bikeshaving

As someone who does not know what k4, qSQL, or q are, reading through the landing page of this website was giving me mild schizophrenia. And then I tried to search for these things in the old way, and received incredibly dry technical sites that still don’t tell me what it is, and all these names are wildly SEO unfriendly. So I had Claude give me context and it’s apparently the database Wall Street uses for tick data. Sounds cool but, jeez.

My favorite example of liminalism is Everything Empty Always Alone, a man on YouTube in his 40s who claims to be a time traveler and films himself walking and driving around empty metropolitan areas. He claims he’s recording from some sort of alternate universe, but it’s likely he’s just at these locations at odd hours. In any case, it’s fun outsider art. Or maybe it’s all true you never know.

https://www.youtube.com/@EverythingEmptyAlwaysAlone/videos

I’ve tried to create the minimalist version of this with Revise.js. The main surface area is a custom element called a `<content-area>`. The OverType library you linked to uses a time-old technique where you essentially put a duplicate copy of the content over a `<textarea>` to highlight it but this doesn’t really work in mobile and it messes with the selection. I’ve tried to grapple with `contenteditable` directly with my solution, but it does try to use less JavaScript and it does try to be more minimal.

https://github.com/bikeshaving/revise https://revise.js.org https://revise.js.org/blog/introducing-revise/

Manual refresh(). This is something Crank does, and other frameworks like the new Remix one is picking it up as well. Being explicit has its advantages.

I’ve written about how Svelte, Vue, and Solid are all reactive and share common pitfalls due to their reactive solutions. My theory is that they all cause worse bugs than they prevent.

https://crank.js.org/blog/why-be-reactive/

I don’t own a car :)

I’m very wary of celebrating Meta’s language work when the company was credibly found to have contributed to the genocide against the Rohingya in Myanmar, and separately, to human rights abuses against Tigrayans during the conflict in northern Ethiopia. Be careful whose sins you’re laundering.

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/02/meta-new-poli... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/meta-failure-...

I must tell you, it is an incredible relief to learn that McZee was not a figment of my imagination.

Just found the text editor from my childhood

I’ve found that humans are pretty good at reading through the output of bash commands. And Claude Code keeps insisting on truncating the output for some reason.

I keep asking why the default Claude tools like Read(), Write(), Edit(), MultiEdit(), Replace() tools aren’t just Bash() with some combination of cat, sed, grep, find. Isn’t it just easier to pipe everything through the shell? We just need to figure out the permissions for it.

Yes, the callable promise abstraction is just a bit of effort:

  let resolveRef;
  const promise = new Promise((res) => { resolveRef = res; });
  
  const callback = (data) => {
    // Do work...
    resolveRef(data); // This "triggers" the await
  };

  Object.assign(callback, promise);

Not accepting PRs for this. I think the logic is sound (Easter Eggs should be difficult to trigger).

A long time ago, I wrote an abstraction called a Repeater. Essentially, the idea behind it is, what would the Promise constructor look like if it was translated to async iterables.

  import { Repeater } from "@repeaterjs/repeater";
  
  const keys = new Repeater(async (push, stop) => {
    const listener = (ev) => {
      if (ev.key === "Escape") {
        stop();
      } else {
        push(ev.key);
      }
    };
    window.addEventListener("keyup", listener);
    await stop;
    window.removeEventListener("keyup", listener);
  });
  const konami = ["ArrowUp", "ArrowUp", "ArrowDown", "ArrowDown", "ArrowLeft", "ArrowRight", "ArrowLeft", "ArrowRight", "b", "a"];
  (async function() {
    let i = 0;
    for await (const key of keys) {
      if (key === konami[i]) {
        i++;
      } else {
        i = 0;
      }
      if (i >= konami.length) {
        console.log("KONAMI!!!");
        break; // removes the keyup listener
      }
    }
  })();

It’s one of those abstractions that’s feature complete and stable, and looking at NPM it’s apparently getting 6.5mil+ downloads a week for some reason.

Lately I’ve just taken the opposite view of the author, which is that we should just use streams, especially with how embedded they are in the `fetch` proposals and whatever. But the tee critique is devastating, so maybe the author is right. It’s exciting to see people are still thinking about this. I do think async iterables as the default abstraction is the way to go.

I was thinking using ZWJ because the staff is always implied by the usage of Cistercian numerals. I was also wondering if we could reuse CISTERCIAN 1-9 for each significant digit rather than having to encode all 4 separately, though at the end of the day it’s only 36 separate code points.

Adding the staff is 37 codepoints versus 36, but I think using ZWJ would at least have each numeral independently renderable so it degrades gracefully. I’m not too sure about how combining characters degrade.

Essentially it boils down to whether you think the staff and the digit flag part of the numeral are independent or not.

Can anyone who works with the Unicode consortium explain why Cistercian numerals aren’t just part of Unicode? There’s Aegean numbers, counting rod numerals, Mayan numerals, Roman numerals (beyond the Latin letter aliases), cuneiform numbers, and plenty of other historical numeral-only systems.

The 4-stave system is interesting but can almost certainly be done using ZWJ hacks maybe.

Thanks for the kind words! Let me know your thoughts if you end up exploring.

I’ve just published the first public release of a new open source project Shovel.js, replacing tools like Express, Fastify, Next.js, Vite. It’s a full-stack/meta server framework which implements the full Service Worker specification but in Node, Bun, Cloudflare. It leans into using web standards to do things like accessing the filesystem, reading cookies, create client-side bundles rather than inventing new APIs. You can read about the process of making Shovel with AI in the introductory blog post.

https://shovel.js.org/blog/introducing-shovel/

https://github.com/bikeshaving/shovel

Seeing this makes me miss the salad days of MOOCs. I learned programming in the 2010s through MIT’s EDX Introduction to Programming course, and then a course on Coursera by Martin Odersky on Functional Programming through EPFL, and I feel like that ladder has been kicked away due to MOOC monetization policies. I wonder if we could return to these days.

It’s sinful to fish and kill these ancient creatures up from the deep for minor scientific progress.

Must be nice to have unquota’ed tokens to use with frontier AI (is this the case for Anthropic employees?). One thing I think is fascinating as we enter the Intellicene is the disproportionate access to AI. The ability to petition them to do what you want is currently based on monthly subscriptions, but will it change in the future? Who knows?

I’m not sure this is correct. The DOM class HTMLDetailsElement has the `open` property, which you can use to read/write the details element’s state. If you’re using setAttribute/getAttribute just switch to the property.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLDetails...

I find that asking Claude to develop and Codex to review the uncommitted changes will typically result in high-value code, and eliminate all of Claude’s propensity to perpetually lie and cheat. Sometimes I also ideate with Claude and then ask Claude to get ChatGPT’s opinion on the matter. I started by copy-pasting responses but I found tmux to be a nice way to get rid of the middleman.

I have a similar workflow except I haven’t put time into the tooling - Claude is adept at TMUX and it can almost even prompt and respond to ChatGPT except it always forgets to press Enter when it sends keys. Have your agents been able to communicate with each other with tmux send-keys?

This is a nice coincidence.

I’ve been heads-down on publishing a JavaScript full-stack metaframework before the end of the year. However, in the past two weeks I’ve been goaded by Claude Code to extract and publish a separate database client because my vision includes Django-style admin/forms. The idea is to use Zod to define tables, and then use raw SQL fragments with JavaScript template tags. The library adds a tiny bit of magic for the annoying parts of SQL like normalizing join objects, taking care of SELECT clauses and validating writes.

I’m only using it internally right now, but I think this approach is promising. Zod is fantastic for this use-case, and I’m sad I’ve only just discovered it.

https://github.com/bikeshaving/zen

My guess is this is a subset of the halting problem (does this program accept data with non-halting decompression), and is therefore beautifully undecidable. You are free to leave zip/tgz/whatever fork bombs as little mines for live-off-the-land advanced persistent threats in your filesystems.

This isn’t science fiction anymore. CIA is using chatbot simulations of world leaders to inform analysts. https://archive.ph/9KxkJ

You know when Claude Code for Terminal starts scroll-looping and doom-scrolling through the entire conversation in an uninterruptible fashion? Just try reading as much as of it as you can. It strengthens your ability to read code in an instant and keeps you alert. And if people watch you pretend to understand your screen, it makes you look like a mentat.

It’s actually a feature, not a bug.

https://github.com/Gricha/macro-photo/blob/highest-quality/l...

The logger library which Claude created is actually pretty simple, highly approachable code, with utilities for logging the timings of async code and the ability to emit automatic performance warnings.

I have been using LogTape (https://logtape.org) for JavaScript logging, and the inherited, category-focused logging with different sinks has been pretty great.

This is interesting. The argument which I’m gleaning from the essay is that the old proposed API of having an intermediary new Sanitizer() class with a sanitize(input) method which returns a string is actually insecure because of mutated XSS (MXSS) bugs.

The theory is that the parse->serialize->parse round-trip is not idempotent and that sanitization is element context-dependent, so having a pure string->string function opens a new class of vulnerabilities. Having a stateful setHTML() function defined on elements means the HTML context-specific rules for tables, SVG, MathML etc. are baked in, and eliminates double-parsing errors.

Are MXSS errors actually that common?