transfire

Location: Palm Bay, FL, USA

Remote: Yes — or onsite/hybrid, any is fine

Willing to relocate: For the right role — especially research

Technologies: Rust, C, Crystal, Elixir, Ruby, Python, TypeScript; LLM training & agents, RAG / vector memory, high-performance parsers & data formats, full-stack + infra/ops

Résumé / Portfolio: https://tabcomputing.com/portfolio

Email: thomas@tabcomputing.com

Self-directed systems & AI engineer, available for contract (or the right full-time role). In the last year — solo, mostly from scratch — I've built: an LLM training engine and active research project (AGPT); an AI agent framework that autonomously runs my own production infrastructure (copious); a semantic-memory / RAG library (memo); a C11 YAML 1.2 parser that passes all 308 test-suite cases and outperforms every other compliant parser on real-world benchmarks (YAM); and a serialization format about half the size of JSON that parses ~3x faster (C0DATA). I also maintain Ruby Facets (since 2005). I go from model internals to production ops, and I ship — every link on the portfolio is real, running code. Research is my first love — AGPT above is my own line of it — and the work I'd most gladly relocate for, though I'm every bit as happy shipping production systems. The site also has an AI assistant you can talk to; she'll take a brief and send it to me.

Sad. A great idea ruined by poor business practices.

The GOAT.

I am a little confused. Is this still JSON? Is it “binary“ JSON?

Holy Deep Dive, Batman. This has to be the most mathematically heavy design for creating TUIs ever conceived. The name makes sense.

But does it blend? (Actually useable?)

CLI is an API, so I decided to treat it as such and created Jargon (for Crystal). Define CLI in JSON Schema, get argument parsing, validation, help text, and shell completions for free. Supports nested options with dot notation, subcommands, config file loading and merging, env vars, XDG base dir compliant, and JSON to stdin.

Honestly if it were not for my extensive Ruby background that I have now been able to carry over to Crystal, I probably would have dived into Guile.

(I have been enjoying Elixir too, but at the end of the day it doesn’t quite sit right with me — just feels a bit clunky. Gleam seems an attractive alternative though. The BEAM rocks, but it is a heavy dependency that doesn’t fit all distribution needs.)

FOR loops?

YAML has a merge key <<:, which might be helpful.

The merge key is a clever little trick, but it depends of the special hash key, so lists can’t be merged.

Syntax does matter, which is why YAML matters — even if imperfect.

So brilliant that we’re all still using ASCII!†

† With an occasional UNICODE flourish.

I agree. Separate keys would be better.

I wonder if hat word processors would have used a separate Enter (or Go!) for?

I hope there are no major problems to commercialization. This will be huge!

IDK. They all look a little atrocious to me.

But readability has a lot to do with what you are used to.

The only exception might be FORTH. A very well written FORTH implementation (and I mean very well written) probably would be fairly readable to anyone — at least at the higher levels of abstraction.

That’s awesome!

Now have it mark blocks of text on or off, so it can ignore irrelevant, or worse erroneous material — no need to include it in the context window.

Do we really need a new “code container” type for this? Could modules not serve the purpose by localizing require. e.g.

    module Foo
      require “bar”
      …
    end

So everything bar.rb loads in safely within Foo?

It was almost exactly the same expect in VB you had use some esoteric code to access databases — and they kept changing what was the “proper” way to do it. (I think by the time I quit VB it was ADO?)

Is this a reflection of the economy in general or just Intel’s own troubles?

With Apple’s move to Arm and increasing interest in RISCV, the x86 architecture hegemony seems to finally be cracking.

As long as Let’s Encrypt is still around.

I find it hard to believe there is no way to secure without requiring an authority in the middle.

Who cares? What does a certificate tell me other than someone paid for a certificate.

And what do certificate buyers gain? The ability for their site to be revoked or expired and thus no longer work.

I’d like to corrected.

GoboLinux has you all beat.

Absolutely correct! Please correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I know, no one has implemented YAML completely according to spec.

The tag schema used is supposed to be modifiable folks!

And why anyone would still be using 1.1 at this point is just forehead palming foolishness.

Just go open source already. Good grief Hyperion has no idea how to actually make money.

Between this and other changes I worry they are just throwing more and more stuff at the wall to widen their browser moat.

Is command and commandfor actually a good idea? I understand the point of it, but it seems like yet another layer of cognitive load.

Instead why not just apply the same principle to CSS? If I could make a CSS selector for one element but have the result target other elements, then one could achieve the same results and more. It would require only a few more pseudo-selectors. And while it probably isn’t necessary, I think it might be prudent to mark the properties that undergo state changes. Something like:

    #my-popover { display:= none; }
    #my-button:click {
      |> #my-popover {
        display:= block;
      }
    }

Where `|>` retargets and the `=` indicates the property can undergo state changes. (Maybe the syntax could be better, but you get the idea.)

If you haven’t refactored most of your code more than once, you are doing it wrong.

Trained only on a thousand curated questions? Something doesn’t add up…

Oh… they just fined turned an already existing model.

That’s just wrong.

It’s no wonder we have endless security issues when documents that should be just data and metadata (layout) declarations are Turing complete. Sigh.

While he is at it, he should make Pi equal 3.

Can it access and SMB or NFS network share?

This is something I’ve been thinking about and trying to find a good way to explain. I think Wheaton has articulated it very well.

One of my all time favorites. The final monologue drops the mic!

Original books are classics too.

Jank