hardwaregeek

Almost finished with A Perfect Spy. Maybe the most emotionally compelling Le Carre I’ve read. Long and I do find him a bit of a slog (The Honorable Schoolboy especially), but there’s something so fun about his brand of tactical, psychological espionage.

Perhaps there’s a difference between what people prefer looking at and what’s actually nicer to inhabit? Architecture is optimizing for people inhabiting the building, not just staring at it in a photograph. It’s like if you asked someone to judge a phone based on a photo. Yes there’s some aesthetic judgement but it matters more if the phone is usable.

I know that personally I find New York’s prewar buildings more beautiful than your average soulless luxury tower. But I enjoyed living in a soulless luxury tower because it had good lighting, not terrible elevators and decent fixtures.

It’s a music player that regularly cannot play music. I don’t understand how you get that wrong for so long.

That seems like a perfectly good use of time for a kid in the 70’s! You’d learn a lot of engineering skills and demonstrate a tenaciousness that most people don’t have. I don’t think the goal is to predict what will be the important technology in 10 years. The goal is to challenge oneself with hard tasks and learn interesting stuff. A lot of the “AI” people today were compilers people yesterday

I feel like people aren’t updating to the possibility that a significant portion of software development could be under the purview of SpaceX. Whether it’s developer Twitter, Cursor’s planned GitHub competitor, or Cursor/Grok, that’s a lot of the developer mindshare. Granted, there’s a lot of competition in all of these spaces except for maybe Twitter, so it might not happen. But there’s a chance! And that possibility is fairly concerning.

Ok but isn’t that true of all software development? It’s not like anybody’s done a rigorous test of writing their entire codebase in Python vs Java. It’s all vibes based there. People create post-hoc justifications for why they use certain technologies but the reality is a lot more vibes than anything else.

When you start getting hate, you’ve made it. Up until then you’re a hypothetical that people like. Maybe they’ve built a side project with you or read the docs. You only get hate when people have used your tool and butted up against limitations. We saw this with Deno too where they went from beloved potential savior to realistic, limited tool. Hate is good. It means people rely on you

Both can be true? You can be doing really well and still have long term risk. Dethroning incumbents takes longer than people think and it’s possible that search growth goes 20%, 10%, -10%, -50%

A fun counter factual: try “proving” that famous scientists are their collaborators based on this methodology. Obviously Hardy and Littlewood are the same person. They’re both British mathematicians who use analysis and number theory and have similar sensibilities in politics and math.

I’ve proposed that someone open a restaurant of invasive species. You could make some decent dishes with lionfish, blackberries, golden oyster mushrooms, venison, etc

Agreed. I was skeptical of Deno and I think their package management story was a mistake. But the people were still trying to make JavaScript better and doing so out of genuine love for the language. I especially feel for the employees who put in several years of their life, with the resulting opportunity cost.

I'm not fully convinced that there's a tenable model for open source devtool companies. Usually there's some handwavy plan to do hosting or code quality that never comes to fruition. Hosting is a hard business and the 800 pound gorilla in the room of AWS is even harder to surmount. Otherwise, I'm not sure what business model you can look towards. Support maybe?

I wonder if it's almost like a new version of management consulting. You hire/invest in a bunch of smart 20-somethings who seem generally intelligent with the idea that they'll "disrupt" an industry with their from-first principles approach. Do the 23 year old McKinsey consultants particularly care about their work? No, but the McKinsey name is a fast way to gain clout and access to executives. Ditto the YC name

For what it’s worth Ruby’s JIT took several different implementations, definitely struggled with Rails compatibility and literally used some people’s PhD research. It wasn’t a trivial affair

That’d also be an interesting data point! What’s the upper limits of vibe coding? Can you vibe code rust? What about an entire programming language toolchain? How about an ecosystem? Can you make a parallel npm?

I really want to host a vibe coding competition and see what can actually be made with these systems. Like if we’re doing insane token spends, it better be in service of creating amazing stuff. Can we make an entirely new programming language? Can we make an OS?

There’s probably a good reason why not, but I’d love a query language with sum types. They just feel like a natural way to model a lot of data

The fundamental issue is that all of education and childhood accomplishments have become cynical, overly competitive games. Science fairs are now attempts for a child to piggyback off of a lab’s existing work and claim they discovered it. Sports are a vehicle to college admissions. Disability claims become another way to gain an academic advantage. It’s no surprise that the 30 under 30 are filled with scammers and criminals. It’s what we’re teaching students who want to get ahead.

I don’t think these are mutually exclusive takes. Bun is essentially taking Node and giving it a standard library and standard tooling. But you can still use regular node packages if you want. Whereas Deno def leaned into the clean break for a while

I was wondering if the logo would be a tortilla

Perhaps OCaml is the Velvet Underground of languages. Only a few thousand people learned OCaml but every one made a programming language[1]

[1]: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/01/velvet/

I like OCaml and have written the "why we chose XYZ language" posts. Most of the time the real answer is "we like it and it makes us feel good to use it". Like the answers aren't wrong per se but they're more post-facto justifications. And that's perfectly fine! I think we should normalize saying that tech stack choices are subjective and preference-based. We're not robots. The social and aesthetic parts of a stack matter to people

Never underestimate cultural momentum I guess. NBA players shot long 2 pointers for decades before people realized 3 > 2. Doctors refused to wash their hands before doing procedures. There’s so many things that seem obvious in retrospect but took a long time to become accepted

I gotta say, I feel pretty vindicated after hearing for years how Python’s tooling was just fine and you should just use virtualenv with pip and how JS must be worse, that when Python devs finally get a taste of npm/cargo/bundler in their ecosystem, they freaking love it. Because yes, npm has its issues but lock files and consistent installs are amazing

I’d agree before AI but it’s so easy to add tests with AI, you might as well. Same with types. You can have AI fix your type checker errors

Hudson River Trading's distributed file system for comparison: https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/hrtbeat/distributed-files...

Remix 3 appears to not be based on React. The React Router/Remix people write great libraries. The problem is that they're constantly chasing the next great library. By the time you use their latest creation, they've already started making a new library that they'll tweet about

Nice! I've wanted to give a similar talk. My thesis is that Rust won on usability above all else. If you look at the semantics of Rust, it's essentially an ML style language with typeclasses and linear types. In some alternate history that's a PhD thesis by someone at Inria that exactly 4 people use. But by making the language actually usable with good errors, familiar syntax (yes, syntax matters!), and documentation, Rust got users. I don't want to get into an in depth comparison but if you look at the documentation of even the most popular functional languages, it's not even close. And they've had a head start of decades!