📝 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

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

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🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

🎥 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

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

✉️ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast

🎥 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

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

✉️ Not subscribed yet? Subscribe to the Newsletter / Archive / RSS

🎙️ Prefer podcasts? check the Future of Coding Podcast