Zig 0.16.0 is out, including the new IO interface, and a strong step towards incremental compilation: ziglang.org/download/0.1...

Implemented some fun stroke dynamics based on mouse speed in papaya.io in an evening.

👀

I had an index variable that kept track of the latest processed element in a list. gpt-5.3-codex today named it `watermark`, and I cannot get over the beauty of it.

Qaws (قوس) Arabic for *arc*, *bow*, *curve*. A dependency-free C11
library for creating, evaluating, sampling, traversing, and inspecting
parametric curves and surfaces in 2D and 3D.

A dependency-free C11 library for parametric curves and surfaces in 2D/3D.
1/13

oh that is awesome, well deserved! congrats @ocornut.bsky.social

taxman.dk - Danish tax calculator Calculate your salary after tax in Denmark. Free Danish tax calculator with municipality tax rates, pension, interest deductions and more.

I just vibe-coded a tax calculator: taxman.dk

Here's a blog post about it: apoorvaj.io/vibe-coding-...

This was also my experience with Steve Yegge's Gas Town (steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-g...). Total jank, but there's a kernel of a really powerful idea in there.

Tried OpenClaw to eval the hype. It's janky af; couldn't get it to work in an hour of troubleshooting in Docker.

Pure vibes coding is still a trash fire, but someone's going to build a very smooth version of this, and it's going to be 🔥.

Nope. 😁

I watch @smartereveryday.bsky.social ’s video on the nuclear power plant and there was one offhand comment by someone who works there about how “nuclear radiation” (specifically Cherenkov radiation) is blue, but “everyone thinks it’s green”.

New blog post: Stop over-engineering static websites

apoorvaj.io/stop-overeng...

https://mitchellh.com/writing/zig-builds-getting-faster

i.e. the median Zig programmer is better than the median JS programmer.

I feel that Claude Code + Sonnet writes way more tasteful Zig code than it does JavaScript. JS is littered with dumb defensive programming, with null checks or conditions where here should be asserts.

My theory is that this is because of the delta in the quality of Zig vs JS human training data.

How are Billions of Nanoscopic Transistors Made into a Microchip? EUV Photolithography 🛠️⚙️🤯 YouTube video by Branch Education

Insanely well-made video on EUV photolithography: www.youtube.com/watch?v=B248...

New blog post: Testing that works

apoorvaj.io/testing-that...

Making Software: What is a color space? In which we answer every question you've ever had about digital color, and some you haven't.

This is a relevant read: www.makingsoftware.com/chapters/col...

This was an easy one to implement.

Then I started on white balance, fell into a rabbit hole of black body radiation and color spaces, and then noped out for a bit.

Holy crap, #ziglang 0.14 -> 0.15.1 is quite the breaking change. This is literally 5% of @papaya.io's Zig codebase.

5. Papaya uses Harfbuzz and FreeType for high quality rendering.

6. Text rendering is done in a worker WASM thread. So it is async and faster than JS.

Text rendering is hard, and literally half of all commits to papaya.io so far. So please let me know when you find bugs! :)

3. This is where @mikkomononen.bsky.social 's excellent Skribidi library came to the rescue. This might be the first WASM implementation of Skribidi in the wild. I was able to make some upstream contributions.

4. Papaya supports Arabic, Chinese-Japanese-Korean, Hebrew, Latin and 20 more scripts.

I'm really proud of this.

1. Unlike many other web-based image editors, papaya.io rasterizes text in WebAssembly. This means that text rendering looks the same across browsers or OSes.

2. This means that I had to re-implement a text box, which was not fun.

...

A plot comparing the original PCA and a simpler approximation. Accurate (red) and approximate (orange) first principal components are shown. The approximation seems close to the original based on this experiment. The shown directions are aggregated over five random trials.

A new article on my site: Approximate first principal component

It describes simple trick to estimate the direction of most spread of a bunch of points without running a full PCA. Includes my Python re-implementation and plots of some quick tests.

30fps.net/pages/approx...

Zig's New Async I/O | Loris Cro's Blog https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-async-io/

Zig's New Async I/O

https://kristoff.it/blog/zig-new-async-io/

Hey Mikko, it's basically impossible for me to find your email address anywhere. Any chance you could DM/email me? My email address is on my website.

Zig Roadmap 2026 YouTube video by Zig SHOWTIME

The Zig 2026 roadmap is absolute fire. Andrew and team are playing the long game, and it's really starting to pay off big time—incremental compilation, async await, cross compilation, fuzzing, and more. www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3hO...

Add MacOS-style caret jumping on command+left/right, command+up/down, and option+left/right by ApoorvaJ · Pull Request #58 · memononen/Skribidi Added some text editor navigation that feels native to MacOS: Command+left/right acts like home and end Command+up/down jumps to the beginning and end of the whole text. Option+left/right jumps to...

Mikko and I added MacOS-style keyboard navigation to the Skribidi text library. github.com/memononen/Sk...

*Tin foil hat* Has Google added a special case for Google Docs in Chrome to show the MacOS accent menu in the right spot? It renders out of the window in Firefox, which is what you'd expect to happen when using a hidden textbox to get input. I cannot find a web API do this. Looks like an inside job.

Still long way to go, but got the beginnings of IME text composition working in papaya.io. I'm super impressed that @mikkomononen.bsky.social's Skribidi library even has this feature. Here's a video of me typing in '⌥-u' and then 'o' on Mac, which results in 'ö'.