AlphaWeaver

[2016]

The "100x bandwidth" claim needs to be substantiated.

There are some significant regulatory issues with the current popular mesh network protocols in the USA, namely that neither MeshCore or Meshtastic are compliant with the actual FCC regulations. 100x bandwidth because you're breaking the rules isn't the same as 100x bandwidth legally.

Here is the issue discussing this in the MeshCore repository: https://github.com/meshcore-dev/MeshCore/issues/945

Might be better to update the URL to this, actually: https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7

If projects like this and DynamicLand interest you, it's worth checking out https://folk.computer/ - they've been working on this much more recently than DynamicLand and share their code as open source.

Do you think there's a path where you can pregenerate popular paths of dialogue to avoid LLM inference costs for every player? And possibly pair it with a lightweight local LLM to slightly adapt the responses? While still shelling out to a larger model when users go "off the rails"?

Yep, SAR stands for "specific absorption rate". These sensors are typically used to change how the antennas on the phone transmit (like how much power they use) by detecting whether the phone is held close to your body vs. sitting somewhere like on a table.

Most phones have them.

Is it a product though? So far they've just released all their code as open source (which Dynamicland did not do) and helped people set up their own Folk systems in other cities. I don't think they're selling anything.

Erlang's use in the telecom sphere has primarily been focused on switching, routing, and real time voice processing on the backend. Beyond just handling cellular traffic, many internet switches are written in Erlang too. It's only recently that Erlang has been used for more of the type of code that could run on the frontend. (The niceness of writing Elixir is a big part of that too.)

The primary blocker to running Erlang on mobile has been the lack of portability of the BEAM VM itself, which is why this project is so exciting!

I looked at using this for a client project a few months ago. We use Erlang and Elixir at work, and it's my go-to for anything serious.

Be aware that parts of their stack use a custom license for some components... but a large portion of it is OSS Apache 2.0, which is nice if you can stick to those parts!

Another comment mentions MinecraftForFree.com...

In middle school, in an attempt to get around the school firewall, I copied the HTML code from that website to my own to play Minecraft at school. Since my domain wasn't on the blocklist, it worked! But when my friends started using it to play, even after they hadn't bought the game, I resolved to add a login wall.

I built a backend proxy in PHP that would POST their credentials to the Minecraft API to make sure they had purchased the game. I still think it's funny to think I had no ethical qualms about circumventing the school firewall, but piracy was where I drew the line.

This book is a fantastic introduction to Erlang in very approachable language. It introduces the reader to both language syntax and design decisions that led to Erlang's strengths as a highly reliable programming language for realtime applications.

If you're learning Elixir right now, I can't recommend enough to also learn a bit about Erlang. The OTP and BEAM VM sit underneath both systems, and learning about what's going on under the hood helps a ton when troubleshooting production issues!

Were you at all inspired by the work of Bartosz Ciechanowski? My first thought was that you all might have hired him to do the visuals for this post :)

OTP in Gleam is what took me the most effort to figure out. The hexdocs cover the basics but that wasn’t enough for me to get the concepts right, especially where they differed from their Erlang counterparts.

This was the biggest thing I noticed as well- core OTP concepts like gen_servers and supervision trees aren't covered in the language tour, the docs, or even the "Gleam for Erlang Users" page... it makes sense that it's missing if it's pre-1.0, but I was very confused when I didn't find anything about it at all.

Came here to comment this as well! TiddlyWiki uses this as it's default storage format.

Donald Bitzer was the first Computer Science professor I had in college. He taught a discrete mathematics course (boolean logic).

Though he was on the older side when I took his course, he still brought laughter and enthusiasm to his classes, and set the tone for the rest of my college career. He will be missed!

People may "prefer" simply replacing containers, but as some siblings mention, some applications might require more reliability guarantees.

Erlang was originally designed for implementing telephony protocols, where interrupted phone calls were not an acceptable side effect of application updates.

Erlang does have a mechanism that allows a module to control when it moves from the "old version" to the "new version" of its own code. Calls to the module with the fully qualified name (e.g. `module:function()`) will invoke the "new code" once it's loaded, but calls within that module using only function names (just `function()`) will continue to invoke the "old code".

If the portion of the app you were hot upgrading was an OTP process like a GenServer, you could theoretically wait for some sort of atomic coordination mechanism to make that fully qualified function call after the new code has loaded, at least in theory.

We use hot code reloading at my work, but haven't had a reason to atomically sync the reload. Most of the time it's a tmux session with `synchronize-panes` and that suffices. If your application can handle upgrades within a module smoothly, it's rare to have a need for some sort of cluster-level coordination of a code change, at least one that's atomic.

Came here to say this exactly - any nurse, PA, or other hospital staff person likely has heard of "Vocera" the hospital communication platform.

Beyond just accidental confusion, I'd be worried about real legal issues with trademark infringement. Trademarks primarily exist to prevent customers from being confused about which business they're interacting with, and this is a great example of the types of things they're trying to prevent. (I am not a lawyer, so take this with a grain of salt.)

As I was building up my understanding/intuition for the internals of transformers + attention, I found 3Blue1Brown's series of videos (specifically on attention) to be super helpful.

Marshall Brain's contributions to the entrepreneurship program more broadly were extremely significant. I never had him as a professor, but his influence on the program was clear, even to me.

He will be dearly missed.

Imagine how those of us who played Ingress (Niantic's first game) feel... We were tricked into contributing location data for the game we loved, only to see it reused for the far more popular (and profitable) Pokemon Go.

Right, but in this example, to "pick up" the code after you have updated it, you still have to trigger a restart of the program somehow. Controlling that handoff can prove challenging if you're just swapping out the underlying binary.

I'm not sure that rolling deployments guarantee you won't lose connections, depending on the type of connection. Imagine your customer is downloading a large file over a single TCP connection, and you want to upgrade the application mid-download.

With rolling deployments, your only choice is to wait until that connection drains by completing or failing the download. If that doesn't fit your use case, you're out of options.

If your application is an Erlang app, you could hot code reload an unaffected part of the application while the download finishes. Or, if the part of the application handling the download is an OTP pattern that supports hot code reloading (like a gen_server) you could even make changes to that module and release e.g. speed improvements mid download stream. This is why Erlang shines in applications like telephony, which it was originally designed for.

I've used a Samsung T5 SSD as my CacheClip location in Resolve and it works decently well! Resolve doesn't always tolerate disconnects very well, but when it's plugged in things are very smooth.

We actually switched from Gollum to OtterWiki!

+100! The whole book is online for free and I've found it explains things in a very plain and friendly way.

It's still present, they've moved it to a separate repository that's now commercially licensed.

Thanks! My mistake.

If you're looking for something like this that's under more active development, (and with available source code,) check out Folk [0]. It's being developed by some folks who visited/worked at Dynamicland but this is entirely in the open. They even have an open house in Brooklyn monthly where you can visit and check everything out!

[0] https://folk.computer

I'm confused - the title says "like Friend" but this appears to be a rebrand of the existing Friend pendant?