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http://mikeinnes.io/posts/advent-2025/ I've been working through advent of code using my own little compiler/language. It's in such an early state that some creative problem solvin…

I'm working on a little hobby language that compiles to wasm: https://mikeinnes.io/posts/raven/ I've spent the last couple of months porting the compiler from Julia to TypeScript. …

The author outlines a fair bit of the design thinking in this post [0]. What Datalog and co give you is the ability to do interesting program transformations. Mostly that's not bec…

Even within HTTP services, (a) your TLS will not be end to end, so you have to be happy for Cloudflare to see your data and (b) they don't like you to use up all their bandwidth wi…

I'm not against a tasteful flourish or two, but in safari the header of this blog stuck over the content as I scroll: https://imgur.com/a/TyU2h3t Something cool the web can do is s…

You need (a little) JS to run Wasm in the same way you need (a little) HTML to run JS; it's a hosted platform. JS handles loading and invoking the wasm code, and because it's close…

I mean, the article's logic is effectively that you can break code without the type system helping or warning you. I don't think Hickey would disagree with this – it's arguably a p…

A nice example, not currently available on Google fonts AFAICT, is 'Gilbert': https://www.typewithpride.com

Monotropism is compelling for all the reasons the author gives, but it isn't without any loose ends. For example, stimming is a characteristic feature of autism; the authors of the…

I dislike referring to WASM as a "stack machine" for this reason. It is useful to remember that the text format started out as a low-level lisp-y expression tree with local variabl…

Epidemiologists study health at the population level in general, not just communicable diseases. So at least in that sense the "epidemi-" prefix isn't limited to infection. Is ther…

Must be because I learned some French as a kid, but I can't help reading the "oi" as a "wa" sound in this context. Probably not what the authors were going for.

To expand on this, the switching argument is actually correct if you happen to know that the envelopes contain either {x, 2x} or {2x, 4x} dollars (where x = 50 or whatever), and yo…

Right. I mean the original, paradoxical line of reasoning – "the switching argument". I see that the article also says "commonly one writer proposes a solution to the problem as st…

This line of reasoning isn't possible if you have specific amounts (eg £50 and £100) for the envelopes, which suggests that the variable A is being misused somehow. `B = (2A if A=5…

There's a proposed standard for embedding DWARF debug info in WASM binaries [1], which at least Chrome already supports. This is the same format native executables use, so it shoul…

Right. It's important to remember that tools like JAX and PyTorch have total control over the numerical libraries they are differentiating, and have freedom to impose whatever sema…

It might be useful to separate the issues that are "just" bugs from the problems that come with Julia's unusual level of composability. I have no idea if Julia has more bog-standar…

Rust and Go seemed to initially want to target C programmers [1], but ended up capturing users from higher level languages – even Python and such – who wanted better performance an…

Do this enough and you get a superpower (or at least a neat party trick): you can translate ideas across field boundaries and find really interesting links between subjects. Even j…

Cool! If the author is reading, have you looked at synaesthesia, and do you think it applies here? The idea of addition having both a visual appearance and a kinetic feel is alien …

In general the gov.uk website is stellar. Lots of good info, and plenty of thought has gone into making everything clear, accessible and pleasing to the eye. Things generally work …

Being explicit about side effects in the type system isn't a bad idea, but don't conflate that with blocking/non-blocking operations. Some side effects aren't async (eg console.log…