🎥 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

🧵 conversation

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.

🤖

📝 ChatGPT - Cutie Mark Crusaders' Origins via William Taysom

🧵 conversation

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.

---

👨🏽‍💻 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

🧵 conversation

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

🧵 conversation

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

🧵 conversation

"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

🧵 conversation

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

🧵 conversation

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

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

🧵 conversation

🤖

💬 Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

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.

---

👨🏽‍💻 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

🧵 conversation

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

🧵 conversation

This may be of interest

💬 Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

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

🧵 conversation

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

🧵 conversation

🐦 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

🧵 conversation

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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🎥 This Game Did Everything. What Happened? 📝 Self-Steering Language Models Ω OhmJS: A JavaScript library for building parsers, interpreters, compilers, and more

Devlog Together

🎠 A markup language and hypertext browser in 600 lines of code via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I've integrated my recent 💬 #share-your-work@2025-04-05 into my template repository for building apps based on the Lua Carousel UI which supports making changes to apps on the phone (or computer). Now any new app built from this starting point will have a rudimentary system of online help for the entire stack:

• Lua Carousel
• LÖVE
• Lua programming language syntax

And there's tooling for authors to draw box-and-arrow diagrams in the environment and hyperlink boxes to code in the app.

It's all very janky, but the combination of editing on the phone, box-and-arrow diagrams and hyperlinks everywhere seems to result in a somewhat unique programming environment worth exploring further. I'm not sure what I'll do next. Probably build some simple apps and try to build experiences for understanding their source code. This is a little bit like Literate Programming, but just a touch more graphical. LP + image maps, perhaps.

🚪 Jumpgate: Bulk transfer notebooks between storage mediums. via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

I am back on the original goal of exporting my Observable notebooks to my offline-first format (lopecode), in a way that preserves editability. I started a notebook called jumpgate, that can do the conversion, and then opens a PR against Github. The first notebook I am trying to get this working with is Jumpgate itself.

I use lightning-fs + isomorphic-git to do the Github part within a browser. The prototype is working

sourcecode on Observable: observablehq.com/@tomlarkworthy/jumpgate

git PR opened by the notebook: github.com/tomlarkworthy/lopecode/pull/4

as my repo is configured as a static host as well, we can see the result of jumpgate after going through the jumpgate here: tomlarkworthy.github.io/lopecode/notebooks/@tomlarkworthy_jumpgate.html#view=S100%28%40tomlarkworthy%2Fmodule-selection%29

Currently its slow as hell as the git checkout takes a long time. lightning-fs is storing itself in indexdb so there is not need to do a full checkout everytime, we should be able to merge with what exists. I went with simplicity for now as the stateful logic gets complicated as you have to do different git commands depending on whether you have done an initial clone etc.

I am not sure how to manage the PR branch either, I keep force pushing a single branch but thats probably not correct either, I should use a fresh one each time but then you need to be careful not to fill indexdb with orphaned work. If anyone has a strong opinion on what the ideal github workflow for syncing offline files is LMK

The jumpgate does not add the extra functionality to make a notebook editable, I need to next mixin with my editor notebooks to get the thing to do what I want. Good stage though, Having notebooks open PRs is cool.

🌝 f-string.lua – ezhik.jp via Ezhik

🧵 conversation

Keep getting sidetracked by making little Lua libraries. This one implements Python-style f-strings in Lua. Pretty cool to have a language that lets you go this far with its syntax. With just a little bit of work this could be extended to implement Python's template strings (PEP 750) and then we could use Lua to make all sorts of DSLs. My initial motivation was easier printf debugging, though 😅.

I started working on this on an iPad with the Codea app, of all things. Was fun, but sadly I couldn't use any of the Bret Victor-inspired things they had in it since I wasn't using any of the app-specific libraries they had.

Though putting aside the library, I think at this point the most interesting thing I did is actually making it possible to use it right on my website without having to install or download anything.

Ω OhmJS: A JavaScript library for building parsers, interpreters, compilers, and more via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

If you enjoyed fooling with parsers, I would recommend looking into OhmJS. OhmJS (plus Ohm-editor) saves a lot of work when building parsers. A game changer. There is the other half, too - once you've parsed something, what do you do with the information? I've found that doing simple string-rewriting is very, very powerful, while sounding overly-restrictive on the surface. One can design and build whole new languages by transpiling them into existing languages for compilation (that's how I use my 't2t' and 'tmx' stuff). I consider the shell (/bin/bash, /bin/zsh, etc.) to be my IDE. PLs are just "little tools" that plug into the IDE. I don't have to stick to using one language. I can pick and choose. Transpiling a new language (or nano-DSL, or Diagrammatic Programming Language) into some other language fits neatly into this workflow. The fact that OhmJS is written in JS doesn't mean that you have to use JS. You can map XYZ to Lua (or whatever). I can supply a /lot/ more info, if this interests you.

Content

💬 Walker Griggs

🧵 conversation

Meta information diet thread: What are blogs / publications that you read frequently?

🎥 This Game Did Everything. What Happened? via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

This Game Did Everything. What Happened?

Dreams is a 2020 game creation system video game developed by Media Molecule for the PlayStation 4. Players can create and play user-generated content in the forms of games, audiovisual experiences and game assets, which can be shared or remixed to be used in other players' creations.

🤖

💬 Arvind Thyagarajan

🧵 conversation

Has anyone played extensively with the swathe of "speak english into code" systems out there, from idea through to deployment to an appreciative public? (I haven't...)

I'm wondering if, at the end of the day, you still have to be somewhat of a textual code / software engineering native in order to take advantage of this particular present-future of coding? Or if it's truly democratising access to practical computation (i.e. domain specific to the domain of semi-commercial tools, apps, integrations that software engineers work on)

I feel a lot of public excitement around it that I'm not feeling -- but as someone keen on encouraging everyone to act computationally for themselves, public excitement is * the metric so I'll admit to being mildly envious 🙂

📝 Self-Steering Language Models via Jack Rusher

🧵 conversation

For anyone working with LLMs (from my colleagues at the lab where I’ve been helping out the last few months):

📝 Self-Steering Language Models

While test-time reasoning enables language models to tackle complex tasks, searching or planning in natural language can be slow, costly, and error-prone. But even when LMs struggle to emulate the precise reasoning steps needed to solve a problem, they often excel at describing its abstract structure--both how to verify solutions and how to search for them. This paper introduces DisCIPL, a method for "self-steering" LMs where a Planner model generates a task-specific inference program that is executed by a population of Follower models. Our approach equips LMs with the ability to write recursive search procedures that guide LM inference, enabling new forms of verifiable and efficient reasoning. When instantiated with a small Follower (e.g., Llama-3.2-1B), DisCIPL matches (and sometimes outperforms) much larger models, including GPT-4o and o1, on challenging constrained generation tasks. In decoupling planning from execution, our work opens up a design space of highly-parallelized Monte Carlo inference strategies that outperform standard best-of-N sampling, require no finetuning, and can be implemented automatically by existing LMs.

💬 Ezhik

🧵 conversation

I wanted to learn how the CodeMirror editor works, so I asked GitHub Copilot's agent mode to build a little app that uses it for me. We had a back-and-forth where I pointed out the bugs I've seen in the UI and then it fixed it. But all this took place without me having to look at the actual code, so I don't really feel like I learned anything from this experience. That makes me wonder - do people here use these tools for learning, and if so, how?

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

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📑 Survey of compilation, recompilation & compile-time evaluation 🪟 Interactive Layout Design with Integer Programming

Our Work

🎨 Helper to select an accessible color relative to a base (background) color via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I spent some time rethinking how color is represented in my browser. I want to prioritize accessibility over expression, so I switched to ~500 colors over a perceptually uniform color space. The idea is that you specify background colors completely, but if you leave wiggle room in the foreground colors the browser will search the wiggle room and try to maintain some minimum contrast level. Here's a test run where I randomize the background on every "page load", but the foreground colors are specified the same way: text is on a greyscale, and links are blue.

I used to think the CSS hotness of the Oklab space is rocket science. I still don't understand the why of it, but it turns out to only take 200 lines of code to implement.

🎥 luaML2-contrast

Devlog Together

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

I padded my work trip to Portugal with some extra days off so I could concentrate for 2 days and do a V2 of the editor component. A great success! I switched to floaty window style near the cell, attached it to the correct DOM so it follows the scrolling properly. Got add/remove cells properly working again since the multi-module refactor broke them. Managed to remove several reactivity bugs. Removed some hacks that were working around said bugs. Fixed some low level bugs in the visualizer, causing a few other unexpected bugs to fix themselves coz of that problem.

🎥 add delete cells

Thinking Together

💬 Felix Kohlgrüber

🧵 conversation

Hi!

it's been a long time since I posted in this group (almost 5 years, wow!). Life changed on my side (working full-time jobs, having kids, ...) but I still tried to follow what's going on occasionally. Thanks a lot to Mariano Guerra for the newsletter, it's the perfect digest for me to read whenever I have some spare time.

I've recently started using Obsidian and it's working great for me to collect and organize all kinds of thoughts. I've used quite a few tools for this over the years, but Obsidian is my new favorite. I'm sure it's been discussed here already, but here's what I love about it:

• based on markdown files instead of some proprietary formats
• great apps for desktop and mobile
• effortless e2e-encrypted sync between devices
• linking between files / pages and following those links is easy. I'm using a variation of a Zettelkasten (this link can be useful as a starting point; I can write about my approach if there's interest in it)

I'm currently trying to collect my FoC ideas, projects and thoughts into my Obsidian and therefore wanted to see my contributions to this community. I used the Archive tool by Kartik Agaram and it's been working great. A simple long webpage and Ctrl-F worked beautifully, probably better than what Slack Pro could have given me. Thanks a lot for creating the archive, Kartik!

Going back in time was very interesting. One thing I noticed though was that quite a few links that we discussed at the time sadly don't work anymore. With the help of the wayback machine, I was able to still access all the info though. This made me once again appreciate the wayback machine and its importance for the internet. Feels like a donation to the project is overdue.

That's all I wanted to share. Have a great day folks :)

💬 Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I've been thinking about color, and I don't know anything about it.

I'd really like my hypertext browser to allow people to adjust color, but without ever compromising contrast. Is there some color space/model like rgb/hsl/CIELAB/Lch that allows you to adjust an author foreground color relative to an author background color, yielding new reader foreground and background colors that maintain the original level of contrast? Ideally I want a single spectrum/dimension/knob that I can adjust to change the hues of one element (say the background color), automatically adjusting the colors of other elements around it.

For example, say the background color is white. I reflect it to get a text color of black. Then I get 3 other foreground colors that are rotated by 120 degrees along the color wheel. Now I could adjust the hue to rotate around the color wheel. Or I could reflect to get dark mode. But is there a way that supports both without going all the way to a 2D color space? For example, if you set the background color to medium grey now no foreground color can give you the desired level of contrast. So I'd like to not even represent such a background color as an option.

💬 Karl Toby Rosenberg

🧵 conversation

I’ve been thinking about how languages taught at the intro level are usually taught with lots of white lies about how they work, out of necessity. For example, Python’s actual underlying memory model (how everything’s a reference and isn’t copied around) is confusing (arguably), so we avoid teaching that part and oftentimes make all these distinctions between references and primitives (even though everything’s an object). Teaching something more accurate (everything’s an object with references, and oh sometimes values are even referenced via referenced counting) would actually lead to confusion when trying to translate some of this in other languages like C, where everything’s actually a value (pointers are just ints purposed for addressing things).

Java is also confusing with all the GC stuff and opinions it has about memory and memory behavior.

I would like a first-learner’s language that has the arguably-more-consistent semantics of something like C (“everything’s a value”), but is closer to Python. So I can feel like I’m not “lying” so much. I think the closest thing is C itself, unfortunately, or C++ with a custom allocator thing.

Or maybe a hot-take: objective C / ARC are the closest.

But really I’d just like a Python with less obfuscation and inconsistency, so it looks more like C with safety on-top and better file imports.

Essentially, Python with proper value types for everything, even if a little more challenging. The most explainable language closest to hardware, but easier to use.

Just thinking out-loud. I think a Python 3 subset preprocessor that outputs raw C would look close to the language I have in-mind. (I’d like end for blocks too).

📑 A rough survey of compilation, recompilation, and compile-time evaluation via Jamie Brandon

🧵 conversation

I'm curious if anyone knows of languages that have different approaches to the ones I covered here.

Content

🪟 GRIDS: Interactive Layout Design with Integer Programming via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

Integer programming based layout engine for graphs

Since Maikel van de Lisdonk/ OCWG : Open Canvas Interchange Format I been thinking it might be possible to write a generic graph layout engine. I also been thinking that historically graph layout engines concentrate on the spatial constraints (including grids), but now we have LLM/embedding vectors it might be fruitful to integrate semantic similarity into the objective function so nodes representing similar things are near to each other as well.

Present Company

📢 Future of Coding meetup · Luma via Maikel van de Lisdonk

🧵 conversation

Our next meetup will be april the 30th at 18:00 UTC .. so, we're looking for 2 volunteers to do a demo/presentation (we already got 1 volunteer)! So who wants to share anything about their project?

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

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🎥 Virtual Meetup 9 • March 26 ✍️ A programming language of flowing strands 🛸 HyperDoc demo

Two Minute Week

💬 Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

I am back to bug hunting. Reactive live coding is great when it works but the bugs can be devilishly difficult. The best methodology I have is plotting all the transitions on a timeseries and zooming RIGHT IN. Its a technique I keep coming back to and it has fixed quite a few subtle issues. I used to think the dependancy graph would be useful but actually a lot of the reactivity bugs occur via hidden event coupling occurring outside the programming model, for example, mouse events, url events, local storage events. They can cause different cells to trigger each other but not through the normal notification mechanisms.

🎥 debugging reactive

Our Work

🛸 HyperDoc demo via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

My main recent FoC-related project is a framework for creating explorable, explainable, Web-publishable, composable, and convivial hypertext systems that integrate code. Combining aspects of explorable explanations, literate programming, and computational notebooks. The two principal intended use cases are (1) programs written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute, and (2) scientific publications using computation.

A first demo is now available for browsing: hyperdoc.khinsen.net

This is what I will present at the upcoming meetup on Wednesday.

🖼️ Open Canvas Interchange Format (OCIF) via Maikel van de Lisdonk

🧵 conversation

Last FoC meetup I showed the Open Canvas Interchange Format we're working at with the Open Canvas Working Group. We want to create a new spec to help (infinite) canvas apps enable interchanging their canvases with each other. More info can be found here canvasprotocol.org and this points to the latest version of the spec on github : spec.canvasprotocol.org .. and in case you want to help developing this: we meet every two weeks and here's the link to our next meetup upcoming tuesday

📝 A markup language and hypertext browser in 600 lines of code. via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Devlog Together

🗒️ The first version of the new multi-notebook architecture via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

Just got Lopecode's plain text serialisation format deterministic so its now git diff friendly! The first version of the new multi-notebook architecture is public here from the lopecode repository. The code editing experience sucks and I lost a lot of functionality switching to dockered multi-notebook but it is so much better being able to work on two or more reactively linked notebooks at the same time it will be worth the backward step long term.

📏 Fit-to-Width Text: A New Technique via Roma Komarov

🧵 conversation

Working on a proposal for the algorithm of fit-to-width text for CSS. Planning to present it to CSSWG next week if all goes right :)

I already have a technique that handles a few main use cases (kizu.dev/fit-to-width), but if we want it to be native, we need to handle a bunch more: specifically, a case when a line of text has “static” elements that do not change their dimensions in response to the font-size change. This, with added handling of optical sizing of a font, requires us to basically render the same line box up to 4 times, but with 2 of those being optional (when no static elements, or no optical sizing axis present in the fonts used).

So mostly working on fine-tuning the algorithm + making a prototype of it with custom elements & shadow DOM (with no runtime JS for layout, only for duplicating the content to emulate multiple renders), and also thinking about what an API for this property could look like, with possible options, etc. And will need to also think how some other edge cases will need to be handled (reverse dependence on the font-size, initial-letter, and a bunch more).

🎥 Screen Recording

✍️ codeberg.org/nilesh/grapher via Nilesh Trivedi

🧵 conversation

Today I added Knotend-like keyboard shortcuts to my Graph editor app: codeberg.org/nilesh/grapher

Because this editor supports compound graphs where, besides adjacency edges, nodes can also be nested using at most 1 parent per node, I needed 4 separate actions on graphs for the currently selected node:

• Add a destination node (using the Tab key)
• Add a source node (using Shift+Tab )
• Add a child node (using ~ )
• Add a parent node (using Ctrl+~ )

I haven't yet added keyboard shortcuts for adding "sibling" nodes.

Also felt sad that we don't have standardized UI components with keyboard shortcuts for manipulating trees, DAGs, plain graphs, compound graphs or hypergraphs.

Thinking Together

🎥 How I Animated This Video via xyzzy

🧵 conversation

I can't take AI seriously.

Not my video but I have worked with ebsynth ... it is a completely analogue algorithm.

Style transfer without AI. It is built on old analogue aglorithm called patch match I believe.

Stylizing Video by Example

The future of code licensing is even stronger copyright protections for software authors / artists. AI has made a mockery of opensource and creative commons.

[Intellectual Property Stuff and Trademarks](https://blog.xyzzyapps.link/2025/03/08/intellectual-property-stuff-and-trademarks/)

📝 post via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

I have come to the conclusion that all PLs are VPLs. The first VPL I learned was assembler . Pond'ring aloud, thoughts welcome...

Background: Inspired by the 💬 #present-company@2025-03-24 by Duncan Cragg, I started to categorize VPLs. I think that I'm up to 9 simple variants. The main knobs that can be turned for PL design seem to be: (1) syntax affected by visualization technology, e.g. 1960s grids of non-overlapping pixmaps called "characters" vs. more modern raster graphics and vector graphics, (2) semantics of control-flow, e.g. 1960s sequentialism implied by line-by-line reading of code and blocking function calls vs. 1970s control-flow isolation like UNIX processes vs. more modern closures (effectively invented in the 1950s :-)). [FTR, assembler is position-based, using crude graphical grids of columns and rows, whereas C is not position-based, using simple eye-candy indentation for human (vs. machine) readability].

[March 24th, 2025 1:57 PM] fp: http://blog.interfacevision.com/design/design-visual-progarmming-languages-snapshots/

this one - is that it? [update: no, but it's a fun page!]

Content

📘 Reflections on writing a book via Patrick Dubroy

🧵 conversation

Hello! Thought some people here might be interested in my most recent blog post — Reflections on writing a book. It's about some of the things Mariano Guerra and I learned in over the 2.5 year it took us to write our book (💬 #share-your-work@2025-03-10)

✍️ Rivulet: a programming language of flowing strands via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I don't even.. just check this out.

🎞️ Pas a Pas via Tak Tran

🧵 conversation

Pas a Pas: A tangible interface for making stop motion animation

Present Company

💬 Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

I did some vibe coding with Cursor and it got stuck in a loop of writing a buggy shell script, running it, looking at the output (unchanged because bugs), going "hmm let's fix that", then writing the exact same shell script.

💬 Andrew Beyer

🧵 conversation

I feel like I saw a really good literature review "state of the world" wrt visual/graphical programming a while back (probably here, though could have been elsewhere) but apparently didn't save the link and can't find it again...

So, anyone have any favorites or good pointers for something like that?

💅 Category:Design Aesthetics | Aesthetics Wiki | Fandom via Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

Here is a game:

• Go to aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Category:Design_Aesthetics
• Check out some of the design styles
• Come back here and post your favourite one that you wish were used more in FoC UIs

🎥 Virtual Meetup 9 • March 26, 2025 via Ivan Reese

🧵 conversation

Here's the recording of the Future of Coding Virtual Meetup 9. See you next month!

📋 13 things I would have told myself before building an autorouter via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

A dataviz driven development win.

"If you do not have a visualization for a problem, you will never solve it"

Also in spatial domain. Code + dataviz is my future of coding.

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

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🥞 Linear Logic and Permutation Stacks 🎥 Malleable UIs using AI ✍️ Code Editing with Free-form AI-Interpreted Sketching

Two Minute Week

💬 Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

I'm getting feedback about the state of the game using basic OCR now. Unfortunately the OCR that I'm using is optimized towards "natural" text - so it doesn't handle game UIs too well.

🎥 OCR

Devlog Together

🧮 Spreadsheet #3 – ezhik.jp via Ezhik

🧵 conversation

Joining Kartik Agaram in the Lua club. I got Lua running in the browser (using wasmoon) and ported my spreadsheet experiments to it: ezhik.jp/spreadsheet-3

I think I'd like to experiment more with properties. I've already got the ability to change styling of cells, but what if we could go even further? Move cells around? Make them round? Make them spin? Make them not cells but images? I want to mess with the spreadsheet formula (pun intended) even further.

What if Spreadsheet #2 was Lua? You get Spreadsheet #3.

Thinking Together

💬 Denny Vrandečić

🧵 conversation

I found the holy grail: Vibe computing + Literate programming = ❤️‍🔥

Content

✍️🎥 CHI25 CodeShaping Video Presentation via Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

"Code Shaping: Iterative Code Editing with Free-form AI-Interpreted Sketching" by Ryan Yen, Jian Zhao, & Daniel Vogel (2025)

1️⃣ Unit: Next Generation Visual Programming System via Fuzz

🧵 conversation

Unit is a General Purpose Visual Programming Language and Environment built with a primary focus on Developer Experience.

It is heavily inspired by Live, Data Flow, Reactive, Functional and Object Oriented Programming paradigms. Formally, units are Multi Input Multi Output (MIMO) Finite State Machines (FSM). A program in Unit is represented as a Graph.

🥞 Linear Logic and Permutation Stacks--The Forth Shall Be First via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

The real Achilles' heel for these languages, however, is their innate inability to deal with parallel or distributed computation.

Perhaps it is time to move on to the next theorem.

further: my thoughts and references

🤖

🎥 Malleable UIs using AI, from Haijun Xia's lab in UC San Diego via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Malleable UIs using AI, from Haijun Xia's lab in UC San Diego

Yining Cao's Jelly work referenced here doesn't seem to be on the lab's site, but this seems to be the paper.

🤖 crawlers by AI companies are not respecting robots.txt and so hostile to the open web via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

It seems like a pretty big negative of AI that crawlers by AI companies are not respecting robots.txt and so hostile to the open web.

I've been hearing about this for years, and I've never understood it. Reading robots.txt is mature technology. I'm curious if anyone here has perspective on the technical/political aspects. (Goes without saying that it's not a good look.)

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

💬 Not a member yet? Check the Future of Coding Community

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📢 Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE) 🐛 in-notebook debugger 📝 Zest: a language for malleable and legible systems

Our Work

📘 WebAssembly from the Ground Up - learn WASM by building a compiler via Mariano Guerra

🧵 conversation

After two and a half years of work with Patrick Dubroy, we are happy to announce the release of WebAssembly from the Ground Up, a book that teaches you about WebAssembly 1.0 by building a simple compiler in JavaScript with Ohm/JS.

Here’s a 25% discount code you can use: FOCWASM25

We decided to do a “digital first” book to take advantage of interactivity and “explorable explanations”, and learned a couple of things along the way.

We also decided that all the code should be in the book and that it should run if you copy and paste the snippets as you read.

To achieve this we had to create most of the tooling around the book ourselves:

• The server that handles authentication and access to the book
• The script that extracts the snippets from the original source code and generates:
  • The snippets you can copy to clipboard.
  • The “Copy up to here” code segments.
  • The checkpoints and chapter modules in the code repo, accessible through stackblitz.
  • The emit library, a standalone library to emit WebAssembly 1.0 binary modules.
• The early access feedback system using embedded hypothes.is
• PDF generation (puppeteer, pdftk, imagemagick, poppler).
• A tool to generate code snippet ranges for “highlight on text hover”.

We plan on writing about some of our takeaways in the coming weeks, but that will have to wait. 😅

Let us know if you have any questions!

🎥 Visualizing Models - Actuarial Playground via Declan

🧵 conversation

Hey all, I released ActuarialPlayground.com : an interactive and visual actuarial cashflow model, where the calculations are described by calculang.

There is a 7min video where I use the Playground to explore some things here

I made remarks about the calculang model and especially model composition, that you can read under the '❓' tab

calculang outputs a JS bundle you can see under '🌟' - obviously a lot can be done with it in a pretty familiar way

This is a contrast to calculations rigidly defined in specialised tools, without composition, and without being able to break out or integrate in a tight visual/interactive and exploratory loop

🦋 Do you want to know what was the secret to Flash websites? via Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

I've turned some notes related to Flash from the last FoC meetup in Berlin into a thread here:

@mrogalski.eu: Do you want to know what was the secret to Flash websites?

Instead of presupposing that "everything is a document" & "documents are a collection of boxes within other boxes" it went with "everything is a movie clip" & "movie clip is a collection of other movie clips" (Clips all the way down!) :thread::point_down:

Devlog Together

💬 Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

In my very-biased view, this looks a lot like what I think of as "layering". I don't trust comments, so I want a way to make diagrams tightly bound to the code itself, i.e. generate code from diagrams (syntax == figures, not just characters). In my view, to get "layering" you need total isolation (encapsulation of data is not enough, you also need to guarantee that the control flow is isolated). To consider: the stuff inside of boxes is important, but, are (some of) the flows important, too? I.E. I see the arrow in the first diagram as a data flow and a "sequencing" thing - it kicks off the box to the right (the Main page) box needs to wait until it gets a signal to begin (I call that sequencing and timing). The 2nd drawing shows 6 boxes and no arrows. Does that mean that they can be viewed in any order, i.e. how are they different from "TABs" on the window? I think that I want a viewer/editor that gives me hierarchical TABs, or, clickable boxes. Double-click on a box and you get to view its innards. Make some other gesture and you go back. Does this mean that you need a "map" off to the edge of the window to show where in the hierarchy you are? The popular web browsers I've used flit really close to this flame, but, don't satisfy...

🐛 in-notebook debugger via Tom Larkworthy

🧵 conversation

I am in the fixing all the reactivity glitches before release stage. They are so difficult to debug, clicking a link opens a panel which syncs the hash URL, which retriggers another cell that get the stale version of the URL which may cause a cycle and the app starts flickering... or something like that.

I had to upgrade my in-notebook debugger to work across notebooks so I can visualize the evolution of the runtime state w.r.t. time. It worked! I figured it out. Pictured is the trace of a self-triggering reactivity loop. Its still hard to understand but you can see a lot of ticks with a regular pattern, and critically, the name of the cells. There were over 1000 cells in the notebook, so knowing the 15 that were implicated in the cycle is helpful.

📝 Zest is a (very wip) programming language for building systems that are both malleable and legible via Jamie Brandon

🧵 conversation

I wrote up some overall design direction for zest - github.com/jamii/zest/blob/main/docs/rationale.md.

Currently bogged down in figuring out how to combine staged compilation and modules (github.com/jamii/zest/issues/1), but once I figure that out I can finally start fleshing out the runtime.

Thinking Together

📝 How Did We Get Here? via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

I’ve come to believe that we’re missing out on approximately 90% of what’s possible because of how we program. It’s not just about the syntax, it goes much deeper - it’s rooted in culture, religion, dogmatism, and closed-mindedness. I think the word “function” has been overused, and the emphasis on efficiency has gone too far. Here are a few thoughts… YMMV. What do you think? How Did We Get Here? The Best Programming Language

💬 Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

I’m curious about your thoughts on this idea: Glamorous Toolkit and Live Programming environments seem to essentially be REPLs that use modernized input and output technologies.

Back in the 1950s, REPLs used the best I/O and interface tech they had back then - mostly text-based command lines because computers couldn’t do much else. But now, environments like Glamorous Toolkit make output look better with graphics instead of just printing text, and Live Programming environments have GUIs with interactive stuff like sliders to change things while the program is running.

The only tricky part in designing modern REPLs seems to be figuring out how to keep things flexible while still working with strongly-typed, functional programming languages.

Do you think I’m oversimplifying these modern programming environments? Am I missing something important about how they differ from traditional REPLs?

🔍 zoomable hypertext via Orion Reed

🧵 conversation

I'm not really sold on ZUIs (zoomable user interfaces) but I became a bit more enticed once I realised that you could make ZUIs for graphs instead of trees. Where you can zoom into things and eventually get back to where you started... I feel like (aside from the potential motion sickness) it induces this visceral sense of how software and data topologies are governed by laws that we made up... And that, so long as we don't break any actual physical laws we are free to make up the semantic rules as we please...

Anyway, made this zoomable hypertext thing the other day to figure out how you would do infinite zoom in an infinite coordinate space that has this weird graph topology, where you can have A --inside-> B --inside-> A

Ended up with what I called a Shifting-Origin Graph which has a series of matrix transforms that can traverse through the graph with you, keeping floating point precision at bay and keeping memory usage fixed.

I would be curious to hear takes on ZUIs here, I feel like there's a more general view on them that would be more compelling to me, I got a glimpse of that as I made this experiment, realising that it would open up some interesting semantics that aren't really to do with ZUIs, and more to do with the ability to warp space in new ways.

🎥 Screen Recording

📏 Programming Language Sizes via Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

Lua is 1,250x larger than Sector Lisp. Rust is 750,000x larger than Sector Lisp.

Are my numbers and data correct?

✊ The Data-First movement via Duncan Cragg

🧵 conversation

🤗

📝 The Data-First movement

We should talk.

💬 Arvind Thyagarajan

🧵 conversation

why ~is~ does it feel like the world of "what people and businesses are paying for today to lower the barrier to entry for computational needs" is an almost non-intersecting set with "what excites us about lowering the barrier to entry for computational needs"?

📢 Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE) via Jonathan Edwards

🧵 conversation

You should definitely submit a demo to the LIVE Programming Workshop this year! It is being held entirely online so no excuses. Submit by July 21

The 11th Workshop on Live Programming (LIVE 2025) will take place online. LIVE invites submissions of ideas for improving the immediacy, usability, and learnability of programming.

💬 Paul Tarvydas

🧵 conversation

Rhetorical question?: how would your programming workflow change if you deeply believed that creating SCNs was cheap and easy? Perl leaned heavily on REGEX. REGEX was once thought to be hoary and problematic. Perl made it accessible. New kinds of things were invented when Perl started being widely used. T2t is “better” than REGEX, because t2t makes it easy to deal with patterns containing recursive nesting. CFGs, like YACC, make it possible to parse recursively nested text, but, CFGs need painful, full specification of too much detail. If you had a way to specify pattern-matching using tiny DSLs that didn’t cost a lot of time to build, how would your workflow change? ['t2t' leans heavily on PEG and esp. OhmJS] [SCN === Solution Centric Notation, essentially a nano-DSL, I think of Richard Feynman breaking away from mathematical/Gutenberg notation and inventing and using Feynman diagrams. Language affects thought, notation affects thought].

Content

🎥 Liber Indigo - Metaphysical Prisoners of the Desktop via Andreas S

🧵 conversation

Interfaces and mysticism 👀

📝 The program is the database is the interface via Steve Dekorte

🧵 conversation

📢 Algorithmic Pattern - Sheffield and Online, September 2025 via Alex McLean

🧵 conversation

Algorithmic Pattern is a new festival and conference for people curious about the practice and culture of algorithmic pattern-making, across algorithmic music, arts and craft. The first edition will take place both in Sheffield UK and online, during September 2025.

The call for talks/papers is now open, please see our website for details: 2025.algorithmicpattern.org/call

🎥 Computers for Cynics 2 - It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC via Christopher Shank

🧵 conversation

"Computers for Cynics 2 - It All Went Wrong at Xerox PARC" by Ted Nelson (2012)

📝 Compiling C++ with the Clang API via Marek Rogalski

🧵 conversation

Here is a quick and dirty way to bootstrap a new programming system: transpilation. And a fun fact: C++ started out as a transpiler.

📝 Rewilding Software Engineering via Konrad Hinsen

🧵 conversation

This book chapter by Tudor Girba and Simon Wardley is a good introduction/motivation for Moldable Development.

📇 Folk Computer: Tableshots via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

Folk Computer: Tableshots

I've never quite seen this page before.

By Cristóbal Sciutto to boot, who's been a big influence on me in recent years. Universes colliding.

🤖

💬 Greg Bylenok

🧵 conversation

What if "vibe coding" is the real future of coding? Is "programming as theory building" a dead-end? Having a bit of an existential crisis here. Anyone else?

🟧 HN Discussion via Kartik Agaram

🧵 conversation

I like this comment:

What I am missing, and would buy as an app, is the ability to code on an Android tablet with pen.

Regardless of the programming language, writing code as I do on paper, with the difference it is straight into the editor window.

No side panel, where I have to write one word after the other with pauses and correction, or that some apps (looking at you Pydroid) for whatever reason disable.

Straight like Apple's math demo, to make it more precise.

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

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