself and confront the issue from the start. It’s slower at first, but leads to better designs. And it’s simpler, you just have to do more work upfront.

Edit:

> Rust's strategy is problematic for code reuse just as C/C++'s strategy is problematic. Without garbage collection a library has to know how it fits into the memory allocation strategies of the application as a whole. In general a library doesn't know if the application still needs a buffer and the application doesn't know if the library needs it, but... the garbage collector does.

Should have noted that Zig solves this by making the convention be to pass an allocator in to any function that allocates. So the boundaries/responsibilities become very clear.

The tagging mechanism reminds me of generational indices like https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html, but I’m a bit out of my depth

This is the answer IMO. The number of targets and noise would be a lot less if JS had a decent stdlib or if we had access to a better language in the browser.

I have no hope of this ever happening and am abandoning the web as a platform for interactive applications in my own projects. I’d rather build native applications using SDL3 or anything else.

https://angelscript.hazelight.se/ for others.

Any thoughts on Verse? I’m not experienced with Unreal or in the ecosystem, but it looked like it might be too foreign to me. But Tim Sweeney is no dummy, so it’s probably good and just requires some effort if you’re not already a functional programming nerd?

Makes sense, thanks for the insight.

Do you still want to do this for SDF font textures? Or is the lossiness an issue?

> The use of a ZIP archive to encapsulate XML files plus resources is an elegant approach to an application file format. It is clearly superior to a custom binary file format.

Can anyone expand on this? Why would it be better than a binary format?

I was watching a talk Andrew Kelley gave about a simple binary format he’s using in Zig: https://www.hytradboi.com/2025/05c72e39-c07e-41bc-ac40-85e83...

Having to map between SQLite and the application language seems like it’d add lots of complexity, but I don’t have any experience with custom file formats so would love some advice.

I’m doing offline-first apps at work and want to emphasize that you’re constraining yourself a lot trying to do this.

As mentioned, everything fast(ish) is using SQLite under the hood. If you don’t already know, SQLite has a limited set of types, and some funky defaults. How are you going to take this loosey-goosey typed data and store it in a backend database when you sync? What about foreign key constraints, etc., can you live without those? Some of the sync solutions don’t support enforcing them on the client.

Also, the SQLite query planner isn’t great in my experience, even when you’re only joining on ids/indexes.

Document databases seem more friendly/natural, but as mentioned indexeddb is slow.

I wish this looked at https://rxdb.info/ more. They have some posts that lead me to believe they have a good grasp on the issues in this space at least

Also, OPFS is a newish thing everyone is using to store SQLite directly instead of wrapping IndexedDB for better performance.

Siri is dumb for an edge model though. It’s like ~2 years behind. It’s just bad and shouldn’t be excused, everything about it is bad.

Metaverse people: “We’re so back!”

All that feels like specialized stunts like IBM’s Watson beating Ken Jennings at Jeopardy.

The rate of improvement has slowed significantly. And chasing benchmarks is making everything worse IMO. Opus 4.1 is worse than Sonnet 3.7 to me :/.

I think the future will be:

1. Ads and quantization/routing to chase profits

2. Local models start taking over. New companies will slide in without the huge losses and provide what Claude/OpenAI do today at reasonable margins

3. Apple/Google eat up lots of the market by shipping good-enough models with iOS/Android

Signed up. Concurrency has been a bit of a blindspot for me outside the basics. It'll be nice to be able to really evaluate approaches and understand the internals.

Location: Wyoming, USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Swift, SwiftUI, Typescript, React, Python, Zig, Web/Tailwind, SQL, Relational Databases, CoreML/Vision models

Résumé/CV: https://austinrude.com/hiredhn.pdf

Email: hiredhn[at]austinrude.com

Github: https://github.com/rudedogg

I have cross-platform experience shipping desktop, mobile, and web applications. Currently focused on Swift/SwiftUI and TypeScript for local-first applications that use SQLite to work reliably offline.

I enjoy working across the full stack and learning new technologies. Have experience with everything from database design to computer vision models, plus some exploration into systems programming and developer tooling.

Looking for a full-time position where I can contribute to interesting technical challenges.

Do you have a fork or the changes? I might take a look, and python dependency hell on Sunday is no good

They're a little pricey but https://www.ui.com is nice. It's what I want to replace my Ring with

Yes.

The resulting class-action lawsuit would bankrupt the company, along with the reputation damage, and fines.

Insane to me there isn’t even an asterisk in the blog post about this. The data collection is so over the top I don’t think users suspect it because it’s just absurd. For instance Gemini Pro chats are trained on too.

If this is legal, it shouldn’t be.

> earthquake bomb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_bomb for others who haven't heard the term

> English is a terrible language for deterministic outcomes in complex/complicated systems.

Someone here shared this ancient article by Dijkstra about this exact thing a few weeks ago: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

> programming

The programming analogy is convenient but off. The joke has always been “the computer only does exactly what you tell it to do!” regarding logic bugs. Prompts and LLMs most certainly do not work like that.

I loved the parallels with modern LLMs and time sharing he presented though.

A cool 2x+ price increase.

And Gemini 2.0 Flash was $0.10/$0.40.