wooby

Thank you! I spent a lot of time eliminating launch-time work. Most state is precomputed or lazily initialized after first render. I wanted it to feel like a calculator, not an app.

I built GridCalc because spreadsheets on phones feel fundamentally wrong.

On desktop, spreadsheets work because you can see formulas, references, and structure all at once. On mobile, that collapses. You’re constantly panning, zooming, tapping small cells, and losing context.

RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) removes parentheses and operator precedence by using a stack. Instead of writing = (a + b) * c, you enter a b + c *. The order of operations is explicit and linear.

GridCalc combines those ideas: a visible RPN stack with a reference grid.

It’s built for quick, ad-hoc modeling on a phone: loan calculations, position sizing, cash flow scenarios, engineering back-of-napkin math.

It’s not trying to replace Excel. It’s trying to make mobile calculation feel native instead of cramped.

Happy to answer questions about design decisions or implementation.

I built GridCalc because spreadsheets on phones feel fundamentally wrong.

On desktop, spreadsheets work because you can see formulas, references, and structure all at once. On mobile, that collapses. You’re constantly panning, zooming, tapping small cells, and losing context.

RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) removes parentheses and operator precedence by using a stack. Instead of writing = (a + b) * c, you enter a b + c *. The order of operations is explicit and linear.

GridCalc combines those ideas: a visible RPN stack with a reference grid.

It’s built for quick, ad-hoc modeling on a phone: loan calculations, position sizing, cash flow scenarios, engineering back-of-napkin math.

It’s not trying to replace Excel. It’s trying to make mobile calculation feel native instead of cramped.

Happy to answer questions about design decisions or implementation.

The book looks awesome. However, I find some irony in the presence of a “no AI” badge on the back cover considering Lisp was AI research.

Photoprism rocks. I wrote up my experience with it in 2021, and I'm still happily using it: https://tailrecursion.com/~alan/HomePhotos.html

Realize a successful 51% attack is just the beginning of the war, not the end of it.

I think you're right; the war will go on for awhile. But I'm convinced by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28028542 that in the end, if anything bests fiat, it will be gold.

Barring some new technological breakthrough, it seems to me that bitcoin has no value in a fiat world, and no value proposition in a sound money world. It's a noble dead end.

It's not a crazy thought at all. Many Americans see government in this light. Others do not:

"No one will really understand politics until they understand that politicians are not trying to solve our problems. They are trying to solve their own problems -- of which getting elected and re-elected are No. 1 and No. 2. Whatever is No. 3 is far behind".

Thomas Sowell

Moving fast and breaking people is, horrifically, the status quo. Special interests in healthcare, enabled by heavy regulation, go great lengths to insulate doctors from the consequences of providing poor care and the rewards of providing excellent care. We all suffer as a result.

Your experience with healthcare might be different, but my own experience in the US has been this: I rarely see doctors that have later contacted me to see how the treatment they prescribed was working. Nearly every other service or product I purchase entreats me with a satisfaction survey at some point. I've asked myself: why don't doctors care about my outcome?

I have concluded that while I am the one with the sick body and paying money to fix myself, I am not the only customer. The regulatory agencies, credentialing schools, special interest groups, pharmaceutical companies, and healthcare unions are too.

Arguably, regulatory forces created the environment in which money could be used to so effectively manipulate doctors at the cost of patient outcomes. If doctors stood to lose business when they lost patients -- instead of fearing only for their license being revoked -- perhaps they'd be incentivized more to treat patients well than to engage in opioid schemes.

If you have good Yelp reviews or if I could speak with happy patients I would consider taking you up on it. Seriously.

I've received enough terrible medical and dental care from various "trained" and "registered" practitioners to value referrals much more than any credential or certification.

If you yourself truly believe that a professional registration is satisfactory, then I trust you practice what you preach by never researching doctor reviews. To do so would invalidate your argument.

See also: https://github.com/micha/json-table

Your concept of a de-fanged FDA reminds me of the NTSB and is interesting to think about.

I don't see how you can contest that they're both products and that they can both kill people if they're defective. To me these two similarities are plainly true, and it is only these two similarities that are material to my argument.

I might misunderstand, but the direction your argument seems to be heading is that the free market is somehow incompatible with products that have complex failure modes or that can be defective in subtle ways, and that the FDA is thus necessary. Is that right?

You're right, that last paragraph is a flawed argument. I retract it, and your findings compel me to assert that I think there was probably never a good reason for the FDA.

But it's the second, and weaker, of the two arguments I made. The argument I develop in my first three paragraphs stands.

What upsets you about other people using their own money to buy placebos, other than the fact that you can't understand why? At this very moment, millions of people across the globe are buying things for themselves you would never buy for yourself.

Has it occurred to you that the health supplement buyer is in a much better position to decide how to allocate their money than you are? You have limited, aggregate information; they have a total view of their own finances and life situation, and are willing to devote their own time to research their personal decision to buy. For example, they might discover through research that a supplement generally regarded as a placebo has a benefit under circumstances known only to the them.

When you limit the choices of others, based only on general information or your personal perspective, you limit the set of choices others may take. If you do this long enough, you might find yourself some day prohibited from buying something you desperately need, because your situation is an exception to some general rule that nobody ever considered.

The FDA might have made sense at a time when most people were illiterate and information was hard to come by. Now that most (at least in the US) are literate, and own smartphones, taking away choices for the benefit of some hypothetical illiterate serves only to worsen the life of the average person.

It is my understanding that malnutrition, clean water, and access to education/information are foremost among the problems of the developing world, and it's not at all clear to me that regulating medication in those countries would improve anyone's situation measurably.

For my part, here in the "developed" world, I have a family member with a rare autoimmune condition, and access to comparatively few medications. Those that are available are very expensive and not covered by any insurance. There is little competition between their manufacturers.

Because it costs at least 1.4B to bring a drug to market, and because of the rarity of her illness, it's unlikely any company will pursue new research. Thanks to the FDA's inordinately expensive approval process, no company is incentivized to bring a drug to market with an upside of <= 1.4B, regardless of how many people it could help.

I mean only to say that they are both products, and that they may both result in injury or death if they are produced irresponsibly.

Would you not agree with those two points of comparison?

I can think of a few systems in place that mitigate cases like the one you mention.

First, I can think of very few things that could happen to someone's car that would disadvantage you without disadvantaging them. In the case you mention, the missing tire would render the jalopy inoperable, and so the buyer suffers for their poor choice of vehicle. Any buyer thus factors reliability and safety into their decision, whether or not they are particularly concerned about the safety of others. Plus, now they have to walk, and you probably won't be giving them a ride. A counter-argument to this would be effect on climate, an externality that's maybe best left out for now :-)

Second, individuals may sue other individuals for personal or property damage. So, at least one factor preventing everyone from terrorizing you with their jalopies is that they are liable for damage their jalopy causes to others. The decision to purchase a jalopy includes this risk, disincentivizing the purchase of dangerous (to others) vehicles.

Third, it's already a requirement in most jurisdictions that drivers are insured because of the above liability, and insurance companies could easily deny coverage to unsafe vehicles, as determined by any (private) mutually agreed 3rd NHTSA/DOT-like party.

Finally, because there is no competition in the area of safety certification, it seems highly unlikely that the government's assessments of risk correspond to the risk assessed by the average consumer. The fact that most people choose to drive used vehicles that don't meet the government's latest safety standards feels like implicit proof of this.

If you have any choice in how you are treated, you will make your best judgement based on information available to you, such as by the recommendation of a friend, or a Yelp review. This is the same process you use to make any important purchase.

Before you have work done on your car, do you fly to China to inspect the part factory? You don't, because the relatively low risk you perceive that these parts will fail doesn't justify the expense of travel.

Do you perceive low risk because a government agency put a stamp of approval on the part? Probably not. Most likely, your risk assessment is based on information you've gathered about the final product, the auto shop -- that it is well-reviewed, and that your mechanic seems knowledgeable.

Furthermore, only you really know your exact needs. An expensive high-performance car part might provide you some marginal benefit, but not so much benefit that you're willing to buy that part at the expense of something else that's important to you, like your electric bill. A race car or Uber driver might make a different decision and choose a different part to suit their needs.

Medicine is like car parts. Bad ones can kill. But through the free market, a system of feedback is established that tends toward a wider variety, and higher quality, of parts overall.

When politicians prioritize some drugs over others, they interfere with this system, and money is spent on drugs and research that people don't necessarily want or need. You can imagine race car drivers getting together and lobbying politicians to subsidize high performance parts. Because these subsidies are funded by taxes, money is effectively taken from individuals who might prefer a different part. Now, those individuals who are not race car drivers have less purchasing power, and fewer choices overall.

You're correct that this is more or less the libertarian perspective, but I find it in no way extreme. I find it principled, direct, and humane. In our society, where nearly everyone has a smart phone and may conduct research at any time, I can't imagine a more effective system. I'm sure it was much easier to criticize the free market in a time when people couldn't read, or didn't have a global information database accessible on their person at every waking moment.

Like the FDA, and as monopolies, NHTSA and DOT have much less stake in the safety of a consumer than do either car producers and drivers.

Personally, I trust myself not to buy a car that I've heard explodes. You may not, and I respect that. But I see no reason to pay for a service that assures you when I myself require no such assurance.

If NHTSA and DOT operated like UL, products that were less safe probably wouldn't have NHTSA or DOT seals, and those products would be much cheaper. People willing to trade safety for cost would be able to own a car. People willing to pay for safety would pay more. Because of the lower barrier to production, there would be probably much greater choice in car buying, and cars would be universally cheaper. In either case, the choice would rest with individual consumers, who know best their situation and risk tolerance.

Pharmaceutical companies have every incentive to make their drugs safe, because if their drugs hurt people, the drugs will not sell.

Many drugs have passed FDA approval but later killed people. If the FDA were a private company, it might have gone out of business. But as a government monopoly, it's very hard to stop paying for. Between pharma companies, the government, and individual patients, the FDA has the least stake in the health of a particular patient.

UL is an example of a non-government organization that offers product safety certification. You see the UL seal on most consumer electric appliances. Imagine an FDA seal.

Drugs are not magical or special. They are a product like any other, and it is the consumer's right to choose a doctor, and for that doctor to choose proper medication. We regularly choose the best mechanics, plumbers, and other specialists we can find, and their reputation is partly a function of the type and quality of the parts and tools they use.

"Antibiotics present an enduring economic puzzle. These drugs changed the world. Yet despite their unique power, the free market doesn’t value them."

No. The free market -- people -- values these drugs. If there wasn't demand, this article wouldn't have been written. The problem is that drugs are too expensive to bring to market for their developers to profit, and that the single greatest cost is often FDA approval.

The article implies that the solution is to funnel more BARDA grants to companies in order to make drug development profitable. This amounts to using taxpayer money to help private companies pay government fees, with lots of bureaucratic overhead (employees, forms, computer systems, buildings) at each end of the transaction. This is dramatically suboptimal.

Instead of this, the FDA process should be cheaper, or the FDA itself should be privatized, and operate as an entity like Consumer Reports or any other review organization. Government need only be involved with prosecuting fake producers. The consumer requires only access to information, and assurances that a substance they bought is the same they have researched.

Paying government expenses with taxes is an unsustainable Ponzi scheme, and takes us further away from a real solution.

I believe the answer to your question of why developers don't generally treat quality the way dentists do is one of economics.

The world needs enough software, and the world's requirements for quality are low enough, and the average developer writes reliable-enough code, that in most cases money can be made without special attention to quality.

In some domains, quality is paramount. I imagine that quality and bug mitigation are the primary concerns of someone who manages, say, an X-ray machine firmware project, or avionics software. Software for these purposes that is not extremely reliable cannot compete in that market. For other kinds of software people are paid to write -- like social networks for pets -- reliability is a much lower priority.

Certain kinds of software needs to be rewritten constantly to meet the demands of highly-evolving markets. Games are an example of this. Reliability is important, but not paramount, because the underlying business can only continue to compete by at some point stopping work on the reliability of existing games, and moving on to developing new games.

I'm sympathetic to the respect you have for the value of high quality software. But the reality is, the value of quality varies dramatically within the software industry -- much more than it does within, say, dentistry, or medicine, or aviation.

Fewer bugs isn't necessarily the primary concern of those using and buying any particular kind of software.

Yes. My plan is for the image dumping facility to support tree-shaking and direct linking. I think tree-shaking by itself might produce reasonably-sized images, for my purposes at least. If not, the direct-linking would make Babel/Google Closure applicable.

Thanks for your interest and the pointer to Amber. I'll check it out. With JACL I hope to find a good balance of internal vs. external development tools, without necessarily ruling out either by design.

The JACL reader is asynchronous, and so JACL can read characters from external sources (in-browser REPL, DevTools connection, websocket, experimental File API) without blocking the event loop and without relying on an external tool. JACL app artifacts will be created by dumping the Lisp image using a Lisp function.

Other than these technical differences, there seems to be a difference in "philosophy of use". I have the sense that the ClojureScript project does not emphasize or particularly support the idea of using self-hosted ClojureScript to build web apps.

Hi, thanks for your interest. The main thing I'm after is a "residential" [1] Lisp development system, where applications and tools co-evolve in the same environment.

Most contemporary compile-to-JS languages target the browser, but do not inhabit it. I'm excited about a system that encourages apps and tools to evolve organically together, instead of tools developing separately from applications, which is the status quo.

Other than that, Common Lisp has some really interesting capabilities relative to ClojureScript, and is also fun!

1:http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/interlisp/Interlisp_Reference... section 1.2

"C is JQuery for the computer."

-- Micha Niskin

Why the cynical view? People have fun, organizers make money, and a charity makes money. Without the event, nobody has fun, and nobody (including the charity) makes money.

I am working on a CL for JS that I will likely share at some point. I post updates about it occasionally to Mastodon [1] if anyone is interested in following my progress. I'm also happy to discuss rationale, design, and implementation -- it's been really fun to work on.

1. https://mytoot.net/@alandipert/103120653862853368