mcdow

“no open source project will succeed with this level of unprofessionalism”

y’all clearly are not acquainted with some of the things Linus has said on the LKML

Haven't done any research into this, but I wonder how tough it would be to build a decent 3D printer. Maybe there are open-source designs out there.

there’s another thing that started to get quite popular in the late 2000s… smartphones

Chrome, Android, and Gmail are optional to use.

They might be buying time to sell the relevant stock

I’m working on a combination of a semantic embedder and vector database with a focus on Apple devices https://github.com/emmettmcdow/dve

It should be drop in semantic search for any text. No need to worry about what models, what database, how the data is processed, dealing with performance concerns. None of that. Just vector search.

I’m looking forward to using a RISC-V computer in 20 years

It's the phones dude. It's literally just the phones. Get rid of the phones and you fix it.

https://emmettmcdow.com

This is awesome! I’ve been looking for a way to batch export my notes out of Apple notes, will this work for that purpose?

I totally agree with you that most notes apps miss the mark. I’m working on one now which I hope satisfies the same requirements as Apple notes(dead simple, iCloud sync, free) but has some things I want (improved search, first class markdown support).

I’ve been using it as my daily driver for a while, but it’s not quite ready for other users yet. I wrote a bit about it in my year in review[1] under the section “Not Another Notes App!”.

1. https://emmettmcdow.com/posts/2025-in-review

Is any company actually doing this? I haven’t heard of anyone that has this setup. Maybe contract work, but never a full time employee working 4 days.

This is tangential but the whole Tiananmen Square thing is kind of odd. When I visited China many people were more willing to discuss it than I had imagined. Some spoke about it unsolicited. It’s a tourist destination you have to buy tickets for. It’s rather subtle what can and cannot be discussed relating to it. Those I spoke to about it told me that most people have a good understanding of what happened, and many people speak negatively of the CCP. You just can’t do it if you have a major platform (e.g. you’re Jack Ma or you are an LLM).

Not to discount how negative free speech restrictions are, but I’m not so sure how effective that particular propaganda campaign would be.

From the comments here it sounds like most people think the amount Anthropic paid for the company was probably not much more than the VC funding which Bun raised.

How would the payout split work? It wouldn’t seem fair to the investors if the founder profited X million while the investors get their original money returned. I understand VC has the expectation that 99 out of 100 of investments will net them no money. But what happens in the cases where money is made, it just isn’t profitable for the VC firm.

What’s to stop everyone from doing this? Besides integrity, why shouldn’t every founder just cash out when the payout is life-changing?

Is there usually some clause in the agreements like “if you do not return X% profit, the founder forfeits his or her equity back to the shareholders”?

Super cool!

Why does Steam/Valve care so much about Linux? I know as devs we all would prefer to use Linux/Unix. But developer experience isn’t a good business justification.

This is true but there is another cost. If you carelessly write you can end up with a system which is a mountain of bandaid fixes; an incoherent and unmaintainable mess.

I’ve used both approaches and I can’t disagree more. Writing code first might feel faster but it isn’t. It’s great for surface level issues but just muddies the waters for any consequential feature.

Measure(communicate) twice, cut(build) once.

Oh ok. Is it still worth learning without LiveView? E.g. in my case I’m much more proficient in Python. Is it worth the jump, over something like Django?

I really want to choose Phoenix, but I can't get over the fact that LiveView is front-and-center. The whole web-socket model just seems so brittle to me.

This is the primary reason Lua is interesting to me. As high level as JS/Python but embeddable.

Only problem is I have language ADHD. I use way too many to pick up another like Lua.

I liked this post, and I can totally understand where you’re coming from…

But couldn’t anything you say about Lua also be said about JS? You mentioned how Lua wasn’t batteries included, so you try to limit your libraries. Couldn’t you say the same for JS? JS itself doesn’t change much, it’s the ecosystem. Couldn’t you just pick out some small and stable libraries the same way you could with Lua?

I'm working on a notes app that is as simple as Apple notes, but has native markdown support and uses semantic search.

Uses SwiftUI for the UI, and Zig does most of the heavy lifting on the backend. It's inspired by ghostty which uses a similar setup[1].

Right now it only works for Mac, but I'll be porting to iOS as soon as I get the markdown renderer polished. It's not available to the public yet, but I'm using it as my daily driver and hope to release it later this year. I've open sourced it so you can see the source code here[2].

1. https://ghostty.org/

2. https://github.com/emmettmcdow/nana

I bet it wouldn’t be too hard to build a nice UI over a mailing list. You could make it as nice as Slack. Has this been done?

Switched to Helix about a year ago and haven't looked back since. Has almost everything I need in it(with a few exceptions). With Vim I would've had to have installed some janky plugins.

I really recommend it if you find Vim motions unintuitive and want some of the basic features of IDEs like VSCode.

My biggest gripes: - No plugin system (yet). - Configuration documentation is not the best. - Hasn't reached enough popularity to where other apps have "Helix mode" like how a bunch of apps have "vim mode". I find myself wanting to do Helix motions in other apps.

Only a matter of time before someone makes something better than Artifactory. It’s a low bar to hit imho.

Came here to say this. I was able to get an omz featureset from vanilla zsh with a handful of lines of config. It works for the features I was using from omz.

Followup question: what’s it like to write COBOL? It’s so ancient as this point you never hear anyone actually talking about what the developer experience is like. How performant is it? What features does it have (or not have)? How bad is it really?

Small world! Searched 'effect oriented programming' and one of your talks was one of the first results on YouTube.

https://youtu.be/EHtVADr-x94

Anyone have a good primer on what effect-oriented programming looks like and how it’s used? Feel free to shill your own blog!

Zoomer terminal maximalist here.

My thing is that most UIs use such poor use of the screen real estate. I get it, pretty is the priority. But when I want to do work, the padding on everything gets to be excessive. Additionally, it’s really nice to be able to host my dotfiles in GitHub and I can be in a 100% familiar environment within a couple minutes. I have a variety of machines I work on. Same thing goes for mouse usage. I’m much faster operating the keyboard, whereas I switch between mice and trackpads and sensitivities when I switch devices. Keyboards are mostly the same. Maybe it’s a skill issue on my part but oh well ;)