Manuel Simoni

@_Felipe This is also how rights work in SPKI: #section-6.3.1" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc26… "additional elements of [an authorization tuple] must restrict the permission granted"

Macaroons (2014) hasn’t been widely adopted as JWTs and I can see why. It requires programmers to start thinking about AuthZ in a very non-intuitive way. Each item in a Macaroon shrinks the set of allowed actions. More perms are “added” by not having caveats that forbid actions.

"If a programmer nods his head when he's reading LLM-written code, wake him up." (with apologies to Alan Perlis)

Emacs with Magit has such a solemn atmosphere. All your data is immutable and versioned. The computer does nothing without your command.

If your OS APIs are RESTful/-inspired, then you can get away with much slower system calls. E.g. if you can do a single PROPFIND Depth=1 to get a large number of directory entries with all their metadata at once, instead of having to readdir() and stat() each one as in Unix.

Is AI replacing software jobs in 5 years?

@adamzwasserman Mutation is the next canard

@msimoni Typing does not matter as much as mutation.

A static typing fan, after years of writing his programs with dynamically-typed Emacs and not a single time encountering a runtime error, will still post things like "without static type checking, lots of runtime errors will invariably creep in".

@refold If you're writing your own scripts, you'll obviously have errors during development. I mean in core Emacs and good packages like Magit. For me, they're error-free.

@msimoni If they've never encountered debug on error then they're a very light user gnu.org/software/emacs…

Memory safe word processing. (LibreOffice compiled with Fil-C running on a completely memory-safe stack compiled with Fil-C.)

As I’ve been saying, modulo verbosity, language designs that benefit human reasoning also benefit LLM reasoning and vice versa. The concept of a “LLM centric programming language” makes little sense.

That first screen is the most '90s UI design ever

@joodalooped (which is of course what the second quote is saying)

@joodalooped While I agree that the graphic design aspect is far more important than often assumed, I would say it should be approached as a "concept design project".

remember, remember

I find LLMs work very well with JS. Personally I dislike the unsoundness and false sense of security of TS, where in reality every value can be of every type, regardless of what a function signature or type declaration says. I use JSDoc with detailed type descriptions (written by LLM) and runtime type checks for absolute safety.

The immediate future of ALL agents is coding agents, and although I could be wrong, I believe this surprising fact is going to be a HUGE boost for @typescript in particular. Let me explain. If your business wants an agent to assist with customer support, employee onboarding, outbound sales, or payroll, then the agent they need is actually a coding agent. The reason for this is quite simple: coding agents have an ability to leverage their training data to solve general-purpose problems, in ways shapes by the tools they have access to. An outbound sales agent assistant can talk to your knowledge base, pull some contacts from your CRM, analyze conversation history, do a web search to learn about each prospect, and then send email through your Gmail account to each prospect. Doing all of this stuff, and doing even more that the agent was never explicitly designed to do, requires the ability to write, test, and execute code for ad hoc, one-off problems. Only a coding agent can do that, and thanks to innovation at the level of the model and harness, a coding agent can do it well. Now, a true general-purpose coding agent can work in any code base, in any language, in any operating system, and with any tech stack. Of course, that type of coding agent is very useful to developers. However, it's overkill for most agentic systems. Most custom agents do not actually need to work with any code base or any language and on any operating system. They just need the ability to write code in some language (which has a lot of libraries) and execute on some platform. What is the ideal language and platform? I'd argue that @typescript fits the bill PERFECTLY. Since TypeScript compiles to Javascript, it can run securely, in a completely sandboxed way, inside V8 isolates, WASM, etc., all of which creates a compelling story for secure, efficient, and scalable custom agent execution. Moreover, because TypeScript adds types to Javascript, those types can be used to catch a lot of common bugs and runtime errors that a Javascript coding agent would have trouble catching in advance--allowing for far faster and more efficient solution of general-purpose problems. So, while general-purpose coding agents will of course need to support all programming languages, platforms, and tech stacks, custom agents are likely to be specialized -- while they will be coding agents, they don't need to work with any programming language, platform, or tech stack. They just need to work with one, and currently, the best option appears to be @TypeScript, for reasons of security, portability, type-safety, and efficiency. Is it any wonder TypeScript is home to some of the most amazing innovations currently happening in AI?

💭JSON prohibits character codes under 0x20 (they always have to be escaped). Which means, you could have a text format where you include JSON objects inline, for example separated by 0x02 (start of text) and 0x03 (end of text). Here's some text with ␂["a", "JSON", "array"]␃.

The Zig crashout is great. Andrew is in the wrong, but everybody wins. It's much better when everyone's position (and vision, philosophy, etc) is known rather than being hidden under corporate or HR speak. We need more of this, not less.

@alurmanc Nobody should need convincing of that

@msimoni doubt this rhetoric convinces anybody. i have to mentally reformulate it as "it's a good idea to linkify things" in order to agree, otherwise my mind thinks "then this blog post wasn't for you".

Whenever a blog author writes something like "as I explained in my previous article" WITHOUT PROVIDING A HYPERLINK I lose all respect. Am I supposed to go through your whole archive now you fucking idiot?

We tend to think of the WWW as an open, permissionless system but it's just very well governed. If a certain type of modern systems designers had created it, you could simply get banned from DNS.