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.
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]
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?
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 :)
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to be super interested in systems programming (OSes, DBs, PLs), but I've worried that those fundamentals might be superseded by AI, whether through a higher-level abstraction or just better automated code generation.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.
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.
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.
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.
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