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Feeling of Computing Weekly 2026/04 Week 3
2026-04-20 09:58
announcements
💬 Ivan Reese: April Virtual Meetup · Luma
April Virtual Meetup • Wednesday the 29th at 18:00 UTC • RSVP
The feeling of virtual meetup. It's almost a routine at this point. Almost. It's almost a wake up, pour a glass of cranberry water, take a spoonful of omega-3, multivitamin, b12, maybe another pill every second day. Play bicross while the kettle boils and coffee brews. Put your hair up. Moisturize. Floss. Think about the part of Clipse's 2002 song Virginia where Malice says "Don't ask about my music and how that's comin' 'bout / Don't ask about my album, or when's it comin' out". The song plays perfectly in your mind, Koji Kondo's iconic production bouncing off the ghostly tree trunks. Oh, it's patch day! Yay, patch day.
Is this the feeling of computing? Should it be? Let's get together to look at a spiky "unknown" array language with a musical REPL, and at a system for automatically parameterizing SVGs to make them interactive, and a secret little silly project from Ink & Switch.
Demos from resident heartthrob Eli Mellen, reigning virtual meetup champion Tom Larkworthy, and somebody I am every morning, routinely, or who I'll be by then, Kokiri.
📑 Resources
- Wednesday the 29th at 18:00 UTC
- April Virtual Meetup · Luma
- Bicross Daily
- The Ocarina of Rhyme: Team Teamwork - Clipse - Virginia (Lost Woods) - YouTube
devlog-together
💬 Jimmy Miller
Finally got some time to play with something I've always wanted, a whiteboard that actually makes your system come to life. Very early days. Very simple. But I have so many ideas for how I could make this actually useful and good.
Ideally I want to not only sketch distributed systems things but simple models of programs. Hopefully will have time to play and expand this in to more and more expressive territory soon.
📑 Resources
linking-together
💬 Konrad Hinsen: The Computing Historian Recovering Ideas We Threw Away
Interesting interview by @Sam Arbesman with Paul Rony, on lessons from the history of computing: The Computing Historian Recovering Ideas We Threw Away
💬 Geert Roumen: Spatial Pixel
Super cool work by Violet Whitney and William Martin on spatial computing with some llm to “speak human” with artificial intelligence and spatial computing. Think mixed reality without the glasses.
share-your-work
💬 Eli: kiki learn
since that blog post about kiki, I've focused on addressing feedback from the array programming discord, and also making a bunch of stuff to make kiki more approachable (because it is sharp and pointy)
💬 Medet Ahmetson: Whitepaper
I released the Ara's whitepaper: Whitepaper, Bitcointalk forum, Website.
Although the whitepaper approaches this from a blockchain perspective,
Ara is not crypto project in a traditional sense. Instead, it redefines blockchain as a protocol agreement that carries software's semantics and acts as the decentralized recommendation engine.
The Ara's goal is the "software ownership" for the users. Or in the decentralization community sense "Web3 as the creative digital workspace built on collective wisdom".
Technically, it's a desktop shell where users can change the software itself. For developers who submit open-source projects, Ara gives a funding, and a feedback for refactoring projects toward MVC pattern: data lives on the user's computer, the view is on their screen, and the application itself is simplified into a remote service that does concrete thing.
Possible future
For me, the real use case for AI is embedded and possibly trained by the user, residing in the workspace, allowing to customize them. It also gains the semantics of the applications allowing for the extended Siri on the desktop.
Also, Ara redefines the metaverse as MVC-split software with spatial data blending all applications together.
There are Utopian ideas beyond the metaverse, but I kept those in the appendices of the whitepaper.
AraTalk:
- This post is to discuss the idea, criticism and collaboration are welcome.
- For the blockchain related questions (technical, economical etc) visit Bitcointalk post (requires sign up to write)
- For the open-source sustainability model, and Ara from the open-source maintainer's perspective, visit the SustainOSS discourse.
💬 Mariano Guerra: Tutuca Update April 13 2026 - YouTube
- Install immutablejs custom formatter if not detected
- Log transaction information
- Playground time travel slider
- API Docs tab auto-generated on each run
- Lint tab updated on each run
- Common mistakes example in the tutorial
thinking-together
💬 Jason Morris
I'm trying to wrap my head around the idea of "MCP Apps", but I'm having difficulty knowing if any of the metaphors track. It's an app interface in an iFrame in your AI chat. So if it's a coding environment app, it is sort of like an inversion of "an agent in your IDE" to "an IDE in your agent". Does that matter? It feels like it might just because conversation is the dominant interface, and that is going to be more approachable for more people. But I don't know what it means about the ephemerality of the IDE inside the chat. Like, at what point is it no longer expected to maintain state with the repository? When it scrolls out of view? When there's a newer one? Does anyone have an intuition for it they can share? Interactive read-only views seem easy enough to integrate into that workflow, but having stateful apps feels really weird. Conversations are append only.
💬 H3X4G0N: H3X Framework Presentation Fix
hi guys. on the topic of thinking and especially thinking ahead, i started with the "project" in the presentation link almost a year ago, solo, because an idea sparked an avalanche of discoveries. Sadly i a m in no position to publicly disclose anything technical for security reasons.. think in terms of CRISPR. however i have this barely finished presentation which is aimed at general public. some slides are missing but all audio is there.. would love to hear you feedback.
H3X Framework Presentation Fix
💬 guitarvydas
Today, I spent much of my time bouncing ideas of an LLM (Claude) and using the LLM as a foil. I'm interested in "language" design, hence, my line of thinking went down this path...
The interesting corollary
If the text-as-notation choice was driven by hardware weakness — keyboards and line printers being the available I/O — then the arrival of bitmap displays and pointing devices in the late 1970s and 1980s should have triggered a paradigm shift toward diagrammatic programming. It didn't, for exactly the tooling-gravity reason discussed earlier: by then, text-based languages had accumulated compilers, libraries, communities, and curricula. Smalltalk gestured toward something different. Sketchpad had already shown in 1963 what a diagrammatic computing medium could look like. But the gravity of text was already too strong.
We may be at the first moment where that gravity is genuinely weakening — not because hardware changed again, but because LLMs make it possible to build the tooling layer for new notations without the decades of infrastructure investment that previously made it prohibitive.
💬 guitarvydas: Understanding Smallness and Speed - by Paul Tarvydas
Understanding Smallness and Speed Understanding Smallness and Speed
💬 guitarvydas: Slack
@Konrad Hinsen's link spawned this thought, among others, as I watched:
TL;DR — Old code is dying. The code isn't the problem. The business rules embedded in it are. LLMs can extract those rules into a factbase. A factbase can be rewritten into any target language. This is Design Recovery, and it is the right job for LLMs.
LLMs as Design Recovery Engines
👨🏽💻 By 🐘 @[email protected] 🦋 @marianoguerra.org
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