🦅 Eagle Mode 🎥 This is not a Clojure talk 💾 Ultorg 2.0 Released

Two Minute Week

🗨️ Jasmine Otto:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-22

Dusting off my Bitsy fork with simultaneous editing across clients. Right now I have Automerge imported and working. Except - while Bitsy is a tiny game engine, it's a massive project to refactor into ES6 modules, due to that Automerge dependency.

This week I got Bitsy's built-in icons working, and I've yanked all of the onclick bindings from inline HTML into a shim module. As I refactor out all of the global state leaks, I have discovered one actual cyclic dependency between modules. I bet I can fix this with an existing instance object.

Share Your Work

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-16

I've been exploring combining Reactive UI components (those that separate the state, the methods to update the state, and computed values such as the UI), with the same methods given as tools to LLM-powered agent. The user can then either use the UI as normal or ask the AI to act on the state: with perfect fidelity between the two.

I want to see if there is an abstraction concise enough for such components to live on the server instead of the client to enable multiplayer realtime collaboration across many humans and agents. It ought to be possible to accomplish this with much less plumbing.

🗨️ guitarvydas:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-16

FYI... Prolog Related References

Beginnings of Scheme (prolog-6.scm) to Javascript tranpsiler using t2t and PBP and Ohm-editor, debug session recording

🗨️ guitarvydas: 🦅 Eagle Mode

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-18

brainstorming:

• A friend was fooling with a midi/mixer control surface as a layered interface to a bank of apps/subdirectories. A grid of buttons, push into one then get a sub-grid of buttons within it, or, open the app.
• IMO, software is just soft hardware. What ideas come to mind for simulating a Z controller before committing to hardware? It seems that an obvious choice might be to put a 2nd scroll bar next to the Y scroll bar. The 2nd scroll bar might be "Z"oom in/out and it might be shaped in a more triangular manner than just a rectangular movable thumb on a rectangular bar. In an orthogonal vein: Ivan Reese posted some interesting looking circular knob ideas.
• 2 sliders, one to control scrollable thing, one to control resolution of 1st slider.
• veering even further away from the original thread, there are ZUIs like EagleMode.

Homepage of Eagle Mode (eaglemode) - a zoomable user interface (ZUI) with file manager, file viewers, audio/video player, games, fractals, and C++ toolkit API.

🗨️ Jack Rusher: 🎥 This is not a Clojure talk - Jack Rusher | Craft 2025

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-20

My latest talk, given at Craft Conf in Budapest. There were some technical difficulties, but it should hopefully serve as a reasonable introduction to the virtues of interactive development in Clojure.

🗨️ Karl Toby Rosenberg:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-21

TahDah: https://github.com/KTRosenberg/DrawTalking

A prototype user experience concept for building interactive worlds and telling stories at the same time by sketching and speaking

🗨️ Scott: 📝 The Moldy Cucumber Chronicles

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-22

I wrote a fun little post about something I've been playing around with with LLMs, how might programming change when LLMs can get what you mean without you getting it exactly right:

📝 The Moldy Cucumber Chronicles

or how I learned to stop worrying and love fuzzy vegetables

DevLog Together

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-19

I'm still thinking a lot about what a "point literal" or a "vec literal" means in the context of visual programming.

In text we have "string literal", it has a bunch of affordances. In visual/spatial/tangible/etc programming, we'd probably want other primitive types with their own set of affordances. So point and vec, obviously. I wonder what else we'd want, and how it would look and act.

Linking Together

🗨️ Ivan Reese:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-16

News: Dark has run out of money and is going employee-owned, I guess? And they're going open source. Seems like making the very best of a bad situation. Kudos to them.

🗨️ Kartik Agaram:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-17

I'm going to forever take the FoC podcast episode on Rules of Code as license to consider the law and philosophy in scope here. Here's a fantastic bit of writing, just in holding my debased attention span 40 years later: James Boyd White, "Law as rhetoric, rhetoric as law: The arts of cultural and communal life"

(A hack for sticking with it.)

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-18

Dyad is a declarative physical modeling language that has a one-to-one mapping with GUI views. This gives a textual representation that is amenable to analysis and generation by generative AI and devops pipelines, while allowing the same artifact to be used in the graphical environment.

https://help.juliahub.com/dyad/dev/

🗨️ Mariano Guerra:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-18

Ultorg 2.0 Released!

Ultorg is an efficient, spreadsheet-like UI for complex business data. Query and edit data across tables and relationships, without SQL or custom CRUD apps.

🗨️ Kartik Agaram:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-19

A different take on s-expressions making them more.. visual?

🗨️ David Alan Hjelle: 🎥 Episode 158 - INTERCAL RIDES AGAIN - Restoring a Lost Compiler

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-19

The Advent of Computing podcast has an episode on Intercal — and apparently also resurrected (at some level) the original compiler (to run on x86).

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen: 🎙️ Samuel Arbesman on The Magic of Code - The Jim Rutt Show

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-21

A nice podcast episode with Jim Rutt inverviewing Sam Arbesman on his new book "The Magic of Code" (which is now on my reading list). A good reminder (for those who need it, perhaps not so much people here) that computing is not just utilitarian.

Since Sam is around here, some short feedback:

1. It's weird to hear both of you dismissing APL as a mess not even worth learning, and then discussing computing as a tool for thought a few minutes later. The link between the topic should be obvious from just the title of Ken Iverson's Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a tool of thought:null:", which I definitely recommend everybody to read. APL was designed as a mathematical notation for algorithmic problems, and only later turned into an executable notation at IBM. It is certainly not, and was never meant to be, a language for writing large software systems. But for its intended problem domain, it still is a good choice.
2. Programming languages not based on English are indeed rare, but there are a few interesting examples beyond just translating keywords. 文言 (wenyan) is based on classical Chinese that tries to incorporate even its grammar. Perligata similarly takes inspiration from Latin grammar to build a Perl-like language on something pretty close to Latin (though not being "good" Latin, neither in vocabulary nor grammar). For those who read French, the slides of a presentation by Baptiste Mélès say something about both these projects (I think the presentation was recorded, but I can't find it anywhere). Hedy by Felienne and coworkers is a very different take on this topic: a language meant to make programming accessible to people from various cultural backgrounds.

Jim talks with Samuel Arbesman about his book The Magic of Code: How Digital Language Created and Connects Our World—and Shapes Our Future.

🗨️ brett g porter:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-21

Programming languages not based on English are indeed rare, but there are a few interesting examples beyond just translating keywords

Also Ramsey Nasser's Qalb

AI

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-16

AI is a new kind of computer.

• A traditional computer processes structured data with deterministic instructions.
• AI processes unstructured data with natural-language nondeterministic instructions.

I like the simplicity of this framing.

But personally, I am more interested in unifying both these kind of computational work: Mathematical (precise & deterministic data structures and instructions) and human-media centric (language, image/audio/video etc) which approximate/ambiguous.

https://jeffhuber.substack.com/p/ai-is-a-new-computer

🗨️ Nilesh Trivedi:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-18

Gemini Flash Lite generating UI on-the-fly:

🐦 Oriol Vinyals (@OriolVinyalsML) on X

Hello Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite! So fast, it codes *each screen* on the fly (Neural OS concept :point_down:).

The frontier isn't always about large models and beating benchmarks. In this case, a super fast & good model can unlock drastic use cases.

Read more: https://t.co/kbkC8CtVYb

🗨️ Scott:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-18

Have any of you here spent any time with MCPs at all?

I've just started building an MCP client into this app i'm working on, and it hit me that this could be what enables a lot more of end user modification of programs and a version of Malleable software...though not completely malleable. You don't have to interact with them through a conversational or agentic interface, you can just treat them like RPCs, and if you set up standardized integration points into your application, users can build all types of customizations for at the very least the objects or metaphors within your system

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

📝 Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps 🎥 Playing tag with dragons 🎥 AI's Non-Euclidean Geometry

Note: trying new process to generate the newsletter, let me know if something doesn't work :)

Share Your Work

🗨️ hamish todd: 🎥 AI's Non-Euclidean Geometry: when gradient descent's shortest path doesn't look like a straight line

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-09

Hey folks, AI-related video 😃 Sorry. The reason I'm thinking about the geometry of this is because I'm hoping it might lead to UI ideas, hence posting here.

🎥 AI's Non-Euclidean Geometry: when gradient descent's shortest path doesn't look like a straight line

🗨️ Mariano Guerra:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-09

Playing with a time traveling WebAssembly visual interpreter, just added the call instruction and call stack

🎥 wasmvm call stack

🗨️ Dan Peddle: sombra - Chrome Web Store

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-11

I’ve been somewhat frustrated by limitations in AI agents when it came to both them deciding which web resources might be relevant, and their inability to retrieve private data. If it’s not public, you have to have some method to expose that data to (for example) Claude Desktop or similar - and it has to live in a different silo. Rebuilding all that context time and again is also a pain.

With all that in mind, and with some downtime in hand, I’ve put together Sombra - a tool that combines traditional web scraping techniques (the original arc90 readability algorithm) with a modern, authenticated remote MCP connection, consumable by compatible clients.
Web pages that you save are stored as markdown and can be organised into collections - and those collections are then available via MCP resources. Scraping happens client-side, so if you can see the content in Chrome, you can save it to your collection. I added screenshot capture too - but haven’t exposed that to MCP yet. I’d be curious if that might be helpful to any of you - it feels like it might be too much when the markdown is available - maybe the visual references could be another resource? About the name, why sombra? I was thinking of sci-fi references such as Peter Hamilton’s u-shadow, or the idea of a “shadow” in Silo - I’d like to evolve this concept further in the future.

The stack is Clojure/Datomic on the backend with a TypeScript Chrome extension - the early release is now publicly available.

If any of this sounds interesting, I’d love some feedback! It’s one of those projects that scratches a personal itch, and then possibly got a bit out of hand - but having built it, it feels like it would be a shame not to put it out there, in case it helps others. Thanks!

🗨️ Mariano Guerra:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-13

Wasm visual interpreter update:

• block, loop, break, break if, i32 comparison ops
• function inspector and switcher

🎥 wasmvm loop

🗨️ guitarvydas: 📝 Using Existing PLs as Assembly Languages

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-15

DevLog Together

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-10

So for the LLM to explore the dependancy graph I added the "dependsOn" cross-links to the already well worn "moduleMap" function. Now I have that information available I can visualize it nicely! and furthermore I made it reactive to the runtime changes so its always up to date.

🎥 reactive dependancy graph

🗨️ Oleksandr Kryvonos:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-14

accidentally I discovered that typing without backspace might be somewhat fun
https://uprun.github.io/web-editor/keeped-2025-06-15-no-backspace-challenge.html

🎥 Demo

Thinking Together

🗨️ Joshua Horowitz:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-12

Two related things:

• The LIVE Workshop deadline is July 21st, so there’s still plenty of time to get a submission together! Please let me know if you have any questions, or want to talk about a submission.
• I’ve been cooking up a LIVE Primer. It’s an overview of LIVE-adjacent research – mapping out some territory, sharing some advice, & curating some citations. It’s rough right now, but I think there’s good stuff in there already. Please take a look and let me know what you think. (Especially if there’s something you wish was in there that isn’t; that would be great to know.)

Thanks!

🗨️ Konrad Hinsen:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-13

I think that Kartik Agaram’s recent devlog post (mentioned in this thread) deserves a thread of its own, outside of the discussion of live programming. The topic that interests me in particular is what he calls the vendor/owner divide, which bothers me as well.

More generally, it's a dependency chain from hardware vendor via OS vendor and programming tool vendor up to the owner, end user, or whatever else we'd call the person or team that wants to use computation as a tool for their own goals. Along this chain, everyone has the power to break the work of the people further down the chain, unless there is some counteracting force such as competition between multiple vendors of fungible products.

As somebody at the end of the chain, if I want to preserve my agency, I have basically two choices (plus hybrids): I can be selective in my dependency chain, only accepting dependencies whose vendors I consider friendly and ethically sound. Or I can restrict myself to dependencies that are fungible because they implement standards for which there are other implementations as well.

Out of the two, my preference is for the latter, which is clearly the more robust strategy. Vendors change over time, and even those that promise not to be evil today can drop this promise tomorrow. Vendors or their products can also disappear for lots of reasons. In fact, a vendor that is serious about being ethically sound should signal this attitude by implementing standards, reducing its own power over its clients. Except of course that there are no standards for most software interface layers, and you cannot create one unilaterally either. Nor quickly, because good standards require many design iterations involving multiple vendors and users. Evolving standards is expensive.

There's a third aspect to consider, which is code complexity. For simple enough software, a vendor provides the convenience of a ready-made and tested implementation, but if the vendor disappears or becomes evil, I can maintain the code myself, or convince someone else to do so. That's what early FLOSS advertised as its strength: you can always fork. Except that today's software stacks have grown too complex for this.

🗨️ guitarvydas: Solution Centric Programming

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-15

I created a document repo on github and a channel on discord programming simplicity for anyone interested in discussing and adding ideas...

from a substack article, brainstorming SCP
We explored how this principle led us from single-machine programming to *Solution Centric Programming* (SCP), which treats hundreds of small computing devices (Arduinos, sensors, actuators) as *new atomic operations* for automating specific problems, requiring *new recipe techniques* for combining them. Unlike traditional programming that forces all code through one paradigm, SCP enables *computational diversity* by letting each distributed node use the most appropriate programming paradigm (Forth for real-time control, Prolog for logic, FP for data processing, OOP for state management) as specialized atomic operations, while connecting them through pure data flow rather than restrictive function calls that impose control flow protocols. The key architectural insight is *Solution Centric Program Choreography* - a hierarchical tree structure where parent nodes contain the recipe logic for coordinating child atomic operations, eliminating peer-to-peer coupling that destroys scalability. This creates a new abstraction layer where solutions are choreographed through structured data flow between specialized atomic operations, each autonomous in their execution but coordinated through hierarchical recipes rather than lateral negotiation - representing the next evolutionary step in programming's fundamental cycle of creating atoms and recipes.

📝 Join the programming simplicity Discord Server!

Check out the programming simplicity community on Discord - hang out with 25 other members and enjoy free voice and text chat.

📝 Solution Centric Programming

Linking Together

🗨️ Mariano Guerra:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-10

quartz: visual programming and dsp playground

🎥 playing tag with dragons

🗨️ Ivan Reese: 📝 Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-10

New Ink & Switch essay: Malleable Software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

By Geoffrey Litt, Joshua Horowitz, and Peter van Hardenberg, with photos by Todd Matthews.

Little spoiler — this essay was written in our malleable environment Patchwork, and Geoffrey created some custom tools to help him write and edit the essay, detailing the experience in the essay. Meta :)

📝 Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

🗨️ Kartik Agaram: 🎥 The Web That Never Was

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-14

An alternate history of the tech industry

I can't believe I haven't seen this 6-year old talk before.

AI

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy:

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-09

building an agent turned out to be surprisingly simple.

🦋 larkworthy.bsky.social:

I went through the Cline source code and wow, these agents are ultra simple! Force the AI to always call a tool. Have some special tools that delegate to the user for the interaction with the control loop. This is *it*.

Present Company

🗨️ Tom Larkworthy: 📝 Terminology: What is a "glitch" in Functional Reactive Programming / RX?

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-13

I was at programming 2025 and heard a developer struggling with glitching in reactive systems. Made me dig deeper into Observable reactivity model. I sometimes see glitching but its when I manually short circuit the dataflow graph. The actual engine is glitch free even when you put async tasks in the middle. I've properly tested it now!

📝 Terminology: What is a "glitch" in Functional Reactive Programming / RX?

What is the definition of a "glitch" in the context of Functional Reactive Programming?

I know that in some FRP frameworks "glitches" can occur while in others not. For example RX is not glitch free

🗨️ TodePond: 🎥 Live: Live

🧵 conversation @ 2025-06-14

hello i am going to do a livestream later where i watch back through every todepond tech talk ive ever given to reflect on each one. i invite you to join!

It's another todepond livestream, at 5pm London time.

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🎥 Vibe code = legacy code 🤖 A computational blackboard for efficient human/AI collaboration 🧑‍💻 playb.it: communal technology

Our Work

📦 github.com/pomdtr/tweety release v2.0.0 via Achille Lacoin

🧵 conversation

Just released the tweety v2: github.com/pomdtr/tweety/releases/tag/v2.0.0

It includes the revamped tweety cli, which has access to most of the chrome extension api !

I also wrote down a new blog post about it: blog.pomdtr.me/posts/integrated-terminal

💬 Achille Lacoin

🧵 conversation

Ok last screenshot and I'll stop spamming about my project, this is just sooo fun (and a new spin on the classic "summarize this post" demo)

🗣️ Interactive visualizations in natural language using voice input in multiple languages (English and Spanish in the video). via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

🎙 Look Ma! No Hands!

💎 LLM-powered Method Resolution with Synonllm via Scott

🧵 conversation

LLM-powered Method Resolution with Synonllm - I've been experimenting a lot with what new things LLMs have to offer more dynamic languages like Ruby. I'm really hooked on this idea of creating a DSL without an explicit interface, and letting users just call methods semantically and letting the LLM figure it out.

You can see kind of what I mean near the end of the video with the FileHandler class example. In that class the method names are much too long for anyone to really want to type, but that extra detail (combined with the arguments) allows the user to use the interface they'd like and have it just work. Also effectively creating method overloading / dynamic argument-based dispatch in Ruby with the help of an LLM...

📝 LLM-powered Method Resolution with Synonllm

Taking Ruby's Principle of Least Surprise to the extreme

📝 We need a formal theory of Agent Evals | Nilesh Trivedi via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

I posted some thoughts about why Coding agents are a special computational unit that unify not just programs and ML models, but also the programmer . and we should perhaps try to unify Type Theory, Testing and ML Evals into a single framework: 📝 We need a formal theory of Agent Evals | Nilesh Trivedi

📝 Tweety - An Integrated Terminal for your Browser: Installation via Achille Lacoin

🧵 conversation

If any of you wanted to try tweety, but was intimidated by the install steps, I've significantly simplified them: github.com/pomdtr/tweety?tab=readme-ov-file#installation

I would love some feedback on them !

🎥 Service Status Extension from HTTP APIs via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

New Gloodata extension demo showing:

• Service status HTTP API integration in 250 lines of Python (no LLM/UI code)

• Voice input mode

• Open weight model support from Cerebras (Qwen 3, Llama 4 & Llama 3.3)

📝 Pastagang: Jamming together far apart via Lu Wilson

🧵 conversation

JAMMING TOGETHER

FAR APART

pastagang.cc/paper

This is a paper about live programming, written by many many many people collaborating together in one shared document, with no one credited by name. It's getting submitted tomorrow.

Devlog Together

🤖 roboco-op via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

My next focus for lopecode is the editing experience. I've tidied most of the gitches up and its smooth, but kinda hardwork to do everything in my head. I need more hands!

So to kill 2 birds with one stone, I will redo roboco-op but this time with an agentic workflow following how Cline works. Early results is that it is quite good at following Observable dependancy graph and exposing itself to jsut enough context for the task at hand. Roboco-op was struggling with context management and I think this is a better path. It can add cells!

Roboco-op hit a ceiling because you have to manually copy and paste cells over in Observable, but with Lopecode you can add cells programatically so its a better substrate for this kinda of idea.

Thinking Together

🎥 Message Gardening in the Atmosphere with Roomy Chat via Andreas S

🧵 conversation

Hey FoC 👋

I recently stumbled upon this:

Message Gardening in the Atmosphere with Roomy Chat

github.com/muni-town/roomy

I found it quite interesting to see how fluid you could go from thought/chat to blog/text (see attachment). Different projects related to AT Protocol are exploring different notions of communication patterns like here:

cosmik.network or here garden.co.

Cosmik employes the concept of stigmercy, something which I think would be very useful for FoC and other communities. Foc beeing trapped in SLACK for so long is cruel enough. Of course tools were build but ...

One can really see how certain preconceived notions of interaction patterns are starting to break up in interesting ways. a PKM tool is usually for personal reflection( hence the P in PKM) of course I could always take a zettel and expand it or include it in messages, which I still sometimes do. But I think there more to it. As we explorer the patterns of communication. Relating to other people, where does my - self, myself start where does -the others- start? So chat is quite a low entry barrier and a interesting start to start communicating with others.

Their project site even has a values section:

muni.town/values

I recently started using anytype.io and was surprised how good the mobile sync worked. Sharing with other people works OK. But then I tried to share a SVG file,... or I tried to create mermaid or a mindmap and view it on mobile...

Clojure clerk is a notebook for some computational stuff but I like the Idea of having snippets that can be evaluated which reminded me of projects like:

cloxp.github.io/cloxp-intro.html

or

lively-kernel.org

To hit the sweet spot is really not simple one wants to avoid to re-invent all of personal computing just to do some note taking and collaboration...

While researching I also found this: neurite.network I vaguely remember reading something about it here at Foc but the search did bring up anything for me..

I hope that the AT protocol related tools become mature enough such that I can use it for my own zettelkasten which is based on markdown. But I really would like to test out the other collaboration based features. What are your experiences with zettelkasten and collaboration? Could you imagine something like roomy being sufficiently good enough to finally replace SLACK for example? WDYT Ivan Reese?

🧑‍💻 playb.it: communal technology via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Anybody play with the playb.it yet? Impressions?

💬 Angus Mitchell

🧵 conversation

RFW (Request For Whiteboard) - Since Google shut down Jamboard I've been looking for a whiteboard app that...

• You can log into from a web app and a mobile app (or 2 web apps) and they stay in sync with each other
• Is NOT an infinite canvas
• Is constrained in terms of colors, brush sizes, etc.

📝 Massive Parallelism via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

Content

🎥 Recreating Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" in Mario Paint via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

One of my favourite recent youtube findings is Cat Graffam, who uses all sorts of "wrong" tools to do fine art. Every one of these videos is a combination of esoterica, hilarity, software design misery, and art theory. Good to put on in the background while you spend 20 minutes making fancy coffee, for instance.

A few favs:

• Da Vinci's Lady with an Ermine in the iPhone Notes app (a real nail-biter for anyone who has ever made a drawing canvas app, especially if you consider that Notes is backed by a CRDT)
• Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" in Mario Paint
• Caravaggio's "Judith Beheading Holofornes" in Kid Pix
• Hopper's "Nighthawks" with a weird Nintendo Wii drawing tablet (the save-load UI is baffling)

(This might be less FoC-relevant for folks who aren't working on programmable drawing canvases, but… (A) there are dozens of us!, and (B) it's good software craft catharsis)

📝 Roomy Deep Dive: ATProto + Automerge via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Roomy chat looks interesting. In addition to various levels of nerding out we can do over it, it provides an interesting looking workflow for a community to go from ephemeral chat to slightly persistent threads to more timeless long-form writing.

💬 #thinking-together@2025-06-02 FoC-esque test group. You need to authenticate using a Bsky/ATproto account.

Be aware it's all alpha software so far and might get torn down at any time. But in principle even if that happens we will all have the data or the group in our browser storage :shocked_face_with_exploding_head:

📝 Roomy Deep Dive: ATProto + Automerge

A technical deep dive on how Roomy chat works, combining ATProto and Automerge to create a resource-efficient group chat.

🗃️ The US IRS open sourced its direct file system via Eli Mellen

🧵 conversation

The US IRS open sourced its direct file system. In the middle of it is a pretty fun logic engine implemented in Scala. Not too futurey, but if you are interested in logic engines at all it’s a fun bit of code spelunking.

📝 TouchDesigner via Spencer Fleming

🧵 conversation

Just saw someone using Touch Designer

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TouchDesigner

It was really neat- real time Multimedia being chained through a pipeline while every element is visually shown in real time and inspectable.

It has very cool ways of making your own UI elements as well.

Made me wonder what it would be like if instead of multimedia it was also able to be used for screen windows as a desktop environment

TouchDesigner is a node-based visual programming language for real-time interactive multimedia content. Developed by the Toronto-based company "Derivative," it's often used by artists, programmers, creative coders, software designers, and performers to create performances, installations, and fixed media works.

🎥 Vibe code = legacy code via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Steve Krouse: Vibe code = legacy code

Present Company

💬 Ezhik

🧵 conversation

Is coding/programming/computering/beepbooping/funking of corn a hobby or a job to you? Or both? It's both for me and I'm increasingly having the two diverge. "Work" coding and "home" coding feel like two entirely different worlds.

📝 Bill Atkinson Dies From Cancer at 74 via Ezhik

🧵 conversation

Might be a good day to meditate on the HyperCard Bible...

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🎥 Virtual Meetup 11 • May 2025 🛸 TinyBoxer: A tiny programming system inspired by Boxer 📘 The Magic of Code

Two Minute Week

🎥 Using lopecode to a create a programmable offline-first single file audio application via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

Dusted off an old project from 2021; a programmable audio sequencer. It stalled because there was no good way to store state in Observable, but with Lopecode, there is! Notebooks can write back into their own FileAttachments, which are bundled when exporting. So I just added some serialisation code and suddenly that project is much more useful. You can actually save the good settings as a hermetic file, completely sure that no external software changes will ever damage that moment in time. (online notebook)

Our Work

📘 The Magic of Code via Sam Arbesman

🧵 conversation

My book "The Magic of Code" is finally going to be seeing the light of day in a few weeks! And it explores a bunch of topics and ideas that I think folks here will find interesting.

🧑‍💻 OCIF Generator via Maikel van de Lisdonk

🧵 conversation

Hi,

Yesterdays awesome demo of Scrappy during the FoC meetup and the small "one more thing"-moment about integrating Scrappy with AI/LLMs, reminded me of posting something here about 2 of my own recent new side projects:

• ocif-generator.vercel.app : generate OCIF files and view them as JSON/SVG/React-flow

• app.prompttoform.ai : generate complex forms and play with them in the preview and also view its structure in the flow tab using react-flow. The latter is especially handy when the form contains multiple steps and has decisions in them (because you can build decision tree's with this generator).

Both tools use structured output using json schema's for the llm's, which allows for a lot of control instead of just prompting and trying to get structured output via a text prompt. Both of these tools were coded using a lot of AI as well (using Cursor).

The OCIF-generator was demoed yesterday at localfirst-conf by one of the OCWG core members @Jess Martin

My plan is to integrate both of the above with my own infinte canvas visual programming system: codeflowcanvas.io.

Check canvasprotocol.org for more info about OCIF.

📊 Gloodata: A low-code platform designed for developers. No UI or LLM code required. via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

I made two demo extensions for gloodata to showcase its capabilities and how to use it to create interactive data exploration tools enabled by LLMs, here they are:

• Our World in Data Demography & Fertility Explorer with DuckDB

  • 🎥 Demo

  • 🧑‍💻 Extension Repo

• GitHub Repository Explorer with SQLite

  • 🎥 Demo

  • 🧑‍💻 Extension Repo

📝 The case for using a web browser as your terminal via Achille Lacoin

🧵 conversation

I've written a little something on why I use a web browser as my terminal emulator

📝 Purpose of Programming Languages via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

🧑‍💻 Tweety: An integrated terminal for your browser via Achille Lacoin

🧵 conversation

I'm working on converting tweety to a chrome extension (as it is much more secure), and it opens some cool new usecases.

Ex: querying the chrome extension api from the shell !

Devlog Together

💬 Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

In a visual programming environment, points (like, x/y[/z/...] positions) are as important as strings are in a textual environment.

If a visual programming environment doesn't have fantastic affordances for working with points, I can't take it seriously.

Thinking Together

💬 Scott

🧵 conversation

I've recently been going down the cybernetics rabbit hole and am curious if anyone knows of any attempts at implementing Beer's Viable System Model in software? I feel like it might be a really powerful paradigm for an ai agent/automation framework... recursive systems built around feedback loops with LLMs in the mix for different responsibilities

💬 Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Here's a fun little game.

PbD = programming by demonstration

PbE = programming by example

What are the other Pb_ s?

(Please bring "wrong answers only" energy!)

Content

🛸 TinyBoxer: A tiny programming system inspired by Boxer leveraging the HTML DOM structure. Illustrates naive realism, explicit structure and evaluation by copy & replace. via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

"Tiny boxer" by @Tomas Petricek, a small boxer-like environment that runs in the browser: github.com/tpetricek/tiny-boxer

Present Company

🎥 Virtual Meetup 11 • May 2025 via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Here's the recording of today's Finneas O'Connell virtual meetup.

Great demos! Excited for next month. Thanks everyone who presented and attended.

💬 Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

🥱 Strings are just arrays of numbers.

🧐 Numbers are just arrays of booleans with a sufficiently small word size.

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🧰 Scrappy: make little apps for you and your friends 🎙️ Lu Wilson on Art of Creative Coding 🎥 ESP32 Composite Video

Our Work

🧰 Scrappy: make little apps for you and your friends via Pontus Granström

🧵 conversation

Hi! Me and John Chang have been exploring home-made software together, and we’ve created Scrappy, a tool for making little apps for just you and your friends. It’s a pretty rough prototype, but it’s real and you can try it for yourself — we wanted to contribute more than a vision statement. Very curious what you think of it!

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

The advantageous that reactive programming on a reflective substrate has over mainstream testing methodologies.

Reactive Reflective Testing in Lopebook

Devlog Together

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Literate Programming with a little bit of spatiality.

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

First draft of a complete running program. I automatically "tangle" the code from the markup to check that I didn't forget to include something.

The picture is blurry, but in practice I can zoom in and out using mouse wheel or pinch gesture.

The editing experience is terrible. All the lines are absolutely positioned and not integrated with the markup. But code is read more than it's written 😛

Thinking Together

🎥 Net Inclusion 2025: Day 2 via Isaac Carrasco-Ortiz

🧵 conversation

National Digital Inclusion Alliance's Net Inclusion 2025 conference is currently live discussing the intersection between skills using AI and general digital literacy training

💬 Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

Procedural Programming + 👀 + 🤏 = Block Based Programming

Functional Programming + 👀 + 🤏 = Nodes And Wires

Object-Oriented Programming + 👀 + 🤏 = ❓

I'm looking for a term that describes a class of visual environments, where behavior is organized into stateful objects, subject to direct manipulation by the user. Examples of those environments might be The Alternate Reality Kit, Automat or Scrappy. I don't think I've ever stumbled upon a term for such a class. Or maybe I'm just not well versed in visual programming nomenclature. Do you know how they're called? Or how would you call them yourself?

Content

📝 Idea: Make a Recipe from the code comments. Code recipes is a view mode… via Medet Ahmetson

🧵 conversation

I got an idea about a code view as a comment lines. Just sharing, might hope someone to grab and build his next AI startup:

Code recipes is a view mode in your editor to read it.

In code recipe mode, instead seeing a programming language grammar words, we see the comment line for each programming language command. For example, can you understand what does following piece of code do?

But, in code editor mode, I would read the code piece as the bullet points: - Convert source code into ontological json data. Ontological json data is called 'contents'. // ...this.identifyContent(... - content is created, lets create its restful api // ...PageLevel.rest... - Re-identify page-rest if extensions ask for. // ...extension.afterPageRestCreation(.. - to make CSS Selector 'module > .page-content', so lets find module in reflect object tree // ...rest.get(..moduleURL...)... - make the branch as a sub-branch of the reflect. // pageRest.setRootNode(moduleNode) - keep alive the page rest object, so that reflect rest could refer to it. // _pageRests[moduleURL] = pageRest

In above list, instead the code, we see the comment lines. And instead comments we see highlighted pieces in the code line. The comment with the highlighted code pieces should be in grey, although I didn't know how to change font colour in LinkedIn. And that code is interactive, clicking on the highlighted codes will expand it or redirect the user to the whole line.

This mode is now possible with the LLMs. I as a developer write the comments on the complex parts, or in necessary parts. Often intentionally not putting comments on the code lines that I think are self explanatory, there comments are actually distracting and irritating. But now, LLMs could do really well about describing the command lines. You could highlight for the AI the parts, that are the main focus of the code piece. And for the readers as well. :)

I also think, maybe add some emojis or smileys next to the recipe code views, so its easier and enjoyable to do the most hated thing: to read someone else's code.

The code recipe isn't good when debugging code errors, when you need to optimize or write the code piece itself. But if you want to understand the code at the architectural, business flow level through the code, for refactoring or for modification, then code recipe is another nice-to-use way. :) I would be glad to see it.

🎙️ Lu Wilson on Art of Creative Coding by The Orthogonal Bet via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

Nice podcast episode with Lu Wilson:

In this episode of The Orthogonal Bet, host Samuel Arbesman speaks with Lu Wilson, a programmer and creative coder who also works as a software engineer at tldraw, a Lux Capital portfolio company. Lu’s creative work is broad, strange, and delightful in all the best ways—perhaps best exemplified by the Todepond videos, a mindbending series that reimagines computing through playful, experimental lenses.Together, Samuel and Lu explore the world of Todepond, the ethos of creative coding, and Lu’s unconventional path through education. Their conversation spans topics like cellular automata, the programming language Logo, the history of computing, and the evolving role of artificial intelligence. They also dive into Lu’s work at tldraw, collaborative software, and the importance of cultivating community in tech.

🎥 ESP32 Composite Video via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

This might be of interest to anyone with a hardware bent. One of the comments below it is: "... The animated explanation of the tv lines and timing are the best i have ever seen. ..."

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🎥 Computational Public Space 📸 Notes from Srceenshot Conf! 🎥 How to Do Ambitious Research in the Modern Era

Our Work

🎠 by Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Lua Carousel now comes with a comprehensive system of online help you can run on computer or phone:

• A tutorial for using it tailored towards programmers
• Exercises for learning programming
• Lots of example programs you can run right from within it, clone and remix
• Reference documentation for available capabilities, while carefully exposing the level in the stack that provides them. (I believe this is critical information for people to be aware of. Abstracting it is counter-productive.)

Try it out by installing LÖVE for your platform. It's completely open source and live editable on a computer.

🎥 carousel docs

📝 Critical Architecture/Software Theory via Tomas Petricek

🧵 conversation

I've been reading various books on architecture theory and (obviously) thinking how the ideas there might apply to programming. It is all still very much early ideas (basically trying to find programming equivalents for lots of interesting ideas I came across) - but I would love to hear what people think about it: tomasp.net/architecture

(There is also a PDF version)

Reading Together

💬 Mr. Rogers

🧵 conversation

Anyone wanna work through SICP with me? I tried a few years ago when I was picking up programming, but I was in over my head.

I think I could swing it now. It'd be cool to learn Clojure after as well.

Content

📝 Policy of transience via Spencer Fleming

🧵 conversation

Neat article from lobste.rs, I have almost the exact opposite habits so its cool to see another perspective

🐦 Kevin G. R. Greer via Steve Dekorte

🧵 conversation

One of the most important but least discussed concepts in software design is creating interfaces which aren't perfect for anything, but which are perfect for everything. Ex. files, DAOs, contexts, spreadsheets, ...

🎥 How to Do Ambitious Research in the Modern Era via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

🕹️ RPG in a Box via Eli Mellen

🧵 conversation

I’m always on the lookout for new programming interfaces in games and tools for making games since it’s one of the commercial spaces where folks focus on innovative graphical programming systems.

Was excited to discover this new (to me) game maker this morning.

Bring your stories and ideas to life! RPG in a Box lets you create games and other interactive experiences in a fun and simple way!

📸 Notes from Srceenshot Conf! via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

During the opening of the conference, Omar honed in on the subversive nature of the screenshot. In popular computing, it circumvents the app siloes that define our contemporary digital ecosystems. A screenshot doesn't need a log in, bypasses DRMs, and is interoperable in practically every single computational device. Even in the "high-culture" of computing, where text is dominant, screenshots prove subversive.

...

And yet, to imagine what an image-oriented computer might be seems to offer a new avant-garde for computing.

🎥 Computational Public Space via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Wake up babe

🪬 Mystical via Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

Mystical: a programming language based on arcane rings

🤖

📝 AlphaEvolve: A Gemini-powered coding agent for designing advanced algorithms via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🪡 Stitch: Prototype quickly on modern technology 🎥 FoC Virtual Meetup 10 📝 The Unix Binary wants to be a Smalltalk Method, Not an Object

Two Minute Week

💬 Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

Here is an overview of a the most complex macro that Automat played so far. It has a little bit of everything: OCR, Assembly, hacky string processing, fine-tuned keystroke sequences. The end result is about 2x faster than manual execution and pretty satisfying to watch.

🎥 Skyrim Ingredient Farming #2

Our Work

🧮 ActuarialPlayground.com via Declan

🧵 conversation

As an example of how I've been using model composition in calculang, I added notes to ActuarialPlayground.com on manipulating the formulas to do mortgage protection - by composing with an old loan calculator model (via just a plain old URL).

Here are the formula changes, you can interactively swap them on the website, under 💬

🪡 Stitch: Prototype quickly on modern technology. Free and open source via Nick Arner

🧵 conversation

Hey all! Excited to share a new project some of us (Elliot Boschewitz, Christian Clampitt, Adam Menges, and myself) have been hacking on, Stitch: stitchdesign.app

We’re ready to add people in mass to the TestFlight. It’s an open source version of a visual programming environment, similar to Origami or Quartz Composer.

In addition to being able to build anything those two can, it also supports AR, CoreML, and native 3D support. As well as being built in SwiftUI, so it runs on basically any Apple device and is easy to hack on and improve.

It’s open source, and we welcome new contributions! github.com/StitchDesign/Stitch

💬 Dave Mason

🧵 conversation

Teaching Computer Science in the AI Age - discuss!

💬 Isaac Carrasco-Ortiz

🧵 conversation

From a health webpage on mental overstimulation. This phrase is particularly interesting to me:

“It can feel like you have too many tabs opened on your mental browser and your brain doesn’t know what to do.”

What’s the idea behind using technological metaphors to describe something human? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? What does that tell us about the way we make sense of our everyday technologies? Hmm… 🤔

Content

📝 What If We Made Advertising Illegal? via Andreas S

🧵 conversation

Only the good things from HN 🙂 simone.org/advertising

📝 The Google Zanzibar Paper, annotated by AuthZed via Walker Griggs

🧵 conversation

Perhaps a meta question for sharing annotations -- does anyone know if this is an off-the-shelf solution for hosting paper annotations? It reminds me of Fermet's Margins solution but didn't find a clear signal in the source at first glance

📝 The Curse of Knowing How, or; Fixing Everything via Maximilian Ernestus

🧵 conversation

Talking about feelings again:

notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowing

This resonated a lot with me. Not sure yet what will come out of it in the coming days.

📝 The Unix Binary wants to be a Smalltalk Method, Not an Object via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

The Unix Binary wants to be a Smalltalk Method, Not an Object by @Joel Jakubovic. A bit lengthy, but has interesting insights.

📝 An Overview + Detail Layout for Visualizing Compound Graphs via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

I stumbled upon this solution to the problem of visualizing large compound graphs (where nodes can be nested inside each other)

🐌 Slow Software for a Burning World 🔥 via Andreas S

🧵 conversation

Like mastodon but with values?

Has anyone heard of it or can make meaningful distinctions?

🦀 Rust Dependencies Scare Me via Andreas S

🧵 conversation

Complexity..

Present Company

🎥 Virtual Meetup 10 • April 30, 2025 via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Here's the recording of the most recent F# or C# virtual meetup.

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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💡 Elliot's amazing work 🎥 Thinking with sand 🎥 Cellular Automaton Drives a Simulated Vehicle

Two Minute Week

📑 C++ codes for fitting ellipses, circles, lines via Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

I'm working on nice UI for working with assembly instruction cards recently. Today I've spent some time fiddling around with Ivan Reese's github.com/ivanreese/knob trying to use it for switching condition codes in a smooth manner. Condition codes are discrete values, and there are just 16 of them but it feels nice to switch them out in a continuous manner. Still not finished but the results look interesting so sharing them here. (code)

A key component of the gesture logic is fitting a circle to a bunch of points. Turns out it's really hard. I've wasted quite a bit of time before stumbling on Nikaolai Chernov's excellent home page: people.cas.uab.edu/~mosya/cl/CPPcircle.html . Strongly recommend bookmarking this one - you never know when you'll have to fit a circle to your data!

🦋 Converter for Observable notebooks to Lopecode aka Jumpgate via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

I've finally built my converter for Observable notebooks to Lopecode aka Jumpgate. Feels good (blusky post). Its 2:45 sorry, but it gives a full project overview.

• Github repository
• Observable collection

🎥 Jumpgate intro

Our Work

💡 Elliot's Work via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Not mine, but this work by Elliot is awesome.

Here's a cut of some of my interactive and visual work from the past year.

I'm looking for work! I'm looking for remote work developing, prototyping and/or researching on editors, custom interactive things, or visualizations. I mostly work in JS/TS. Let me know if you know something pls ty :)

✍ Prosetta: Poetic graphical esolang via Charlie Roberts

🧵 conversation

Sharing a fun student capstone project I advised, an Esolang for 2D drawing / animation using free prose:

• Prosetta Overview
• Prosetta Playground

If anyone has ideas for venues they could publish this at I'd be very appreciative. Most of the evaluation so far has been practice-based, with a couple of small end-user studies as well. One of my favorite parts of the project is that they wrote the introduction to their capstone paper in the language itself... when executed it draws / animates an eye moving around a canvas.

🎥 FDD - Failure Driven Development via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

Ideas for using existing tools to augment program development workflow

🐸 pondiverse.com via Lu Wilson

🧵 conversation

we made a place to share and explore creations from creative tools. you can connect your own tool to it too if u want

pondiverse.com

Thinking Together

💬 Declan

🧵 conversation

Pure computation is pure all the way down, an advantage of this is the ability to verify a result by just putting the inputs in again. This is useful in the real world if you share a result with someone: for example when a bank tells a customer how much their mortgage repayment costs

It works not just for one result of interest, but for every other result that one depends on: in other words for the complete workings. So by sharing the pure computation code and it's inputs along with a number, the number is verifiable and you've also shared the complete workings (for free).

I exploit this as much as I can in calculang, including while developing models, with reactive visualizations showing me current model behavior for some inputs (with controls; all experimental at this stage).

It surprises me that on developer tools, functional programming is not in it's own league in front. There are some application state developer tools that FP techniques enable and some are influential. But I don't know anything about interesting introspection- or validation type tools that especially exploit purity. Anyone know if I'm missing something in particular or have any good references to read on?

I might consider a POC exploration on just this idea for some other language (maybe Haskell or PureScript but open to thoughts)

🗨️ by Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I finally got around to Dave Ackley's latest video report on robust-first computing which Andreas S shared 💬 #linking-together@2025-04-28, and it prompted me to zoom out and think about the territory of computation and what we know of it so far in the year 2025. Right now I imagine it as a 3D terrain. Along one axis, analogous to a plan view, I see the following coarse technical approaches to structuring computation, each equally valid:

• Computation as the orchestration of precise instructions.
• Computation as the learning of matrix weights.
• Computation as the orchestration of fuzzy, imprecise cellular automata. Ackley's approach.

I think that's it? Are there others?

Along an orthogonal axis, analogous to an elevation view, I see social approaches to organizing the means of computation. So far we only have open questions here:

• Does computational infrastructure necessarily require authoritarian dictators or at best feudal lords and vassals? Or is it possible to have something analogous to a democratic approach?
• Can we reduce inequality between the haves and have-nots of tech knowledge and computer whispering?
• Can we design incentives to keep computation working over time, in a secure and trustworthy way? (Can computation ever be biased less towards offense, can defense be viable?)
• Can we design incentives to make the means of computation sustainable in their impact on the environment?

And along a second orthogonal axis, analogous to a side view, I imagine ways to connect up computation with other fields of human endeavor. Here there has been much progress, though I am running out of steam:

• Learning from the arts to improve visual and auditory design, e.g. typography.
• Learning from math to better model the world, e.g. numerical methods.
• Learning from the social sciences to nudge groups of people in productive and unproductive directions. Coevolving populations with these lessons that will inevitably grow robust to such nudging.
• ...?

Feel free to point out gaps, additional axes, add examples..

💬 Josh Bleecher Snyder

🧵 conversation

Naive question (apologies in advance): What does convention vs configuration mean in a visual programming language? Are there interesting examples of this playing out in practice?

📝 Eidetic Systems via Spencer Fleming

🧵 conversation

This reminds me of an old USENIX talk that I found very inspiring, on Eidetic Systems, aka recording every input into the OS, write only, forever

[March 13th, 2025 8:04 PM] guyren: I think economic incentives in the development of technology have strongly favoured big business. We want to write large apps with lots of users that can run efficiently on AWS.

But computing is staggeringly cheap. If we are willing to entertain “inefficiency”, we can make small business and individual user software in very different ways to what we do now.

This and other aspects of the economics of all this lead me to believe that our default when storing data is that it is a write-only store. The “current” version of a row is the one with the latest timestamp.

It is easy enough to roll event sourcing into this. We already “store” incoming requests — in the stupid text log file, if nowhere else. If instead, we store full, structured inputs to each request coming into a system in a database table (because we’re all about relations), then we arrive at the results of an input to a system are the results of triggers on those inputs.

Step back, and consider the larger picture: every state the system was ever in can be reviewed. Every input to the system is recorded, and every state transition.

Now, we circle back to small business software, and to my other bugbear: we don’t make software for non-developers to solve their own problems.

But if you put a FileMaker-like interface in front of that write-only store, and you think about augmenting that UI with tools to explore its history, I think you really have something.

Future of programming? Give me this system, with a Datalog query interface, and I can replace most of what I do in a traditional programming language with queries. Traditional programming is relegated to side-effecting or efficiency-concerned stuff.

💬 Alex McLean

🧵 conversation

Trying to stay on topic, when have you most feared clicking on something? How could you have been reassured via humane programming language experience design?

🎥 Maggie Appleton Lecture for MIT Media Lab's Thinking With Sand Lunch Lecture Series via Andreas S

🧵 conversation

Have you seen this? I liked the Cultural perspective of it

💬 Lu Wilson

🧵 conversation

reflecting on jam oriented programming...

i can't believe i spent so many years being dictator of my projects. what a waste.

i now do the jamming approach... it means i MUST accept all changes, even if i disagree with them. if i care enough, i can change them or revert them, but that takes effort, so they usually stay. and for ease, i make everyone admin of my own project. if you submit a pull request or an issue, i just instantly merge and make you admin. then i don't need to be a blocker in future: you can commit straight to main

it means the project becomes ten times richer because it's a team effort with everyone pulling it in different directions

nothing has to be perfect, and it gets done FAST.

it's more open than open source. it's jam source!

each day it becomes more hilarious/tragic to me how most HCI and "future of coding" developers keep things so closed off and secret, now that I've experienced this better way

💬 Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

One of the early promises of computer revolution was the universal access to knowledge and culture. Out of curiosity I've just checked how many hours of video would fit on an average HDD. Assuming average HDD size of 11.6TB (as reported by Segate) and an aggressive, but watchable compression (1GB = 3h of video) we would get a total of 34800 hours of video. Apparently this is around (maybe even slightly above) the total runtime of the whole Netflix's library.

My conclusion is that it should be now possible to buy Netflix on a drive.

Content

🎥 Cellular Automaton Drives a Simulated Vehicle via Andreas S

🧵 conversation

I asked again about Robust Computing, and I think they made some progress

🎥 Algot Tutorial via Beni Cherniavsky-Paskin

🧵 conversation

algot.org — a research visual, by-demonstration (aka code while seeing concrete values 🍰), language operating on graphs. Papers largely closed-access but preprints here.

I find it a bit hard to imagine how one uses it from screenshots, and ~didn't find videos / lectures?~ OK here's a (silent) demo

In some ways similar to Subsequently in de-ambiguating user intent by "demonstration" not being "say the result" but "pick an action".

📝 The Shapes of Abstraction in Data Structure Diagrams via Karl Toby Rosenberg

🧵 conversation

My friend wrote this CHI ‘25 system paper (open access). Very cool

📝 Understanding Marine Scientist Software Tool Use via Jeffrey Tao

🧵 conversation

I’m at CHI right now and just saw this talk. Haven’t read the paper yet, but it seems like it might have some interesting takeaways about a population of scientific programmers with interesting, idiosyncratic needs

Marine science researchers are heavy users of software tools and systems such as statistics packages, visualization tools, and online data catalogues. Following a constructivist grounded theory approach, we conduct a semi-structured interview study of 23 marine science researchers and research supports within a North American university, to understand their perceptions of and approaches towards using both graphical and code-based software tools and systems. We propose the concept of fragmentation to represent how various factors lead to isolated pockets of views and practices concerning software tool use during the research process. These factors include informal learning of tools, preferences towards doing things from scratch, and a push towards more code-based tools. Based on our findings, we suggest design priorities for user interfaces that could more effectively help support marine scientists make and use software tools and systems.

🎥 Prof. Judy Fan: Cognitive Tools for Making the Invisible Visible via Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

"Cognitive Tools for Making the Invisible Visible" by Judy Fan (2025)

In the 17th century, the Cartesian coordinate system was groundbreaking. It exposed the unity between algebra and geometry, accelerating the development of the math that took humans to the moon. It was not just another concept, but a cognitive tool that people could wield to express abstract ideas in visual form, thereby expanding their capacity to think and generate new insights about a variety of other problems. Research in my lab aims to uncover the psychological mechanisms that explain how humans have come to deploy these technologies in such innovative ways to learn, share knowledge, and create new things. In the first part of this talk, I will provide an overview of our work investigating drawing — one of humanity's most enduring and versatile tools. Across several empirical and computational studies, I’ll argue that drawing not only provides a window into how people perceive and understand the visual world, but also accelerates the ability to learn and communicate useful abstractions. In the second part of this talk, I will preview an emerging line of work in our lab investigating the cognitive foundations of data visualization — one of humanity's more recent inventions for making the invisible visible. I will close by noting the broader implications of embracing the continually expanding suite of cognitive tools for accelerating the development of new technologies for augmenting human intelligence.

📝 Mechanical Computing via Paul Tarvydas

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I find this fascinating. The way my mind works, , I found Merkle's 20 minute talk to be very informative (included near bottom of post). Digital computation was done with tubes, then with transistors and now there is a suggestion that mechanical devices might supersede transistors. The NAND gate is fundamental to how CPUs work. If you can implement NAND, you can implement a CPU.

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📝 ChatGPT - Cutie Mark Crusaders' Origins via William Taysom

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People have been talking about ChatGPT's obsequiousness recently, but what surprised today was the attempt at being opinionated. Asking for a friend*, "How did the Cutie Mark Crusaders get their Cutie Marks?" Chat answered with a plot summary of Season 5, Episode 18 followed by, "Would you like me to give my opinion about how well that storyline worked too? (I have thoughts.)"

Of course I said, "Do you? Do tell."

Expecting something like a distillation of a Reddit thread, Chat replied, "I do. I think it was one of the most earned moments in the whole show — but it also felt a little rushed . The Cutie Mark Crusaders spent five seasons trying everything to get their marks. [Details about how the resolution is apt.] That said, the episode jammed a lot into 22 minutes. [Five bullets about major the episode.] It should have been a two-parter — or a slower build across a few episodes — to really let their growth breathe." And so on.

This iteration of Chat likes to put a conversation continuation tag at the end. Following up, Chat goes full fanfic.

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🎙️ FoC 76: Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing 🎥 Wanix: The Spirit of Plan 9 in Wasm 🎥 What is PLUS times PLUS?

Our Work

📝 Figmata (Data ❤️ Figma) via Geert Roumen

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Hey all,

I've built a plugin for Figma that allows designers to do more with data visualisation, inspired by the 'Drawing Dynamic Visualisations' but than building on top of the already existing experience and knowledge of designers in Figma. It is using the Figma API to adjust instances of components to represent types of data.

I made two versions for now, one that is build with Monaco to allow the designers to use text to couple data from JSON into a Figma Frame (which was originally a tool I needed myself) and one that is having UI where users can couple data to properties of the elements (which I'm happy to get feedback on this concept; and if there is cool examples in this space let me know).

If you want to read more on the process or want to check it out; see the Medium Article

🎙️ Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing via Ivan Reese

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Future of Coding • Episode 76

Computing Machinery and Intelligence by Alan Turing

With special guest: Felienne Hermans

Hey, everyone? We've had this community for, what, like, 8 years now? We've shared a lot of great links, had lots of discussions. Surely most all of us know the name Turing, know about the Turing test. Heck, those Hollywood tastemakers put "Eggs" Benedict Cumberbatch in a movie called The Imitation Game, and it did numbers ! Turing is top-tier pop culture for our field.

So… why the hell doesn't anyone ever say, "This paper is proper messed. It's very very very very bad." Because, now that I've read this paper, I'm cursed! If anyone mentions Turing near me, I won't be able to resist the screaming. This lil Alan of all time has taken on an entirely new texture in my life. And if you don't know what you're in for, well, I cannot wait to welcome you into this new baffled, corrupted awareness.

Now, I should say it was truly an honour to have Felienne Hermans, author of one of our all-time favourite papers, A Case for Feminism In Programming Language Design, join us. This episode format — a guest who discusses a work with us, but not their own work — is something Jimmy has been encouraging us to try for a while now, and I think it turned out fabulously. And we couldn't have asked for a better first guest — or a worse first work. Enjoy!

Thinking Together

💬 Walker Griggs

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"Should technical candidates be allowed to use AI assistance in an interview?"

I've had the debate many times over the last two years. My initial stance has always been "of course not, I want to evaluate if they actually understand programming fundamentals." My stance here might be softening. Common responses I hear are

• "This is the way people write code now and we should assess candidates in as close to 'real world' conditions as possible"
• "Where is line between syntax highlighting, LSPs, and AI code-completion?"
• "It should be obvious when a candidate doesn't understand the code they're generating"
• "Cursor boosts your output; a productive engineer should always leverage the best tools"

My responses to those points vary from "LSPs don't write the code on your behalf", "code completion operates on syntax and not semantics", and "human-in-the loop reduces critical reasoning." I personally find it difficult to discern meaningful signal around a candidates level of understanding while they tap tab. What do you all think?

Content

📝 not being Technical via Ivan Reese

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Here's a lovely, heartbreaking 20-minute read by Cat Hicks about her not being Technical, despite the efforts of Technical people to include her in Technical spaces and encouraging her to adopt that identity. I talk a big game about making an inclusive space for people of various levels of Technical to come participate in dreaming about better computers, but this piece makes me question whether the effort is inherently flawed. A taste:

In my research and writing on how technical identities are both constructed and policed, I gave a round of talks about how I see Contest Cultures in software spaces, naming the routine hierarchical nastiness that we experience under the guise of technical arguments as real and important. In a conference hall, a woman in technical leadership came up to me and held my hand so tightly that it hurt. She struggled to find words, and I understood, because some things are too difficult for words and can only be felt together. I will never forget her. It is because I am not Technical that I can have these moments and I would not trade them for anything. Closely after this I heard from an engineer who told me that my work had named and helped him set a boundary around a years-long experience of pain in his career. These moments also mean everything to me, although there are so many more of the second than the first. As someone who has been known to be a human being myself, sometimes I go home and cry after I deliver a piece of the psychology of software teams. This is hard work. And at the same time to be in this field is to understand that I can provoke this second kind of reaction from a man who never would have offered a job to the me of ten years ago. In the Technical world, men have told me quite openly that who they were twenty years ago would have hated me from the moment I came into their visual range, that they would have believed that they knew everything about my mind without knowing me at all.

🎥 What is PLUS times PLUS? via John Christensen

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Pretty animations of lambda calculus (and some nice sound design)

🎥 Wanix: The Spirit of Plan 9 in Wasm via Mariano Guerra

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💬 Nilesh Trivedi

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Hi all,

Have any of you run into questions where large AI models are missing crucial conceptual knowledge as well as are unable to find it by using Web search as a tool?

In other words, what are some examples of the blind spots of "AI + public Internet"?

I really mean CONCEPTUAL knowledge, i.e. HOW things work in the world, not mere factoids or events. Will likely be super-niche, or some nuance that has not been discussed on the Web, and therefore missing from the training data.

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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🎥 Multiplayer Live Coding 📝 Why frameworks are evil 🔤 Typography meets scifi

Our Work

🎥 pastagang @ Noughty Fingers Second Date via Lu Wilson

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here's a 45 minute slot of many people editing the same code document at the same time to make music and visuals. four people are there in person, many more are remote - connecting in from around the world. it's all made LIVE, from scratch - during the slot.

i am still shocked that the LIVE programming world is largely oblivious to this sort of thing

📝 Programming In The Age Of Abundance via Guyren Howe

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This may be of interest

💬 Konrad Hinsen

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A world of rapid change that is almost entirely driven by and enabled by software is not one in which programmers will be idle.

I'd have said "yes" to that conclusion even without reading the arguments before it.

I am less convinced about some of your more detailed predictions, because many of them depend on changes in incentives (whether by markets, regulators, or something else), which are hard to predict.

Thinking Together

💬 Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

I've spent a considerable amount of time now figuring out in which "direction" do memory addresses mentally increase. I'm trying to pick a convention for presenting memory in Automat that would make it easier to mentally picture what's happening. No direction is perfect and each one involves some friction when mentally manipulating order of things.

The established conventions that I know of are:

• Text goes right and down (when lines wrap). Text direction may be pretty much arbitrary when different scripts are involved.
• Bits increase towards left (because << shifts bits up) and then up (because of "higher" bytes). Computer science courses teach that "stacks grow down".
• Numbers increase towards left (more significant digits go towards left) but for a typical (little-endian) CPU more significant bytes are written towards right.
• Points on a cartesian system tend to increase first towards right and up.
• In nature things usually grow up.

📝 Library patterns: Why frameworks are evil via xyzzy

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A good comparison can be Qt vs Skia.

I agree with most claims of this essay. However, having used many frameworks and after having analyzed why they work well, it boils down to.

• Good documentation
• Multiplatform abstraction behind a standard interface
• Combine many calls into a simple end point (button->draw in Qt vs drawing a button via Skia)

If these are addressed by libraries, then libraries with simple callbacks are much more preferrable to frameworks.

One problem which frameworks and libraries don't address or hide away is state machines.

An app is fundamentally event loop + state machine.

Any framework that you use long enough, you will want to peek into how it is actually handling events and customize it.

Content

🐦 Aurelien (@Aurelien_Gz) on X via Steve Dekorte

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🐦 Aurelien (@Aurelien_Gz) on X: omg.. this is next level..

typography meets scifi.. schultzschultz's tools feel like they’re from the future

📝 Feral Cogitation | David West | Substack via Erik Stel

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A number of interesting reads from a friend and former colleague/partner of mine:

📝 Feral Cogitation | David West | Substack

Professor Dave West talks about business software development, software, engineering, cognitive science, AI, Mysticism, education, and much more. Click to read Feral Cogitation, by David West, a Substack publication. Launched 2 months ago.

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👨🏽‍💻 By 🐘 @marianoguerra@hachyderm.io 🐦 @warianoguerra

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