Bob Nystrom

Have you considered using AI to detect AI posts? Then you could write a post about using AI to detect AI posts and post it.

Oh, yes! I just, uh, keep forgetting about it. :)

Really wish Hacker News would fork into "LLM news" and "all the other Hacker News". It's worse now than it was with crypto during the crypto bubble.

Yes, gen-AI is important and I want to learn about it, but there are diminishing returns in yet another dude's breathless vibe coding blog post.

Trivia: This use of the word "orthogonal" is older than us too. As far as I know, it's earliest use is in the ALGOL 68 report.

I must admit to being a political novice, but wasn't the RNC slightly more instrumental in Trump being elected?

There are a bunch of reports in the issue trackers for both books already, but I'm trying to not touch them at all. (It's easy to fix the online versions, but then I worry about the online versions getting out of sync with the print versions and not realizing that if I update the print editions.)

Yeah, having written a parser for it... Markdown is just not a great language. CommonMark helps regularize it some, but in the early days, it was wild.

I don't have advice that would fit in a bsky post beyond the general "avoid inventing a language unless you have to (or want to)". :)

I need to know more about the Tears for Fears Trout sticker.

The premise of LLMs leading to AGI is that if just you wordcel hard enough, a shape rotator magically pops out.

I still don't really understand this one. 🙃

Introducing Dart 3.8! Here's everything you need to know ↓

yes

It's good to be writing again!

I use a stitch counter app on my phone, or a polyhedral die to keep track of counts.

I wrote a blog post about, of all things, knitting: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2025/05/30/c...

@mrale.ph would definitely know better than me. Compiler folks who work on optimizations are by nature cagey about definitive answers to questions like this because they want their future selves to have the freedom to change optimizations without breaking users who rely on them.

Wrote a blog post on noodling around with syntax for access control modifiers in my hobby scripting language: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2025/05/26/a...

Sure! Thank you for asking. :)

"It is a rare privilege to be able to spend ten years building a tool you want to use, and then be able to spend your time at work using it."

So true. One of the things that makes me excited to work every day and grateful that my career led where it did.

Yeah, it was a deliberate choice to not use those (even though I personally love those features). The goal is to make the code as readable to as many people as possible, so I tried to stick within a fairly small subset of imperative/OOP code.

I write how I talk. :)

I'm 2,000 miles from Florida and have no intention of ever moving back but, God, do I miss Publix fried chicken and Pollo Tropical.

Doing Russia's bidding is a foreign entanglement too.

It's definitely not intentional! The book is mostly print-on-demand and some small fraction of times, it seems that the print gets messed up and someone gets a bad copy. Usually you can return it and get a replacement. Most of the copies look great.

People have asked this before, but static types would be much more than a chapter. More like an entire book, one which I'm not confident I could write.

People often forget the fourth quadrant of Hanlon's Razor which is that an act can be both malice *and* stupidity. Bad people are not generally known for being detail-oriented.

Gotta love that 90s Photoshop Crystalize filter on the text background.

26-year-old me: Fuck we weren't able to get pit tickets.

46-year-old me: Oh, thank God, we don't have to stand all night in the pit.

If you don't need color, then Brother laser printers are incredible. I think I've changed the cartridge once, and that's after printing two several-hundred-page textbooks among many other things.

😱😱😱😱 I only have to do taxes for my tiny personal publishing company and that's enough to stress me out.