Joy & Curiosity #12

Interesting & joyful things from the previous week

Here’s what was on my mind this week: my new mattress. Yes, I hear your groan, I see the eyes roll backwards — but, listen, hey, listen: after ten years of sleeping on a… let’s call it an entry-level mattress (it sure didn’t feel cheap back then), and having had back pain for the last two to three years, my wife and I finally realised that, hey, it might be the mattress?

So we went to a mattress store and laid on the mattresses and — hey! stay here! listen to this! — and the woman said, try this one, and it was heavenly and I could feel every fiber in my body relax and we bought two of them and — in the most literal sense possible — it was a life-changing decision.

I sleep better, I feel like I have twice the energy, I’m in a better mood, I’m happy I get to go back to bed when I wake up at 2am, I’m a more interesting person, I sleep deeper, I also think I dream better dreams and, hell, maybe I am still dreaming and writing this while sleeping, on my new mattress? Sure would be nice.

Anyway: get a good mattress.

• Ghostty 1.0 is coming — yes! Such a wonderful project and I’m so proud to have contributed a little code myself last year.

• Time to share a classic: The TTY Demystified. Came up while debugging an issue in which a grandchild process was still attached to the stdout/stin of the grandparent. If you haven’t read this post: this is your lucky day. Read, bookmark, share it forward.

• Good intro to jj. I need to finally try it.

• There’s been a bump in Bluesky activity this week. Unsure of the cause, but my guess: Twitter has changed their Block feature, which was the last drop for some people, and — making a big splash in the tech Twitter world — Kelsey Hightower deactivated his quarter-million-followers Twitter account and moved to Bluesky. I’m over there too and so far I’ve enjoyed not having a feed full of video very much.

• Simon Willison’s blog post showing everything he built in a week with Claude Artifacts was very inspiring. Look at those tiny programs! Look at how easy it is to build a small tool on the web! It made me play around with Claude Artifacts — the people building the web UI at Anthropic know what they’re doing.

• I’m sorry, but: this made me laugh out loud. “I recorded them all myself” — that’s the spirit.

• This blog post by Daniel Mangum — host of the Microarch Club — on running the Chicago marathon was impressive. “On most difficult journeys in life there is a thin line between delusional and daring.” I did just enough running in my life to know what he’s talking about, but ran so much less than Daniel to be impressed by nearly everything he described here.

• Very short post with napkin math on angel investments. As someone who has stock options, I’ve done quite a few what-will-this-be-worth calculations myself, but still: very surprised by how surely and to which extent they factor in dilution — not something that’s often talked about.

• Check this out: Stephen Bourne, the Bourne in Bourne-again-SHell (Bash), “relentlessly beat C with its own preprocessor until it began to resemble his preferred language” — look at the code! And then lean back and laugh, imaginging your reaction if someone would pull this stunt in a pull request you have to review.

• Jarred: “you’ll learn way more by building stuff for people to use instead of building to learn”

• Have you ever used the Go assembler? I did — tried to, at least — and over the years I kept thinking how weird is that. There’s · in the code — come on. But reading through this discussion and the post its attached to, I started to wonder: maybe they did reach their goal, maybe it did work and they achieved what they set out to do, even though everyone said it’s weird, even though there’s · in the code?

• “They start and want to get to the end right away. When you go mountain climbing, the first thing you’re told is not to look at the peak but to keep your eyes on the ground as you climb.”

• Watched Bill Gurley’s Runnin' Down a Dream and, man oh man oh man, it’s— wonderful? A lot in there I already knew but could’ve never named and pointed at like he did, and so much more that I didn’t and was fascinated by. Also, funnily, it made me think: this is one of the most American talks I’ve ever seen and, wow, I do love Americans being Americans.