miniblog.

Do any tech streamers try new software live? It'd be a really fun way of doing UX testing.

For hobby projects, I really like software where I can do small features or tweaks. Sometimes I don't have time for anything more substantial. Website projects are great for this. Are there other areas?

I've been writing docs for different programming language operators (+, *, == and so on). Each one gets a separate web page. I've suddenly realised that / is much harder! docs/+ and docs/== is fine, but docs// just doesn't work as a URL in a static site. Any ideas?

I've released difftastic 0.65! Highlights of this release: * Better parsing of Clojure, Common Lisp, Kotlin, Rust and Zig. * Quality of life improvements for binary files.

Text to speech systems seem to have largely avoided the uncanny valley effect. I've encountered robotic sounding voices but it's way less unsettling than bad CGI. I'm not sure why this is. Maybe looking at faces is just way higher bandwidth so more things can go wrong?

I'm surprised by how many different weather forecasts I can get out different apps. Surely there aren't many API providers for weather predictions? Alternative conspiracy theory: do weather apps that predict nicer weather get more downloads?

I've been playing with labels on my code blocks. Sometimes I have useful labels, other times it's just "Example 2". It's also unclear exactly where I put the label: Inside the box? Outside? Are there any docs sites that do this really well?

Do users of immutable systems (i.e Nix or Guix) upgrade more or less often than other platforms? There's less pressure to upgrade (unlike a rolling release distro) but in principle upgrading is easier.

Is there a programming equivalent of the strawberry problem, i.e. a specific coding task that LLMs are consistently bad at?

Trying to let my 3yo try as many different technology interfaces as possible. Mouse: not too bad, especially after reducing sensitivity. Keyboard: WASD is easy to lose track of in a sea of buttons. Controller: requires both hands together, which is tricky. Arguably the left hand is more important too, hard for a right hander.

Blogging about my programming language project: choosing the basic syntax!

GNU Make defaults to a single worker, and newer build tools (e.g. ninja) default to the number of physical CPUs. I wish there was an option for 'leave me a little bit of my machine to do stuff'.

Today I learnt that Racket *intentionally* doesn't have a traditional REPL workflow. The authors were concerned about students not understanding the state between the current session and the code on disk. (Arguably Jupyter has some of these features now.)

The Matter protocol is excellent for puns. "Does it Matter? It doesn't Matter."

I'm experimenting with syntax in examples. I don't really like Rust's `assert(inc(1) == 2)` syntax, I find it a little distracting. I'm trying `inc(1) //-> 2`. The comment is rendered differently, and there's nothing before the sample code. What do you think?