

Sam H Smith
1.1K posts






CipherPay is live. Private payment infrastructure for Zcash. Accept ZEC on your store, your site, or your app. Non-custodial. No buyer data. Open source. Here's what we built →

Tomorrow airs an awesome chat with @DelaneyGillilan! Here is the JS rant part! :)



The evident alternative is spending 3 years working on a fast file explorer used by a small number of enthusiasts, or a marginally better non-cross platform debugger. So maybe some humility about this stuff is reasonable given that Claude is literally a once in a generation innovation



Bypassing Kernel32.dll for Fun and Nonprofit #2026-02-03" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">ziglang.org/devlog/2026/#2…


If a woman is single after a certain age, people assume she's intentionally avoiding marriage to focus on her career or casual dating--but in 2026, it's pretty hard to find a husband on a 2006 timeline, even if you're attractive and not crazy-picky. Link in replies.



Act on press This is a UI design hill I will die on, and it dismays me how often and hard I have had to fight for it. Almost all interaction methods have a “press” and “release” event associated with them. Whenever possible, you should “do the thing” when you get the press event instead of waiting for the release event, because it makes the interaction feel substantially more responsive, and it reduces user errors by not allowing the focus to slide out of the hot box between press and release. Even a “ballistic tap”, where your finger is intentionally bouncing off the button or touch surface, involves several tens of milliseconds delay between the press and release, and most button presses have well over a hundred ms dwell time. There is a delight in interfaces that feel like they respond instantly to your wishes, and the benefit to every single user is often more important than additional niche features. Game developers, with simple UI toolkits, tend to get this right more often, but “sophisticated” app designers will often fight hard against it because it is mostly incompatible with options like interactive touch scrolling views, long press menus, and drag and drop. Being able to drag scroll a web page or view with interactive controls in it is here to stay, and nets out way better than having to use a separate scroll bar, but there are still tons of fixed position controls that should act on press, and it is good UI design to favor them when possible. In the early days of mobile VR, the system keyboard was a dedicated little OpenGL app that responded instantly. With full internationalization it became prudent to turn it into a conventional Android app, but the default act-on-release button behavior made it feel noticeably crappier. The design team resisted a push to change it, and insisted on commissioning a user study, which is a corporate politics ploy to bury something. I was irritated at how they tried to use leading questions and tasks, but It still came back one of the clearest slam-dunks I have seen for user testing – objectively less typos, expressed preference, and interview comments about the act-on-press version feeling “crisper” and “more responsive”. So, I won that one, but the remaining times I brought it up for other interfaces, I did not, and you still see act-on-release throughout the Meta VR system interfaces.


Here is a great conversation with @CharlieMQV! We talk (of course) about programming, how he learned it, and his current work on Nowgrep - a search utility which is order of magnitude faster than ripgrep. And since Charlie is one of three organizers of @BetterSoftwareC, we talk how it happened! Charlie, thanks a lot for coming!







please for the love of all programmers out there do not do this, do not recreate 2010-2015 I would rather see 40% coverage with extremely well thought through tests then whatever comes out of here