My wife is officially overdue for our second child.

Definitely keeping me up.

I met a dog earlier

The AI bubble popping would be nice, although I’m concerned about the fallout.

The Gleam programming language. It resonates quite well with me, the community is very welcoming, and most importantly, its logo is adorable!

I’m really excited by the evolution of post-Rust memory safe languages. I work a lot in memory safe but slow languages these days, but my heart will always be in writing code that is fast and I look forward to a future where we can have more of that without having to deal so much with the code architecture puzzles that rust’s model imposes.

I’m also really excited that Helix is (hopefully) finally getting a plug-in system via a scheme! Looking forward to playing more with that soon

It’s finally summer here, near the 64th parallel north, and that makes me happy.

I’m excited to ride my bike everywhere.

And it’s easy to stay up all night, since it never gets dark.

And I’m excited to move to a bigger home, with more space for music.

Realizing I’m not excited about anything computers, currently, but that’s fine.

Very excited to switch my setup to Lix

I’ll go against the grain a tiny bit and say that I am really excited about the Elden Ring DLC that is coming out next month. For lore reasons of course.

Svelte, especially with Svelte 5 on the horizon.

It’s the first web tech that I don’t absolutely hate. It still devolves into div soup but the framework seems designed for making things instead of piling on more and more things to learn. Svelte 5 is especially interesting to me because they are essentially shipping Solid’s primitives, which seems like the most principled and well-designed take on reactivity in the JS ecosystem.

Case in point: I made a SPA that I’m optimizing by moving pieces to server side rendering. Very straightforward to pick and choose where parts are rendered.

For the last few months, I’ve been obsessed with Decker and Lil. It’s just such a beautiful little ecosystem for hacking together reasonably decent apps and scripts in no time at all.

lisp interactive programming and how to bring it even further along, what could be added to the language as a library to make creating software interactively even better. On top of that how to bring that into game making (for game jams)

Substructural type systems (Rust, ATS, …).

The potential for object capabilities to make network software more secure and more composable, especially the work the Spritely folks have been doing in that direction. I’m especially hyped about that work getting integrated into Guix via Shepherd: https://spritely.institute/news/spritely-nlnet-grants-december-2023.html

Forth, Forth…

I’m really boring, but I love obscure google tech that gets open sourced.

Monorail is the issue tracker used by the chromium team, I’ve taken it upon myself to try and deploy a version of it for myself. Keep in mind the setup instructions definitely do not work.

While I deploy this I read as much of the repo as I can to understand it. I am quite enjoying it even if it’s horribly frustrating at times as it has multiple build-systems, references to internal tools, requires Google Cloud (and, worse, assets that are only in a google cloud project that I do not have access to) etc;.

Other things are writing little utilities for my job. I’m CTO so most of my tasks are administrative, strategic or very slow burn. So when I get the opportunity to write a stupid utility I fully enjoy it.

Right now I’m writing:

• A bot that syncs Jira tasks assigned to me with my Google Tasks (because I vehemently despise Jira’s UI)
• A bot that creates Jira tickets for people (We use Zulip, not slack)
• A bot that lists the prioritised list of tasks
• A bot that syncs certain google groups (and of course memberships) to zulip groups.
• A bot that syncs vacation between our HR system to: Google, Jira, Zulip (Status)

I’m considering in the future creating something similar to Moma from google, but my webdev skills are worse than terrible. – Something that links the HR system, important information like news, profile badges, visibility into groups and something to store public keys etc; I’m aware of golinks own thing called goprofiles but I hate SaaS.

I’m excited about life in general and being able to live it in a simple manner. I’m also excited about gaming.

Surprisingly enough, getting back to C++ after years in the C world.

C++ has improve dramatically in the last few years.

Much much better, much easier, and really for all the whinges and complaints, well thought through compared to many tools out there.

Learning many new guitar chords! I’ve played guitar for many years but mostly classic rock and metal. Recently started playing old jazz standards with my wife, and learning a ton.

My first game jam in ten years or so. Happening next week and I’m planning to get something done for the Nintendo 64. I’ve been hacking libdragon on and off for a couple years but haven’t managed to make a game yet!

I got Lua coroutine support working in my C++/Lua hobby game, so game object scripts can yield in the middle of one of the update functions and it’ll resume there when needed in a future update.

-- e.g. spawn a new minion every second
function onStartFrame(dt)
    while true do
    	Boss.spawnMinion()
    	Script.waitMilliseconds(1000)
    end
end

I’ve been spending a more time away from computers as I renovate a house into which I’ll be moving in a couple of months. It’s stressful but I’m happy with how it’s (slowly) coming together.

I’m particularly excited that it looks like I might actually be able to execute on my network strategy. I want to put Ethernet in all of the bedrooms, some of which will be offices. I may also run fiber into some or all even if I don’t actually end up using it right away, or even in the next ~5 years. I’m prepping to do a lot of fun smart home stuff while also trying to keep it minimal, resilient, and local.

RISC-V.

I’ve been excited about it since December 2016, and for sure January 2017 when I received my first Arduino-style board and did some hacks. It’s working out well so far … expecting a 16 core board (SG2038) with around Nehalem Xeon (maybe better) performance at the end of the year. That’s behind current x86 and Apple, but very usable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eDS6pGYsCE

I’m on a Lisp-implementation binge with Lisp in Small Pieces, Lisp System Implementation and Scheme 9 from Empty Space. Looking for any other similar books, so open to recommendations.

(edit: also any interesting books on APL implementation…)

• Zig
• eBPF
• HTMX

archinstall! I’m came back to Arch Linux after a while because I’m wanted to use KDE 6 and was very pleasantly surprised to see that I can make an install now without having a second computer with the installation guide open!

I successfully make a knock-off Wendy’s Spicy Chicken Sandwich while living in Europe and it only took many tries.

I’m really excited for the position I have at work. I get a lot of freedom to try out new things in the AI/LLM space and really explore how these technologies can be used for social good.

I’ve had several tech jobs/internships in the past and they never really clicked for me. I really enjoy research but I didn’t see a future where I could really just experiment and research with something that nobody really fully understands. Working together with so many people and learning an entirely new way of framing problems has been so fun.

It’s kind of boring that “my work” is what I’m excited about, but it really has been the highlight of the last year.

The design behind CSS & how it could be extended for more general purpose programming, also prolog.

I’m one step away from making my end game keyboard. Just have to get the plate printed, and then I will have enough parts to make a Realforce R1 which has an ANSI layout everywhere except the bottom row, which will follow the JIS standard and have a split spacebar.

looking for a new job right now, so excited about all the cool projects i’m seeing in places i’ve been applying to.

Servo, the browser written in Rust.

I have a challenge $AT_WORK, to turn a 5 years old, initially legacy codebase into a great one. I have no resources allocated for that (yet), 15+ staff.

I finally decided to do proper self-hosting for all my (and possibly: family) needs.

While I am a software guy, my excitement has been all hardware:

• Mary Lou Jepson’s Open Water offerings for a headband with infrared detection (spotting major vein strokes) and ultrasonic treatment of glial blastoma (brain cancer) AND severe depression.
• Gumbi’s chemistry and devices for removing all the excess methane from the atmosphere for well under $1B.
• Avegant’s new AR glasses.
• Competing plasma based drilling companies.

In software, I feel the randomness aided solving of traditional linear algebra problems is pretty cool.

• Trying out pincers following by shoulder hits in the game of Go, hoping to have grasped something new.
• Ollama and the uses of larger context sizes.
• Uses of LLMs for detecting fraud.
• Learning cuts on the feadóg stáin.
• Learning what to look for when buying a small boat.
• Planning a vacation with my wife and kids that tries to maximize happy childhood memories. It is often surprising how low key things makes the best memories, though. Like finding a small park and having a popsicle, just talking together or serendipiously finding a friendly hedgehog.

I’m having authentic Detroit-style pizza tonight which I can’t get at home but is my absolute favorite style with the crispy cheese perimeter. This is always my favorite treat for traveling to Bangkok on a Monday.

I’m excited to try out marimo today

Trying to work on three PHP projects at once! Deadline’s by next weekend and it’s proving to be a big challenge.

it’s finally warm enough to sit out back with the laptop.

I got me a 1980s pocket computer with built-in K&R C that am going to try restoring soon.

I’ve built a few “lego pieces” of infrastructure that I think can be joined to unlock products and workloads that historically have been both very difficult to initially make and to scale. I think when joined they could be a massive startup.

I’ve been on the lookout for a functional language influenced by Elixir that compiles down to a single fast binary (and alternately to other platforms like WASM) and https://www.roc-lang.org/ might be it

Idris 2 is also pretty neat

I’m excited about where e-ink tech (electrophoretics) could lead. Quick aside:

E-ink is defined by its limitations, which makes it feel kind of like old consoles, except everyone seems insistent on ignoring those limitations and forcing it into a box - trying to pretend it’s an Android, giving it a touch-screen and assuming swipes make sense. Trying to make it watch videos. Assuming interfaces designed around 60Hz screens are the best pattern on a 1Hz screen.

E-ink can do things that LCD just can’t (for example, the more (and larger) screens you put on an e-ink laptop, the less power it would use! less alt-tabbing etc), but its upsides aren’t that great (e.g. it takes a lot of power per refresh, which really undercuts its “you don’t use power when the screen isn’t changing” upside) and it’s been rightly relegated to a niche.

So, the recent-ish Gallery 3 tech flopped, but what it represents I’m really excited for: colour tech that doesn’t suck.

See, there are three types of color tech in the e-ink world: CFA, ACeP, and just leaving it monochrome. Most e-ink screens are monochrome, because both ACeP and CFA have major downsides that make them niche within a niche.

CFA (“Color Filter Array”, and E-Ink’s current CFA line are called “Kaleido”) is what’s in every colour e-ink e-reader. It’s just getting a sheet of clear plastic, and tinting it R-G-B-R-G-B- in a grid, then putting it over the pixels. It’s impossible to switch off (it’s literally just tinting the display, like if you drew on the screen with highlighter) and it cuts contrast by at least half (theoretically it cuts it by 66%, in practice there’s a white square thrown in to make it 2x2) and since you’re stuck with the R-G-B turning multiple pixels into one “pixel”, it halves the resolution. CFA is a dead-end and I expect it to die.

ACeP (“Advanced Color e-Paper”), or multi-dye, is what’s in fancy non-interactive displays with absolutely flawless colours. A normal e-ink pixel is a capsule filled with white fluid, and black magnetic powder. ACeP just adds multiple types of powder (each with a different colour), and tries to manipulate what powder type is at the top. The fancy non-interactive displays have 7 different dye colors. They take 30 seconds to refresh, because essentially they need to refresh multiple times in order to bring the correct powder to the top. There are screens with fewer powder types, and they refresh slower as a result, but IIRC they weren’t getting under 10ish seconds, or at least 7 seconds for the 3-colour screens (which have only 2 dyes) . ACeP doeesn’t have any downsides, other than cost/manufacturing and this slowness to refresh. But a 1/7Hz refresh is not remotely workable in an interactive device, and there’s only so fast you can physically move those powders (which is what determines the refresh speed) so the tech looked pretty dead as far as e-readers are concerned.

Then the Gallery 3 released. It has a 1.5s refresh speed (at worst; e-ink lets you refresh faster with worse quality and vice versa, and 1.5s is the highest quality) and lets you disable color for a faster refresh, almost as fast as monochrome screens, at 350ms.

This is amazing. It’s within spitting distance of being able to oust monochrome on the ReMarkable et al, giving everyone a viable colour e-reader - which opens up reading comics, coloured text (some web novels use it, but also syntax highlighting), books with colour illustrations, much better highlighting (as in the stationary), and drawing stuff that’s not specifically monochrome/greyscale (which is really annoying). This would be huge, it’d turn e-notes from a small niche into a much larger niche, which would bring prices down over time and open it up even more. Also I really want colour.

The Gallery 3 screen has only been used in one device so far, the Bigme Galy, which side-note: if you look up e-ink stuff you’ll almost certainly see the website/youtube channel “Good Ereader” a lot, please note that they’re a shitty, shady company and source. They review devices, they also sell them, and they either completely omit any disclaimer saying “HEY I SELL THIS DEVICE ITS MY MAIN SOURCE OF REVENUE” or they leave it til the very end. They also pull shit that they know is unrepresentative - like, during a review, displaying a CFA ereader with the backlight enabled throughout the whole video, not mentioning or investigating the display’s possible contrast issues without the backlight enabled. Backlights are useful in a pinch but if you don’t keep them switched off most of the time, then you’re better off with an LCD. GoodEreader knows this, but omitted any mention.

Anyway, the Bigme Galy was the only device launched with the Gallery 3, which came out a year-ish ago. And the Galy flopped, hard. It had all sorts of quality problems (they also teamed up with Good Ereader, although that was probably just a branding thing) and none of the other companies launched a device with the screen since. It’s an open question of just how much of the Galy’s screen problems were the screen, versus Galy just being incompetent (they shipped the thing with two cameras, and a front-facing camera makes zero sense on an e-ink tablet, BTW the device cost $700 in a $2-400 market).

So, if E-Ink delivers a Gallery 4 that fixes the Gallery 3’s colour problems (and whatever else prevented even Mobiscribe from being interested in shipping an all-upsides device) then that would be amazing. If.

There is still a hope that I will be able to make some internet business that will allow me to not return to 9-5, but I have less and less runaway :D

I am excited about compilers and multithreaded code.

I have a simple JIT compiler but not a tracing one.

But I am interested in coroutines at the moment.

If you’re interested in this subject please email me! sam@samsquire.com