Going on a random trip to Halifax, literally no reason other than it was cheap and I’d probably never have a real reason to go.
I think I’m also going to “crunch” my public wiki / “blog” / “journal” into one directory. I think I don’t have enough time capacity to keep shit organized. Putting “tags” into text files is enough to find things instantly.
OpenSCAD + Libfive is coming. We had a discussion on IRC. Going to implement an “oracle” so we should be able to use any OpenSCAD code to generate SDFs. The main downside is implementing an oracle means no tree optimization from Libfive, and so the final rendering will be slower, but we’ve agreed getting the full power of OpenSCAD is more important than speed right now.
Job hunting! Mostly by reaching out to past coworkers at this point, but if anyone here happens to be looking for a senior frontend engineer with a ton of experience with both SPA and traditional server-rendered apps, definitely let me know. My (slightly out of date) resume is at https://joshuaclanton.dev
I’ll also be adding some additional features to https://rpgportrait.app. Hopefully including Google login, and setting up a subscription plan in addition to one-off purchases.
I’m jamming on some stuff in my GPT experiments, https://llm.ianbicking.org/ – starting to convert things to the new ChatGPT API. I haven’t paid much attention to my chatbots specifically, but I’m thinking about them a bit more. I’m thinking about goal-oriented chats. My first attempt in this line is chatting with a guy who is feeling depressed and you have to make him feel happy. It’s pretty minimal and easy to “hack” (because if you just say nice things over and over he “becomes” happier). But it’s a starting point to think about numeric or structured attributes underlying a chatbot.
I want to finish a blog post about peoplesim but I’m having a hard time figuring out what I want to say about it.
I’m also trying to figure out what my revealed desire, manifest in these hobby projects, should be telling me about my job search.
Mostly: finishing up job-hunting (I hope!) Completed one round of final interviews last week; scheduling some more for this week and next.
On the side:
Trying to cook a pork belly such that the skin winds up crispy, as opposed to my usual strategy of cooking it in a slow cooker.
Building a server in a rackmount case from an older dual-Xeon board. Hoping for something a lot quieter than my ProLiant.
Trying to work out an easy way of programming Home Assistant to do a dawn simulation with my LIFX bulbs. I’m a bit confused by the design; I’d have thought a nice embedded scripting language (Guile?) would have been great here but it’s all … YAML?
Continuing to hack on my decentralised-LinkedIn idea.
I was not expecting to talk about that here, but regarding pork belly: I’ve had success by starting with a regular slow cooker approach and finishing off at very high heat in the oven in grill mode (no more than 5 min).
That’s similar to the approach I wound up using: 2.5 hours @ 140 degrees, then finish for 30 minutes @ 240 degrees. That plus not scoring the skin (a recommendation I discovered recently) produced a crispy, crackled finish to the entire cut of meat. Deeeeelicious.
Hoping to finish a TUI app for Python regex exercises (most of the coding and question set is done, waiting for a few features like tabbed widgets and then need to do a sanity check before release).
Finished a slice-of-life progression fantasy book earlier today (On Lavender Tides), planning to read the second one in the series.
House-hunting! Continuing to rent in my area is untenable to the point that a mortgage would be cheaper. (Of course, that was before the SVB collapse…) My partner and I have set up a system for this in Notion and I have to say I’m finally ready to become a power user. Having multiple views of the same data all in one place is just too nice.
$work: Documentation review, getting ducks in order, preparing for a long overdue patching of some old stuff.
!$work: Planning a vacation, refactoring turnkey so that it works outside the little ecosystem I pulled it from, and maybe getting started on something new. Haven’t really decided.
Apparently Garnet has more or less hit the point where its idea of types and compilation is different enough from Rust’s that a trivial translation to Rust no longer works. So it’s time for me to work on monomorphization and probably other code transform passes as well.
Coil: Rewrote the collection protocol & all implementations to be iterator based, allowing you to map/filter/etc any js iterator, including generators. It works quite well and I’m quite excited, but there are some tradeoffs & I have to now rewrite a fair amount of the compiler to utilize the iterator stuff properly. This change also got rid of ~600 lines of the prelude so far which is great.
I’m doing some prototyping for a Rust network packet parsing library. A while back I worked on a project that used Pcap++ extensively. Pcap++ is pretty cool – I have a ton of notes about it, most of which are not in terms of “what Pcap++ got wrong” but in terms of “how could I make a better trade-off under ”.
If you ever looked into the innards of e.g. Wireshark, you know that parsing binary protocols is, erm, fun. Back then I sketched a few ideas for “a better Pcap++”, many of them not so much about how to make a faster Pcap++ but about how to make a safer Pcap++ (although some of them are about speed, too). That is, a library that a) would push fewer safety checks onto the user without devolving into an awkward API or parsing logic so slow that you’re better off deciphering packets with pen and paper and b) would provide a framework that makes it easier to write safe parsers.
I have a ton of ideas but it’s hard to tell which ones are good without profiling and/or API prototyping, so I’m looking at a few weeks of writing shit that I’m going to throw away :-D.
Grinding on a complex library upgrade in my team’s main service.
On the home front, still euphoric at being able to book our first trip to HK (where my son was born) in over a decade last weekend.
Frantically practicing songs for this Thursday’s acoustic open mic night in a nearby village. Last month’s went well, but I blew through all my material in one go so now I need to learn new songs quick!
Going on a random trip to Halifax, literally no reason other than it was cheap and I’d probably never have a real reason to go.
I think I’m also going to “crunch” my public wiki / “blog” / “journal” into one directory. I think I don’t have enough time capacity to keep shit organized. Putting “tags” into text files is enough to find things instantly.
OpenSCAD + Libfive is coming. We had a discussion on IRC. Going to implement an “oracle” so we should be able to use any OpenSCAD code to generate SDFs. The main downside is implementing an oracle means no tree optimization from Libfive, and so the final rendering will be slower, but we’ve agreed getting the full power of OpenSCAD is more important than speed right now.
What is the OpenSCAD + Libfive work? I’m familiar with both projects but not with what you are doing with them.
Integrating libfive into OpenSCAD. So you can mesh SDFs using OpenSCAD code.
Job hunting! Mostly by reaching out to past coworkers at this point, but if anyone here happens to be looking for a senior frontend engineer with a ton of experience with both SPA and traditional server-rendered apps, definitely let me know. My (slightly out of date) resume is at https://joshuaclanton.dev
I’ll also be adding some additional features to https://rpgportrait.app. Hopefully including Google login, and setting up a subscription plan in addition to one-off purchases.
I’m jamming on some stuff in my GPT experiments, https://llm.ianbicking.org/ – starting to convert things to the new ChatGPT API. I haven’t paid much attention to my chatbots specifically, but I’m thinking about them a bit more. I’m thinking about goal-oriented chats. My first attempt in this line is chatting with a guy who is feeling depressed and you have to make him feel happy. It’s pretty minimal and easy to “hack” (because if you just say nice things over and over he “becomes” happier). But it’s a starting point to think about numeric or structured attributes underlying a chatbot.
I want to finish a blog post about peoplesim but I’m having a hard time figuring out what I want to say about it.
I’m also trying to figure out what my revealed desire, manifest in these hobby projects, should be telling me about my job search.
Mostly: finishing up job-hunting (I hope!) Completed one round of final interviews last week; scheduling some more for this week and next.
On the side:
I was not expecting to talk about that here, but regarding pork belly: I’ve had success by starting with a regular slow cooker approach and finishing off at very high heat in the oven in grill mode (no more than 5 min).
That’s similar to the approach I wound up using: 2.5 hours @ 140 degrees, then finish for 30 minutes @ 240 degrees. That plus not scoring the skin (a recommendation I discovered recently) produced a crispy, crackled finish to the entire cut of meat. Deeeeelicious.
Hoping to finish a TUI app for Python regex exercises (most of the coding and question set is done, waiting for a few features like tabbed widgets and then need to do a sanity check before release).
Finished a slice-of-life progression fantasy book earlier today (On Lavender Tides), planning to read the second one in the series.
House-hunting! Continuing to rent in my area is untenable to the point that a mortgage would be cheaper. (Of course, that was before the SVB collapse…) My partner and I have set up a system for this in Notion and I have to say I’m finally ready to become a power user. Having multiple views of the same data all in one place is just too nice.
If anyone’s selling or knows of a house for sale in mid- to upstate New York, consider me interested. NJ and CT are also on the table.
$work: Documentation review, getting ducks in order, preparing for a long overdue patching of some old stuff.
!$work: Planning a vacation, refactoring turnkey so that it works outside the little ecosystem I pulled it from, and maybe getting started on something new. Haven’t really decided.
Apparently Garnet has more or less hit the point where its idea of types and compilation is different enough from Rust’s that a trivial translation to Rust no longer works. So it’s time for me to work on monomorphization and probably other code transform passes as well.
Prepping to take my first technical job interview in a long while.
Vacationing with the family in NYC. A pleasant time is being had by all.
Coil: Rewrote the collection protocol & all implementations to be iterator based, allowing you to map/filter/etc any js iterator, including generators. It works quite well and I’m quite excited, but there are some tradeoffs & I have to now rewrite a fair amount of the compiler to utilize the iterator stuff properly. This change also got rid of ~600 lines of the prelude so far which is great.
I’m doing some prototyping for a Rust network packet parsing library. A while back I worked on a project that used Pcap++ extensively. Pcap++ is pretty cool – I have a ton of notes about it, most of which are not in terms of “what Pcap++ got wrong” but in terms of “how could I make a better trade-off under ”.
If you ever looked into the innards of e.g. Wireshark, you know that parsing binary protocols is, erm, fun. Back then I sketched a few ideas for “a better Pcap++”, many of them not so much about how to make a faster Pcap++ but about how to make a safer Pcap++ (although some of them are about speed, too). That is, a library that a) would push fewer safety checks onto the user without devolving into an awkward API or parsing logic so slow that you’re better off deciphering packets with pen and paper and b) would provide a framework that makes it easier to write safe parsers.
I have a ton of ideas but it’s hard to tell which ones are good without profiling and/or API prototyping, so I’m looking at a few weeks of writing shit that I’m going to throw away :-D.
Grinding on a complex library upgrade in my team’s main service.
On the home front, still euphoric at being able to book our first trip to HK (where my son was born) in over a decade last weekend.
Frantically practicing songs for this Thursday’s acoustic open mic night in a nearby village. Last month’s went well, but I blew through all my material in one go so now I need to learn new songs quick!