Joy & Curiosity #46
Interesting & joyful things from the previous week
Recipe for some weekend fun.
Duration: 15min. Potentially endless.
Ingredients:
An OpenSimplex noise library, such as this one or that one
A programming language to use that library
A nice terminal that knows how to render smoothly, like this one
A good LLM, such as o3, Sonnet 4, Gemini 2.5
Here’s what you’ll do:
Ask the LLM to generate you some code that uses your chosen OpenSimplex noise library (rolls of the tongue, doesn’t it?) to generate an ASCII representation of the noise in the terminal
It should also animate it and every so slightly jiggle the noise
Also add something like this: “it should morph and breathe and it should have a sick color. sunsets colors, man! or fire!”
Choose some sweet characters for the ASCII representation
Take the generated code; run it
Tweak the constants in code, just like you’re 13-year-old me and have just discovered JavaScript. Change that 8 to a 15, rerun the program. Change it to a 99; rerun it. Change the ASCII characters. Go nuts, live a little.
That’s it. You’re smiling.
Not only do I agree with that headline, but, wow: MacPaint Art From The Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today.
If you’re even the teeny-tiny-iest bit curious about programming with agents, you need to read this: How I Use Claude Code to Ship Like a Team of Five.
Reflections on OpenAI, after a year of working there and being part of the Codex team. OpenAI is one of the most important companies of our time and this gives a glimpse into its culture. There’s nothing in there you haven’t heard about other companies, I guess, but the combination, at this scale, in a spotlight this bright? Rare. I highly recommend reading it. (Tiny bit that might get lost: the nod to Twitter/X as being very important to the company. As much as one might dislike its owner, or how it has changed in the last few years, I don’t think there’s a true replacement for it yet.)
This actually made me start running again this week: no days off. “In July 2015, something changed. I headed out on a run on a Tuesday, then did another one the next day, and the day after, and… I took the Friday off. When I woke up on July 11, 2015 I remember thinking I could have done 4 days in a row, so I set out to try and do that. 4 days turned into a week, then a month, then two, then six, then a year, and here I am, ten years later.” I didn’t run every day, but I ran four times.
Atharva Raykar wrote down how he keeps up with AI progress “(and why you must too)”. Good list. (And here, too: “Twitter is the only large-scale social media platform for conversations on cutting edge of AI developments.”)
Found this — oh-my-logo — after Rafael tweeted that he uses it to keep track of agents. Gave me a solid 10min of joy on a Saturday morning.
This is such a good landingpage: caligra.com. The c100 Developer Terminal is a “Computer for Experts” and that manifesto down there — “Most people don’t write code or manage data, and consumer devices are designed accordingly.
But change isn’t made by most people. Progress comes from the people whose work improves our understanding and ability. Scientists and artists. Engineers and designers. Hackers and painters. We think the world needs a brand of computing that stands behind creative technical work, dedicated to creating instead of consuming.” — made me consider whether I don’t want to have one. Building a new computer sounds like an insane idea until someone goes and does it.
“pproftui is a terminal-based UI for Go's pprof that makes profiling interactive, intuitive, and fast.” Neat.
This very, very good article on James Joyce, Ulysses, and Richard Ellman, who wrote a biography of Joyce that was wildly successful and that I didn’t know about until reading this, made me really consider whether I shouldn’t start reading Ulysses. Alas, I fear that I’ve exhausted my Big Book Budget for the year by reading The Power Broker (will I ever stop bragging about this? no). But then, through some Reddit slouching, I found out that Irish public broadcaster RTÉ recorded an audio book version in the 80s and that it’s available on Spotify as multiple ~45min episodes and that, supposedly, it’s very good indeed and… I don’t know man. Maybe I’ll do it.
Read this in a silent room and you can hear the faint, sad sounds of a trombone.
“BREAKING: FFmpeg 100x speedup from handwritten assembly”. Patch is here. I don’t have a lot of context, nor do I really understand what’s going on in that patch, but I love being part of a world in which someone sends the words “BREAKING” and “100x speedup from handwritten assembly” through the Internet.
NIH Is Far Cheaper Than The Wrong Dependency. There’s few things in the last 10 years that I’ve changed my mind on as radically as on dependencies. Dependencies suck, man.
Agents Built From Alloys is very interesting (yes, that’s an italic very). It contradicts (maybe not directly) my hunch that switching models mid-conversation leads to worse outcomes, but (italic) I also don’t think it validates model selectors either. There’s more to it. I have a hundred ideas now.
With the sound of a screeching, excited, close-to-losing-consciousness fan: Patrick Radden Keefe has a new book coming out next year. From what I can gather, it’s based on (or longer version of) this New Yorker piece: A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld. I haven’t read it yet, but hopefully very soon. (We’ve also started watching MobLand — great! — and, man, it’s all coming together isn’t it.)
They say the first paragraph often makes or breaks a piece. So how about this one: “As an excercise in syscall golf, I wrote an implementation of ls(1) which uses my IO library, ourio, to perform as much of the IO as possible. What I ended up with is something that is faster than any version or alternative to ls I tested, and also performs an order of magnitude fewer syscalls.“ The number of syscalls that lsd does is nuts: “I have no idea what lsd is doing. I haven’t read the source code, but from viewing it’s strace, it is calling clock_gettime around 5 times per file. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it’s doing internal timing of steps along the way?”
