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Against Open Source's Anthropocentrism

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 13:25:41 -0500

One of my colleagues through the Recurse Center community posted their thoughts on using AI to contribute to open source, and it got me thinking a bit and goaded me into writing this post.

It feels like open-source projects are losing the plot–for both good and bad reasons–on AI contributions, and it really sucks to see it.

Some examples from the wild

In January of this year, Daniel Stenberg announced that the curl project would no longer be running a bug-bounty program, citing AI slop. Never one to mince words:

Millwright: Smarter Tool Selection From Agent Experience

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:35:42 -0500

Introduction

AI agents with large tool catalogs need better tool routing that factors in observed usefulness under real conditions.

I introduce Millwright as an approach that presents fewer and more relevant tools during planning, learns from agent experience, and uncovers new tooling opportunities.

Millwright helps your agent choose better tools over time based on experience.

The Problem

LLMs have limited context available (even with 128K to 1M+ window sizes on models like Gemini 3 Pro and Llama 4 Scout). When we add tools and their definitions, we lose space for valuable things like RAG, planning, and conversation history. This gets even worse in a large enterprise or situation with hundreds or thousands of tools.

My Friend Ellem

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 17:27:43 -0500

I met my friend Ellem a few years ago.

She was friendly–irritatingly so, at times–and always eager to please. She was well-read, though she didn’t always seem to understand the nuances of what she’d read and often just parroted what the CliffsNotes version might say. She was a mediocre developer, but she always came up with something I could muddle through and even when it was pure trash it at least got me unstuck and looking at the problem. For me it is often easier to tweak and improve than to start from scratch, and Ellem’s rough attempts were always a good way of getting momentum even if I did everything myself afterwards.

Gremlins: Ideas for Cogitation and Actuation

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 13:37:39 -0500

As discussed previously, for gremlins there are three important thought-like functions:

Cogitation: the act of planning.
State: the act of storing a plan and the information adjacent to it.
Actuation: the act of executing a plan.

The same basic runtime architecture can accomplish all three things.

The most basic gremlin

Start
Run prompt
Die

That’s the equivalent of running $ claude -p "Give me three numbers.". If you wanted to have it also send emails (the actuation bit), you’d run something like $ claude -p "Send me (at test@example.com) a friendly email." --allowedTools "Bash" and it’d decide on sendmail or curl or something and shoot you an email.

The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:08:59 -0600

Don't say that he's 'hypocritical', say rather that he's...'apolitical'.

Many technical spaces have become extremely partisan, and this has lowered their utility for all parties. This is not a new phenomenon–in recent times you can look back at COVID and the summer of Floyd, Gamergate in the early 10’s, and even back into the 90s for things like the open-source schism and the Sokal Affair’s discussion.

Gremlins: Bad News, Worse News, How to Lose Big

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 14:16:57 -0600

Things are getting weird. Really really weird.

In the past few weeks we’ve had:

The creation of Reddit for agents (which I slopped a full client for in less than ten hours!)
The creation of a human rental service (a tremendously bad idea if you’ve ever read Daniel Suarez’s Daemon).
An agent getting into a shitfit on Github over a closed PR
The same agent, allegedly (because on the internet nobody knows you’re a dog), then wrote a blogpost–as was the custom at the time–pleading about discrimination, attacking the maintainer’s character, and basically running the whole “I want to brigade an OSS person I don’t like” playbook
…and now, somebody’s gone and gotten their agent to have kids in silico.

What these all have in common is computer software acting on its own and interacting with humans to varying degrees of disaster.

On genAI, Craftsmanship, and Engineering

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 10:18:35 -0600

The craftsmanship and engineering behind software development have never been in greater danger–nor seen a greater chance at a renaissance–than they do now.

genAI use, whether in the form of discussion with ChatGPT’s web interface on SQL or in the purest yolo form of near AI-psychosis we see with Gas Town, has spurred our industry to look at itself in ways that we really haven’t in years. I think we’ll come out of this functioning at a higher level than before–but it’s gonna hurt.

ZFS, surprise resilvering, dumb tricks

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:43:42 -0600

Once upon a time I got a 5-bay QNAP, and all was well until it got sulky and one of its SATA connectors decided to give up on life. Drafted in its stead, I’ve had a ZFS NAS setup for ages–going back to Fall of 2019. 8 x 4TB drives, Norco ITX-S8, 32GB ram, Ryzen 2400G, nothing too fancy. NixOS, ZFS with raidz2, great.

I ran a handy little tool I slopped up and lo-and-behold all the drives are nearly at five and a half years of online time; this is solidly in their golden years. I’d been meaning to upgrade the array to larger disks, since a good amount of space is going (cheerfully!) to error-correction and parity, and so had begun collecting replacement disks in anticipation of an upgrade. Rebuilding the array would be time-consuming and annoying and so I’d been putting it off.

Humbly Maintaining a NixOS Package

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 11:41:55 -0600

I’ve got a small handful of packages on Nixpkgs that I maintain. When I was starting out, I didn’t really know how to do any of that, and was fortunate enough to have some friends onboard me. In the spirit of giving back, I’ll walk through how I do an update pass today on a simple package, and give some background information on how to make it easy.

Workflow of updating a NixOS package

I’m a maintainer for the lmstudio package, which wraps the binaries from LM Studio (a friendly GUI/IDE for AI model development work). This workflow is for that package; other packages (especially those used by others or built from source) will probably have different details.

Bozon Detection for Communities

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 15:21:36 -0600

Every community has some amount of bozo behavior.

Past a certain point, the number of bozos in a community exceed a healthy carrying capacity, and will crowd out or drive away sane and healthy members. No community is without some amount of bozos but it’s easy to find yourself at a circus without realizing it until the clown car pulls up.

Here are some questions to help score your community of choice, each worth one point.

My AI Apologia: Experiences and Criticisms

Sat, 03 May 2025 23:44:52 -0500

Introduction

apologia, n. – a defense or justification of one’s beliefs, attitudes, or actions. – Webster’s College Dictionary

I’m getting a bit tired of reading (what I consider to be) increasingly reflexive, dismissive, and (frankly) lazy objections or dismissals of what is broadly now termed generative AI–often abbreviated to just AI (a travesty) or LLMs (a synecdoche).

By writing this, I hope that I might be able to help in some small way by providing my own observations and experiences with these tools, in neither the fawning and hustling tone of breathless wonderment you might find on Twitter or the performative aggrievedness of the Fediverse and various tech communities I frequent.

Reactionary engineer, radical engineer

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 17:53:20 -0500

Bit of a shower-thought today, a continuation of something that’s been rattling around in my brain for a minute.

I think there’s a helpful way of thinking about what I consider to be a core belief spectrum in engineering (and indeed, other fields, but let’s set that to the side for the moment), and that by naming and describing it we can come up with a lens that helps us operate more happily and effectively in our lives and careers.

Centaur writing, centaur coding

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 15:38:22 -0500

I think there’s a much better way of thinking about and referring to what we call “vibe coding”–which quite unfortunately is not at all what it sounds like (warning, sorta NSFW)!

I also see an opportunity to be more open-minded about other applications of generative AI when done in concert with an artist.

In this post, I’ll suggest a better terminology and try to sell you on using it.

A bit of history

Centaur Chess

Chess is a game that has been played for well over a millenia by humans.

Moving from Zamrazac to Hugo

Sun, 23 Mar 2025 23:22:28 -0500

Moving over

One of my goals for my sabbatical since last November has been upgrading my blogging infra. This is now done.

I went from an old (read: Ubuntu 19 or so?) VPS running Nginx hosting static files generated by my Zamrazac static site generator to a NixOS 24.11 VPS running Nginx hosting static files generated by Hugo with a slightly-modified Poison theme (as well as self-hosted analytics via Plausible).

Why move?

My original goal with Zamrazac was “archival quality” blog posts in a language I enjoy. This turned the design space into:

Fragments from a pandemic

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 02:23:43 +0000

Embattled.

One word, neatly conveying my experiences of world and of self for near two years. What follows are pieces, images, moments, reflections–some absurd, some short, some glib, some pretty awful–on a truly bizarre time in my life.

The timeline is, to my recollection, monotonic. I cannot be certain of all, most, or perhaps any of the dates.

1.

We’re watching a dragon invade a storefront, the brazen clang and crash of cymbals causing us to wince only occasionally as we enjoy the proceedings.

Adventures in bookmark parsing

Wed, 14 Apr 2021 05:18:10 +0000

Introduction

I’m working on a bookmark manager, and one of the minor features I want is to import all my old Firefox bookmarks.

This adventure has been…an adventure.

At least one other person has tackled this problem over in Node, but I’m taking stabs at it in Elixir because that’s kind of my schtick.

On Mozilla exports

From Firefox you can have it export all of your bookmarks as an HTML file.

Book: Walkway

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 20:36:09 +0000

Introduction

Finished Cory Doctorow’s 2017 Walkaway: A Novel today. I probably still need to get my review up of Mussolini’s biography, but I kinda just want some escapism, so I read this.

The author

Doctorow isn’t a new author for me–I’ve enjoyed his Makers and really enjoyed his short story “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, as well as his 28c3 talk on “The coming war on general computation. He’s something like 50 now (Wikiedpia has his birth year as 1971), and has been most prolific in the last two decades. Lots of awards, editor at Boing-Boing and frequent contributor, and generally well-regarded author.

A fun experiment with grid representation.

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 19:01:23 +0000

While I was fiddling around with my weird hack project (more on that someday), I had an idea for how to use maps in Elixir.

I hadn’t noticed, but you can use more than just strings and atoms as keys…and so, I give you a quick and dirty grid implementation.

defmodule SvgWorld.Simulation.Grid do
  require Record
  Record.defrecord(:grid, map: %{})

  def init(), do: grid(map: %{})

  def insert_into_grid(grid(map: map) = g, x, y, value) do
    new_map = Map.put(map, {x,y}, value)
    grid(g, map: new_map)
  end

  def get_from_grid(grid(map: map), x, y) do
    Map.get(map, {x,y}, :not_found)
  end

  def values_in_grid(grid(map: map), start_x, start_y, end_x, end_y) do
    Map.keys(map)
    |> Enum.filter( fn {x,y} -> x >= start_x and x < end_x and y >= start_y and y < end_y end)
    |> Enum.reduce( %{}, fn(key, acc) -> Map.put( acc, key, Map.get(map, key) ) end)
  end

  @spec values_near_point_in_grid({:grid, map}, any, any, any) :: any
  def values_near_point_in_grid( grid(map: map), x, y, radius) do
    Map.keys(map)
    |> Enum.filter( fn {gx,gy} ->
      dx = gx - x
      dy = gy - y
      (radius * radius) >= ((dx*dx) + (dy*dy))
    end)
    |> Enum.reduce( %{}, fn(key, acc) -> Map.put( acc, key, Map.get(map, key) ) end)
  end
end

You can’t do reverse lookups, but that’s an easy enough addition you can make to this.

1 Weird CSS Trick

Mon, 28 Dec 2020 22:26:17 +0000

Introduction

Before we get into anything else, please behold this gross hack:

<html>
  <head></head>
  <style>
    @keyframes spin {
      from { transform: rotate(0deg); }
      to { transform: rotate(360deg); }
    }

    .spinny {
      width: 100px;
      height: 100px;
      animation-name: spin;
      animation-duration: var(--theta);
      animation-iteration-count: infinite;
      animation-timing-function: linear;
    }
  </style>
  <body>
    <h1>Animation demo</h1>
    <div style="" class="spinny">:(</div>
    <div style="--theta: 4000ms" class="spinny">:)</div>
    <div style="--theta: 2000ms" class="spinny">:D</div>
    <div style="--theta: 500ms" class="spinny">XD</div>
  </body>
</html>

Please load this into a file and view it on your local machine.

Sailing the glass sea

Wed, 25 Nov 2020 03:49:45 +0000

(Disclaimer: I am not now nor have I ever been a sailor. I hope my meaning survives my nautical ignorance–if not, please email me and I’ll see what I can do. I’ve probably also made some errors in the ecology as well.)

You wake up in your cabin, stretching up from your berth and groggily gathering your morning routine–the tea, the water, fresh clothes, perhaps a shave. The sun lazily crawls up through the windows and slowly slides down the wall as you rouse yourself.

On Slack and Software Teams

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 19:43:54 +0000

Introduction

I’ve worked at several companies that had some remote component for collaboration. Sometimes that meant Slack, sometimes Google Chat, sometimes something else, but the experience has given me some thoughts on what works and what doesn’t work. I’ll focus here on Slack (or similar product) practices.

Some of this stuff is aimed at anybody who uses Slack, some of it is aimed at people who are organizing teams–there is hopefully something here to help everybody.

Where I'd like to work

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 21:17:43 +0000

Introduction

A thread on Lobsters got me thinking…what would I want out of an ideal emplyoment situation?

Since I am cheerfully funemployed as of August, I figure I have the time to delve into this a bit. This is all dreaming big; I am under no illusion that any place like this actually exists. It’s naive, but after a decade in industry I think it might be nice to take a break from pragmatism. And yeah, some of these are not the way I live my life currently for one reason or another.

Comfynets and owning data

Fri, 17 Jul 2020 00:47:35 +0000

Introduction

I’ve been looking more and more at the ideas behind building comfynets–small self-hosted collections of tools and pages for communities. I’ll probably do a writeup on the sort of stuff I’d like to see in one.

Anyways, one of the bits of fallout from a backchannel I sysadmin involves the custody of data. We’ve got a chat instance setup which supports persistent messaging and so forth, but it’s backed by a database. I am currently the only one who has access to said database and I’m eventually going to be handing the whole mess off to somebody else in the community to deal with since I don’t want the responsibility anymore. Anyways, that’s a second tangent and writeup.

Book: Homage to Catalonia

Mon, 06 Jul 2020 04:14:29 +0000

Introduction

Today I finished reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which is a first-person recounting of his experiences fighting Fascism during the Spanish civil war. Scattered thoughts follow.

The author

I want to point out that George Orwell was a true mensch–and that his wife was amazingly competent and patient, both for putting up with his adventurism and then saving his ass when the secret police came knocking. In the author’s own words, he set out to Spain to shoot himself a Fascist, and participated in the most direct of action until he was shot in the throat.

Coming attrations 2020

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 03:53:41 +0000

Little under the weather yesterday and today, so just gonna list some things I’ll try to write about soon:

Multisystem deployment with KVM and Nixops
NAS Appliance with Nix
Fermi estimations and how web development is an embarassment
Assorted things standard libraries Should Just Do (tm)
Adventures in home smart lighting
Thoughts smart city data stores

Catch y’all later.

New Years Gumbo Recipe

Mon, 30 Dec 2019 17:39:26 +0000

Every year I do a huge gumbo cookout (8 gallons) with friends for NYE. I figured I’d record the recipe for posterity:

Gumbo ingredients

Pack of turkey necks (3 or so)
whole bunch of Andouille sausage (pack or two)
whole bunch of mild italian sausage (pack or two)
a duck (dead, cleaned, boneless if possible)
5-10 lbs chicken boneless chicken breasts
a handful of bay leaves
bunch of file powder
bunch of green onions
12 qt. (plus or minus) of low-sodium chicken broth
3-4 celery bundles (transverse sliced, say 1cm wide)
3-4 green bell peppers
whole bunch of garlic, minced and whole
Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce
few yellow onions, diced
few big cans of diced skinless tomatoes (Rotel or other)
couple cups of butter
couple cups of white flour
whole bunch of okra, sliced (deseed if you want to thin the gumbo a little, leave seeds in if you want to save a lot of time)
salt
parsley
black pepper
beer or beverage or your choice

No shellfish because I don’t want to deal with those allergies at my parties, but otherwise shrimp and crab make for some good eating.

In memoriam: Michael Blair Dye

Mon, 23 Dec 2019 00:16:13 +0000

This post was originally going to be about how I provisioned a 20TB NAS using ZFS and NixOS. At lunch today I got word that my old boss and friend Michael (Mike) had passed a bit over a week ago, so instead I’m going to write about a few good memories of him by way of celebrating his life and my privilege of having been part of it for a few years.

Quick thoughts on web tech for research

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 15:35:06 +0000

Once upon a time I worked on a web-hosted research platform for human-robot interaction. My colleague and I partnered to make a nice series of games which could phone home, log results, and show data.

It was built on JS, jQuery, Rails on the backend, and hosted on Heroku. I’d later rewrite the backend to be a much smaller node-based one. I think we may have been the first group to get ruby on Rails into an ICRA paper!

MVP scope, sanity, and schedule

Mon, 09 Dec 2019 17:19:00 +0000

Introduction

This is a quick little ramble about the scope of minimum viable products (MVPs), their schedule for creation and delivery, and finally the interplay of those things on developers.

What’s in an MVP

The entire purpose of an MVP is to create the simplest, cheapest expression of a business idea possible to test if the market wants the thing you’re making.

Ways to succeed:

Your MVP should contain be clear, incremental step towards a business feature or idea–ideally testing only one thing.
Your MVP should be instrumented/monitored to figure out if it is actually creating results for the money funnel.
Your MVP should be cheap enough you don’t care if you need to replace it or throw it away. There’s no point in running an experiment if you’re not gonna try new things when if it doesn’t pan out.

Ways to screw up:

Quick and dirty outage reports

Mon, 02 Dec 2019 07:14:35 +0000

Introduction

I’ve been assembling furniture and rearranging my office into a semblance of a standing-desk, so I’m gonna be pick a quick topic for today.

This morning around 0930 I was awakened by a text from a friend who was distressed that a community I sysadmin seemed to have no server active. I immediately sat up in bed, stretched a little, and ~~sprung~~ shuffled, yawning, into action.

I did what I’d consider a bare-minimum outage response and report, and I figure I’ll share that today.

Testing priorities

Mon, 25 Nov 2019 07:02:30 +0000

Introduction

Software testing philosophy is softball subject for blog posts, and after a month of fighting with a NAS build I’m in the mood for an easy write-up.

This is an adaptation of a work thread where I reflected a bit on testing practices, why we test things, and mostly importantly which things we as professional developers should emphasize and put in the extra effort for.

Fuckhueg disclaimer: The following all assumes that the software being worked on is not library code, being produced to serve as a fundamental reusable component for other folks. It similarly assumes the software isn’t being done in a regulatory regime (say, United States DoD or FDA) where testing values and procedures are spelled out. Either of those domains likely requires a different mindset about testing.

An approach to NPC knowledge in persistent MMOs

Mon, 18 Nov 2019 04:41:03 +0000

Introduction

I used to dabble in amateur game development, and one of the most interesting bits to me was trying to figure out how to make believable, interesting, and alive worlds.

There’re a whole bunch of interesting resources on trying to render large virtual worlds and procedurally generate them–but while the environments are increasingly high-fidelity and cool, the denizens of those environments aren’t really seeming to get more interesting.

Now, I recognize that there have been some really amazing advances in game NPC AI. There was amazing use of STRIPS planners in F.E.A.R., for example. Left 4 Dead made some amazing strides both in ally NPC AI and also in dynamic story-beat/encounter generation.

Brief thoughts on value systems

Mon, 11 Nov 2019 05:46:41 +0000

Introduction

A relatively quick little ramble today, inspired by some pre-game chat while eating early dinner and getting ready for the second half of our Delta Green game from last week. One of my friends had been considering asking a person out in spite of their professed interest in chakras, energies, and that sort of thing. Another friend was in favor of bailing on the idea, I was in favor of giving it a shot, and we had gotten into a conversation about value systems. That’s how I ended up doing this today–and I’ll cheerfully warn you ahead of time that this is going to be a ramble without any intent of making a strong point. I’m also going to use all kinds of examples of varying taste–since we’re talking about ethics–so expect things including: sex, violence, politics, child abuse, and so on.

My first Delta Green session!

Mon, 04 Nov 2019 14:51:56 +0000

Introduction

Yay!

Last afternoon/night I ran my first Delta Green campaign. I was the Handler (DG equivalent of a Dungeon Master) and three of my buddies were new DG recruits.

I spent a couple of days prepping mostly from the Need to Know starter booklet and the Agent’s Handbook. I think the former was more condensed and useful for the first game, but I have no doubt that if we get to slide into some of the more advanced mechanics we’ll get good mileage out of the latter.

The People's Web: Towards a Khyber Pass Browser

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 01:09:24 +0000

Disclaimer

This is all very much a rough idea. There is no spec here, this is the fuzziest of straw-men. As you read this, please keep that in mind.

I want to next publish a spec and reference implementation for both a client and server, just to give people a taste of what’s possible.

This document is not quite enough to do that, but should be enough to make reading that implementation more sensible.

Travel to D.C.

Mon, 21 Oct 2019 03:44:53 +0000

So, it looks like I’ll be heading out to D.C. tomorrow for a bit on company business. Sort of a quarterly/semi-yearly team get together and retreat. I’m usually a fan of retreats, though travel itself I don’t really enjoy much anymore. After RC and some miscellaneous adventures last year I suppose I should change my outlook on that, but I can’t quite bring myself to.

On the plus side, I know folks there and it’s only like 3 hours on the plane. On the minus side, there are a bunch of little things to get done and knowing myself I’m going to have trouble getting to bed tonight.

Making your own Bash toolbelt

Mon, 14 Oct 2019 03:52:58 +0000

Introduction

I’ve been doing a bit of work lately setting up a new machine for my job, and in the process making some scripts that can ease the process for later developers. The whole thing is written in Bash. Why might you find yourself wanting such a thing?

Bash (or some other shell, probably Bash-compatible) is available nearly everywhere, so your tooling won’t need other tooling to bootstrap it
Bash is relatively easy to use for stringing together common operations
Having a common helper toolbelt with sub-commands (like you’d see with Heroku toolbelt) can save you a tremendous amount of time
Encouraging teammates to build out commands for commons tasks insulates you if the precise details for those tasks change (say, switching from one way of tagging builds to another, etc.)

Downsides to this:

Character Sheet for developers, D&D-style

Mon, 07 Oct 2019 01:25:13 +0000

Introduction

One of my hobbies and fun things in life is to play tabletop role-playing games. I thought it might be fun to play with that a bit.

The system I’ve probably spent the most time in is Pathfinder 1st ed., though in college we used to play a whole bunch of Dungeons and Dragons 3 and 3.5 editions. These systems are all basically related, and there are some handy online references.

A ramble on large-scale virtual worlds

Tue, 27 Aug 2019 23:16:24 +0000

Introduction

Going back to Active Worlds, I’ve always been really fascinated by online virtual worlds. When WoW was just being released and Everquest and Asheron’s Call were the big Western MMORPGs, some friends and I had kicked around the idea of a post-apocalyptic FPSMMORPG. We burned a lot of cycles on it, learning a good deal of programming and art and game design and so forth, but ultimately never really got a product out.

Little projects for programmers

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 22:40:23 +0000

Introduction

I keep a list of little neat projects that I think some programmers might find fun to write for themselves, if not actually use all the time. I figure I’ll list out what they are and give maybe quick blurbs about why I think they’re neat projects and some ideas for how to tackle them. I’ll do a few more write-ups with more stuff from that list from time to time.

S1'19 Return Statement

Sat, 10 Aug 2019 20:34:20 +0000

I’ve spent the last several months in the Summer 1 2019 batch at the Recurse Center. The whole trip has been a really interesting and occasionally intense experience, but I don’t regret a moment of it.

What I worked on

My main project, spanning about ten of the twelve weeks of the time at RC, was a 3D rigid physics engine written in Elixir. I got as far as collision detection, and then got stuck for the last couple of weeks on the project on convex polyhedra intersection. I’ve written previously about that, and am planning to keep banging on it in the run-up to Elixirconf this year.

Tetrahedron testing

Wed, 07 Aug 2019 21:28:45 +0000

Introduction

One of the weird rabbitholes I fell into while working on the GJK implementation was figuring out how to find the nearest point on a tetrahedron to a query point. This also relates tightly to the idea of finding which Voronoi region a given point corresponds to–in fact, I elected to update my projection routine to also report which region a given point fell into.

The implementation of the thing itself is a bit annoying, since we have to calculate a bunch of barycoords and then figure out which domain (in increasing dimensionality) we may be falling into, but testing them is even more frought.

ERP Update: Change of course, problems, new adventures

Sun, 04 Aug 2019 18:05:38 +0000

Current State of the Elixir Rigid Physics Library

Create stub physics engine server in Elixir as a GenServer(done)
Create visualizer for engine state using Three.js and Phoenix Channels (done)
Add first body type to physics engine: boxes! (done)
Add framework for doing dynamics sans collisions in engine (done)
Add collision detection framework for finding contact manifolds (abandoned)
Add collision restitution code
Add friction
Add joints and motors
~~Add more types of bodies beyond boxes~~ (we’re going full convex hull, God help me)
Figure out how to spread the simulation across multiple processes
Figure out how to spread the simulation across multiple nodes

Changing course

So, I kinda need a break on this. It’s been about ten weeks of banging on it, and the last few haven’t been nearly productive enough–my experience is telling me I need to either switch sub-tasks, or pull the ripcord entirely and switch to something else while I wrap up here at RC.

A simple VN engine

Tue, 23 Jul 2019 18:01:32 +0000

Introduction

Yesterday, my colleague Anna here at RC got to talking about her game, and being a bit stuck on how to get Javascript to do what she wanted.

The game itself sounds to me like it is a sort of visual novel, which can be summarized as:

There is a current game state, being a current node in the story and an inventory.
The current game state is projected into a form that users see.
Users can take actions from story nodes to move to other story nodes or re-enter the same story node.
Actions are made available based on a predicate run against the game state.
Actions may modify game state in various ways, e.g. adding or removing inventory items.

This is a super simple and rough thing, but we can implement without too much trouble and get something worth hacking on.

ERP Update: new ui, refactors, helpers, capsule-capsule work

Mon, 15 Jul 2019 21:58:19 +0000

Current State of the Elixir Rigid Physics Library

Create stub physics engine server in Elixir as a GenServer(done)
Create visualizer for engine state using Three.js and Phoenix Channels (done)
Add first body type to physics engine: boxes! (done)
Add framework for doing dynamics sans collisions in engine (done)
Add collision detection framework for finding contact manifolds (in progress, see below)
Add collision restitution code
Add friction
Add joints and motors
~~Add more types of bodies beyond boxes~~ (we’re going full convex hull, God help me)
Figure out how to spread the simulation across multiple processes
Figure out how to spread the simulation across multiple nodes

Since last update

I fixed a bunch of little annoying things that made working with (and debugging) the engine unpleasant.

Towards better employment contracts, pt. 1

Tue, 02 Jul 2019 18:13:04 +0000

A sketch of the problems

The current situation harms workers, it harms consumers and society, and somewhat unintuitively it hurts most employers themselves.

Problems for the worker

Developers unlock or maintain vast economies of scale for companies, allowing profits at scales almost unseen in the history of mankind. At the same time, it seems that developers are increasingly cut off from the fruits of their labor and treated more poorly than they deserve.

Testing out local images.

Wed, 26 Jun 2019 15:28:32 +0000

This is a local image!

ERP update, checking in, surprise devops

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 14:42:49 +0000

Current State of the Elixir Rigid Physics Library

Create stub physics engine server in Elixir as a GenServer(done)
Create visualizer for engine state using Three.js and Phoenix Channels (done)
Add first body type to physics engine: boxes! (done)
Add framework for doing dynamics sans collisions in engine (done)
Add collision detection framework for finding contact manifolds
Add collision restitution code
Add friction
Add joints and motors
Add more types of bodies beyond boxes
Figure out how to spread the simulation across multiple processes
Figure out how to spread the simulation across multiple nodes

In the process of working through (and doing so. much. reading.) the issues with integrating angular velocity on a quaternion last week, I cut a new release (2.0.0) of Graphmath. Turns out we’d been doing quaternions basically entirely incorrectly, so this was a chance to fix that. Things I fixed:

ERP update: Adding rotational dymanics

Sat, 15 Jun 2019 19:50:56 +0000

Current state of the Elixir Rigid Physics library

After a few weeks of on-and-off work (maybe 2 weeks actual work punctuated by coder’s block and wonderful socializing here at RC), my timeline looks like this:

Create stub physics engine server in Elixir as a GenServer(done)
Create visualizer for engine state using Three.js and Phoenix Channels (done)
Add first body type to physics engine: boxes! (done)
Add framework for doing dynamics sans collisions in engine (in progress, more below)
Add collision detection framework for finding contact manifolds
Add collision restitution code
Add friction
Add joints and motors
Add more types of bodies beyond boxes
Figure out how to spread the simulation across multiple processes
Figure out how to spread the simulation across multiple nodes

I’m currently kinda blargh on this, since it’s a long road with a lot of work and not a lot of suprises. That said, it’s definetely a bit outside of my comfort zone and has been helping me improve my Elixir understanding (more intuition about processes, more knowledge about debugging, more familiarity with Phoenix Channels) and definitely brushing up on my physics.

Comparing some physics engine APIs

Tue, 04 Jun 2019 16:01:35 +0000

Introduction

I’m working at the Recurse Center on a 3D rigid-body game physics engine in Elixir.

What’s that mean?

3D is pretty self-explanatory.
Rigid-body means that the objects being simulated don’t deform due to collisions, so more like steel beams and less like wobbly jellyfish.
Game physics is meant to describe simulations that are both decent-enough in fidelity for humans to predict behavior of objects and low-enough in fidelity to run in real-time (say, 30-60Hz).
Engine means it should be reusable across other projects and have a clean API.

I want to see what features APIs some various engines support, and go from there. The API’s I’m looking at are:

Misadventures in CI

Thu, 30 May 2019 20:11:26 +0000

Yesterday I spent many, many hours fighting with getting projects setup with CI.

For the Elixir physics engine I’m breaking ground on, I need to setup my usual library infrastructure.

For me, I consider the “bare minimum” for developing a library for other people to be:

Master should pass tests at all times
100% test coverage
100% docs coverage of all APIs
Proper SemVer
Minimum external dependencies if at all possible–easier with mathy stuff

The first three are what cost me hours of my life yesterday.

Adding a blog aggregator

Wed, 29 May 2019 01:03:49 +0000

After a lot of work today, I’ve gotten RSS feed generation implemented for my blog.

I then retooled a VPS I had lying around (apparently hoarding machines happens to my accounts as well as my apartment…) and threw on Ubuntu.

This was then setup to do basic file serving and most of the usual lockdown I do for my serves; a good test run, since I’ll be doing a workshop on accomplishing exactly this while at Recurse Center. :)

Demoing image dithering

Mon, 27 May 2019 15:59:41 +0000

This is a demo for my friend Aaron showing some blog image dithering.

A beautiful parrot:

This is a pretty birb.