Advertisement · 728 × 90

Posts by Bob Nystrom

Fingers crossed you find the right set of meds.

1 week ago 1 0 1 0

I've read so many articles in the past year from developers talking about how much more productive LLMs have made them at work. You know what I can't recall a single one of them mentioning? Getting a raise because of it.

1 week ago 88 20 5 4
Preview
a close up of a cat with a caption that says heavy breathing ALT: a close up of a cat with a caption that says heavy breathing
1 month ago 6 0 1 0

It could also be my honest opinion.

2 months ago 0 0 0 0

Both at the same time!

2 months ago 2 0 0 0

Typo in the headline, pretty sure they got "Bots" and "Humans" flipped.

2 months ago 7 0 0 0
The Value of Things – journal.stuffwithstuff.com

Forgive me, I wrote a thing about AI: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2026/01/24/t...

2 months ago 78 10 7 3

OH SHIT.

5 months ago 3 0 0 0

For anyone in the market for some nerd knuckle tats:

P E E K — P O K E
E X P R — S T M T
P R E D — S U C C
T H E N — E L S E

5 months ago 40 4 8 2

I Reject The Timeline Where It Is Not Butter.

5 months ago 3 0 0 0
Advertisement

Ah, you're right. I assumed that the JSON spec went down to the encoding level, but it doesn't. (Though it does do a funny little dance to acknowledge that JSON string literals may contain UTF-16 surrogate pairs but then punts on whether an implementation treats them as a single code point or not.)

5 months ago 0 0 0 0

The unicorn emoji 🦄 is 1 code point (0x0001f984), 2 code units in UTF-16 (0xd83e, 0xdd84), and 4 bytes in UTF-16 (0xd8, 0x3e, 0xdd, 0x84). The answer is different for encodings like UTF-8 or UTF-32 (JSON is UTF-16). And there is a whole separate ball of complexity around grapheme clusters.

5 months ago 2 0 1 0

Is "length" here bytes, code points, or code units? :) I hate that I can't read anything about string length without that question immediately entering my mind.

6 months ago 4 0 2 0

Hashtag life goals.

6 months ago 2 0 0 0

Emoji Kitchen is the best thing Google has ever made.

6 months ago 12 1 1 1

Have you considered using AI to detect AI posts? Then you could write a post about using AI to detect AI posts and post it.

8 months ago 2 0 1 0

Oh, yes! I just, uh, keep forgetting about it. :)

8 months ago 1 0 1 0

Really wish Hacker News would fork into "LLM news" and "all the other Hacker News". It's worse now than it was with crypto during the crypto bubble.

Yes, gen-AI is important and I want to learn about it, but there are diminishing returns in yet another dude's breathless vibe coding blog post.

8 months ago 63 0 6 0

Trivia: This use of the word "orthogonal" is older than us too. As far as I know, it's earliest use is in the ALGOL 68 report.

8 months ago 0 0 0 0

I must admit to being a political novice, but wasn't the RNC slightly more instrumental in Trump being elected?

8 months ago 2 0 1 0
Advertisement

There are a bunch of reports in the issue trackers for both books already, but I'm trying to not touch them at all. (It's easy to fix the online versions, but then I worry about the online versions getting out of sync with the print versions and not realizing that if I update the print editions.)

8 months ago 1 0 0 0

Yeah, having written a parser for it... Markdown is just not a great language. CommonMark helps regularize it some, but in the early days, it was wild.

I don't have advice that would fit in a bsky post beyond the general "avoid inventing a language unless you have to (or want to)". :)

9 months ago 1 0 0 0

I need to know more about the Tears for Fears Trout sticker.

9 months ago 3 0 1 0

The premise of LLMs leading to AGI is that if just you wordcel hard enough, a shape rotator magically pops out.

9 months ago 52 4 1 0

I still don't really understand this one. 🙃

9 months ago 2 0 1 0

Introducing Dart 3.8! Here's everything you need to know ↓

9 months ago 41 6 2 0
Post image

yes

1 year ago 33832 8860 162 407

It's good to be writing again!

9 months ago 0 0 0 0
Advertisement

I use a stitch counter app on my phone, or a polyhedral die to keep track of counts.

10 months ago 2 0 1 0
Consider Knitting – journal.stuffwithstuff.com

I wrote a blog post about, of all things, knitting: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2025/05/30/c...

10 months ago 27 2 2 1