In Malcolm Gladwell's "Talking to Strangers" he discusses how in general people who never met Hitler were better able to see him for what he was, and people who met him face to face were more often taken in by the lies. I wonder if the same effect is at work with Trump, e.g. Whitmer and Bill Maher.

Track Day at Kamehameha school on Maui.

sane discussion of AI in congress from Kevin Kiley (R-CA): www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwJh... -- a problem with politics is that actually most are sane people, but the media isn't interested in sanity. That doesn't sell ads or go viral. They love Trump because he sells ads and gets eyeballs.

Hiii 🔥 new profile pic we’re ready to go!

interesting data on US 2024 EV sales: electrek.co/2025/01/14/t...

Pumped about seeing Goonies in the theatre

A little post Christmas hacking I implemented a semver Version type in Scala: github.com/johnynek/bos...

Very well tested and I think a good API. Feel free to copy it to your projects if you like.

I love this song. It’s my favorite Christmas song. It’s amazing that it was released in 1961 and hit only 76 on the chart. It took 11 years to finally hit number 1 for Christmas singles in 1972. Goes to show: good stuff often isn’t appreciated right away.

Finally got my programming language (bosatsu) fully compiling to native code and in a naive benchmark of computing Fibonacci numbers the silly recursive way it is 32x faster than Python:

github.com/johnynek/bos...

OH: Taco Bell is the AWS of fast food. 12 ingredients, 200 products.

I’m implementing big integer division and mod in C. My strategy has been to implement it in Scala first, then property check it like crazy against the JVM implementation along with many assertions of properties at various stages. Then translate the algorithm but remove the assertions.

For the first time, generated C code from my pure and total functional language called bosatsu runs and even passes 19/21 basic List tests:

hot take 0: follower count navel gazing posts are like telling people about your dreams. No one is interested.

hot take 1: pretty sure that all such counts encourage gamification that leads to the toxicity of social networks. I wish the system didn't even show metrics like that.

I really hope the "billionaires want a plan B" critique of space exploration disappears soon. This is clearly false. Mars and the Moon are utter *shitholes* compared to any place on Earth's surface (and the vast majority of them below).

I’m disappointed and discouraged about the direction of the country, that said, I’m in this space to focus on tech and science

One lesson I took from Twitter is I don’t want a rage bait machine. The world is full of tragedy and injustice. I don’t want a firehose of it 24/7.

do any of y'all have some weird C lore to share that is also up to date about using ternary vs if/else? e.g. if I can just as easily generate ternary expressions when I have an expression, vs if/else and assigning to tmp values in the branches, will it matter on a modern compiler?

Working on my compiler for my functional programming language and for the first time I have it generating C code that compiles:

Tree supports are amazing