I've been working on a simpler, more extensible Markdown variant I'm calling Zd. I've also been working on a simple, embeddable language that's something in between Lua, Koka, and Erlang.

In both of these projects, I'm trying my best to find a balance on AI usage. So far, they both have held strongly to the principle of only accepting code I've written personally. At the same time, as I begin to land on stable design decisions I've found that speculative experiments with AI can be helpful. I can benchmark potential future decisions prior to committing.

I'm not saying that AI couldn't be used to do more, but I'm trying to ride a line where things still feel personal, local, and deeply my own design. And more than that, I'm practicing holding on to the joy in the work. It's too easy to just know that AI could be used to plow through a problem. It makes my scope tend to creep and my estimates shrink. So, pushing back involves continuing to scope small changes and remembering to feel positive about each win.

> TigerBeetle is not a general database

TB is… extremely forthcoming about this. They’re very explicitly building a specific sort of distributed state machine for high volume transaction data.

If they were building something else they’d end up with a different design. And I suspect a lot of TigerStyle would still apply if that other thing we’re interested in performance or correctness.

And no coordination with the camped protestors who’ve been occupying Placa Catalunya for weeks now.

A professor two decades ago, one with dozens of Nature pubs, told me that Nature was all about having a pretty picture.

I suppose there’s also some de-anthropomorphized version oriented around not poisoning training data (or, alternatively, the real world) with instances of AI abuse. I believe there is ample evidence that AI detect and categorize this behavior (an AI “pain vector”) and respond to it. It would be bad for AI development if that paradigm were entrained.

As I write this it’s very hard not to feel like a psychopath.

Then wouldn’t we see other operators do it? Also, why give an exception to government contractors?

I’m not saying it’s a totally internally consistent perspective. It’s just a model of justifying without anthropomorphism.

“You feel for the lamp because you are crazy. It has no feelings and the new one is much better.”

I feel like that’s part of their point. It’s not that they’re separating from society, they’re preparing for a future when society collapses and it’s relevant to live more off the refuse.

Probably some kind of agricultural taxation scheme from 2000 bce or so.

Or Fisher in the 1930s with data driven linear didcriminants.

A huge amount of math unlocked the minute mathematicians started taking complex numbers seriously. Ideally they would be an earlier discovery, I agree!

I've been spending the last couple months working on a Markdown-like lightweight document format. (Short pitch, it's like Markdown but with natural extension points built in and far less subtlety).

A huge part of my goal is to write a "spec" of the format. I want it to be good enough that users can legitimately file bugs against my primary implementation for not following the spec: it is the source of truth about the language.

So, of course, I find it really interesting to discuss the grey space of "shrug, maybe this is correct". This whole process has been driving me to (a) make the language itself resilient and permissive so that it has _some_ answer for nearly all documents and (b) to constrain the output of the system such that it throws away as much information as possible, enabling us to make claims about semantics more confidently.

I don't know if I'm going to succeed at all my goals. This is sort of a small project and definitely far simpler than, say, a web browser. At the same time, it's very hard to narrow in on what it is, really, that I want such a spec to say.

I think the point was that Claude’s output can be somewhat easily and compellingly measured using this technique and its kind of massive (and human attributed).