Also, nice work: this makes the world just a little nicer!

When I ported pikchr (also from the SQLite project) to Go, I first ported lemon, then the grammar, then supporting code.

I always meant to do the same for its SQL parser, but pikchr grammar is orders of magnitude simpler.

It’s fun to look at your code samples, have absolutely no clue what any of it means, and think about just how many non-English-speaking programmers must have felt that way looking at our all-English programming languages.

Except lisp: that’s just inscrutable symbols like cond and cons and car and cadr and a bunch of parens! :-)

[Edit] Which also does Arduino.

If a leaf lands on your windshield, you can look beside it or move your head to see around it. If a leaf lands on a camera lens, it blocks it.

A pair of cameras mounted in the same place as human eyes, with the freedom to move a bit would be a fairer comparison. (The cameras would probably see better…)

Lovely article, and the dynamic examples are :chefs-kiss:

Even if you’re worried it’ll be sparse and crappy, isn’t an Internet full of idiosyncratic personal blogs what we all want?

If you want help or encouragement, reach out: zellyn@ most places

I just downloaded a bunch of qfx and csv files, and got Claude Code to do this. Took an hour to create the whole system from nothing. Then of course I stayed up until 2am getting CC to create Python rules to categorize things better, and trying to figure out what BEENVERI on my bank statement means

(If you do this, make Claude generate fingerprints for each transaction so it’s easy to add individual overrides…)

Getting Claude to write a FastAPI backend to serve up a “Subscriptions” dashboard took about 3 minutes, plus another minute or two to add an svg bar graph and change ordering.

Crazy times.

This is going to destroy my home network, since I never moved it off the little Lenovo box sitting in my laundry room beside the Eero waypoint, but I’m out of town for three days, so

Granted, the seed of the idea was someone posting about how they wired pyiodide to Ace in 400 lines of JavaScript, so I can’t truly argue it’s non-trivial.

As a light troll to hackernews, only AI-written contributions are accepted

[Edit: the true inception of this project was my kid learning Python at school and trinket.io inexplicably putting Python 3 but not 2 behind the paywall. Alas, Securely will not let him and his classmates actually access it ]

And +1000 on linking to your own (or any other well-written) blog.

Of course, there are other variants (see qntm's https://qntm.org/responsibility) where the simulation _is_ a simulation of the world outside. And we have GoL in GoL :-)

tl;dr they write to s3 once every 250ms to save costs. IIRC, they contend that when you keep things organized by writing to different files for each topic, it's the Linux disk cache being clever that turns the tangle of disk block arrangement into a clean view per file. They wrote their own version of that, so they can cheaply checkpoint heavily interleaved chunks of data while their in-memory cache provides a clean per-topic view. I think maybe they clean up later async, but my memory fails me.

I don't know how BufStream works.

The thing that really stuck with me from that interview is the 10x cost reduction you can get if you're willing and able to tolerate higher latency and increased complexity and use S3. Apparently they implemented that inside Datadog ("Labrador" I think?), and then did it again with WarpStream.

I highly recommend the whole episode (and the whole podcast, really).

It hits a really nice sweet spot, letting you automate things, without making everything too complex.

Recently, I've taken to just asking Claude Code to do things via bundlewrap. It seems to be about as easy for it to create bundles and templates that update systems, etc. as it would be to just update systems, etc. except you're left with something you can check in.

Here's the result of me asking it to set up Caddy to serve a website from my little Lenovo box in the laundry room: https://github.com/zellyn/bundlewrap-config/commit/d5f92ebb0...