All the HYTRADBOI videos are up at hytradboi.com/2025. I also wrote a post-mortem and some musing about talk selection
I made the zest repo public. Not any particular milestone, just that I keep wanting to point people at docs/code when discussing design problems and it's easier to do that if the repo is public. The rationale is a good place to start reading.
I still need to find some consulting work this year, but the rest of my time will be spent chipping away at zest.
no internet
We've been experiment with not having internet at home. It's been mostly positive - we've both spent more time reading, playing music, stretching etc. I revived some old hobbies too.
The biggest sticking point is we both have regular video calls with friends. Trying to do those in a late night cafe was a hard failure.
We tried just turning the internet on when we need it and turning it off again afterwards, but it's easy to forget to turn it off or to get lost in browsing.
We bought a timer plug where you press a button to get power for 5/10/15/30/60 minutes but it didn't deliver power at all and we sent it back. But if we can find a working one I think that might be a good solution.
In my ideal world, rather than buttons it would take quarters, so you really feel the time being spent.
on social media
Shallow feedback hollows you out
Stop trying to make a "good" social media site
Stating this concern more broadly, we might not have any internal mechanisms that can differentiate who our thoughts and emotions belong to. After all, why would we? Let us call this the uncertainty of origin problem that individual minds who are part of group minds might face. Evolutionarily, normally everything in your stream of consciousness is by default yours, and since consciousness is notoriously blind to itself, it could easily be the case that, rather than some 'voice from above' bicamerality like that of the sonorous Borge hive-mind in Star Trek, members of a group mind would just accept that the group mind's thoughts and feeling are their own. Especially because, at least in the case wherein the group mind is being generated by information transmission and synchronization with a larger group, you yourself would be experiencing some minor form of this conscious content already. A group mind might feel a little like a great human mind, attending to the same subjects, and feeling many of the same feelings (hatred, mockery, sympathy, and so on).
So if there were somehow a stranger in your stream of consciousness, something other that had wormed its way in, you might not even be able to tell.
I'm not thinking about whether this last one is literally true, but how it's useful as a prompt. I increasingly find myself checking "whose thoughts am I thinking right now?".
my product is my garden
That's what I want from my products. I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so. I want to make things that don't scale. To see people tuck into them and enjoy them as people, not as stats.
Resonated as I've been getting back into working on zest. I get all worked up and stressed about whether it even makes sense to try to make a language - it's overwhelmingly likely that I'll never finish, and even if I do noone will care. But the same is true for climbing and it doesn't stop me climbing. So I've been trying to think of zest more as a personal direction, in the same way that I look at permanent waves every time I pass, even though I'll almost certainly never climb it. Trying to stretch my skills is a reward in itself, and that 'almost certainly' lets just enough light through to steer by.
Also maybe bear blog is a good one to add to my small tech list.
datafusion and clickhouse jits
Datafusion added a cranelift jit in 2022 and then removed it in 2023.
cranelift lacks the ability to inline rust functions, and yields inferior performance.
But clickhouse has a jit using llvm and they report worthwhile gains. It's possible that the difference is just that their llvm jit can inline functions from their c++ codebase, but they don't mention this explicitly.
books
Lost in thought. Roughly, trying to build an argument that reading classic literature is key for your moral development, but it really feels like she just wants to read literature and feels insecure about doing it for the sake of enjoyment alone. Many of her arguments are based on fictional examples, which I think drives home the point that to actually learn things you need to be in contact with the world.
Scarcity brain. His last book was half annoying journalist pop sci and half fun adventure story. This time he didn't go on any adventures.
Zen mind, beginners mind. Bring me the rhinoceros. Hardcode zen. I read a bunch of zen books because some of the ideas seem to mirror things I run into in climbing. But zen has this core idea that it's not worth trying to explain things clearly because they can't be understood intellectually, so instead you should try to confuse people with nonsense until they give up their mental abstractions and experience reality directly. But the rock warriors way really did point me in the right direction to figure some things out, and I wish I could find someone try to point towards zen ideas in the same way.
The war of art. Feels kinda grindcode in a totally unhealthy way. Some of the reviewers defence is that all the bad advice is meant to be comedy, but I'm not seeing it.
An astronauts guide to life on earth. It's not super well written and his advice is not unusual, but the biography parts were moderately interesting.
Company of one. I got bored and skimmed most of it. I'm not entirely sure why I thought I would enjoy it in the first place.
The revelations. Consciousness-themed scifi. I read it expecting all the mysteries to be wrapped up but the ending totally abdicated. It's totally worth reading anyway for the great mood, so long as you go into it knowing that the plot isn't going to be resolved at all.
The man who saw seconds. I feel like the writing prompt for this was 'that escalated quickly'. Definitely clumsy in places, but exciting enough that I read it in a single sitting and realized I was holding my breath at the end.
Perfect days. Technically not a book, but I wanted to recommend it anyway. I'm still not sure what the message is, but I keep thinking about it weeks after watching. I really enjoyed it.