Ranting and Reflections

ML Understanding

OpenAI announced the release of GPT-4 a few days ago, with the not-surprisingly flurry of news reports, quite a few hyperbolic, and a few good. I watch RSS feeds (with the amazing open-source NetNewsWire app) of various individuals, forums, and a few online sources for my technology news – so it was a fairly notableContinue reading “ML Understanding”

CRDT work

What are you working on these days? I’m all over the place at the moment, but one topic keeps standing out – working on CRDTs. If you don’t know this crazy arsed geek acronym, it stands for Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, and it’s a means to enable eventually consistent data replication – “sync” in aContinue reading “CRDT work”

Creating an XCFramework

In the past couple of years, I’ve had the occasion to want to make an XCFramework – a bundle that’s used by Apple platforms to encapsulate binary frameworks or libraries – a couple of times. In both cases, the reason wasn’t that I didn’t want to ship the source, but because the source was fromContinue reading “Creating an XCFramework”

Large language models and Search

Microsoft’s made an aggressive and delightful splash in the search market by deeply integrating the guts of OpenAI’s large language model ChatGPT with Bing Search. There’s an impressive interview by Joanna Stern on the topic (hat tip to Daring Fireball for the link). There’s a potential there that’s amazing, and others that are truly frightening.Continue reading “Large language models and Search”

Native support for USD tools on an M1 Mac

I saw USD release 22.08 drop a few weeks ago, and notably within its release notes is the sentence: “Added support for native builds on Apple Silicon.” I struggled quite bit with getting USD both installed and operational because, as it turns out, there’s a bit of quirk to Python that made things more difficult.Continue reading “Native support for USD tools on an M1 Mac”

I wish contextual SwiftUI was more predictable

I’m not certain how to phrase this. It’s either that I wish I was better at predicting what a SwiftUI view would look like, or that I wish SwiftUI was more predictable at how views render in different contexts. I recently built a multi-platform SwiftUI utility app, and was struck by how often I ranContinue reading “I wish contextual SwiftUI was more predictable”

What Apple might do with distributed computing

I’m excited to see not only async-await making it thoroughly into the language (in Swift 5.6), but also the extensions that enable actors and distributed actors with this general sweep of the Swift language embracing concurrency. It’s been several years in the making, and the past year has been building much of these base piecesContinue reading “What Apple might do with distributed computing”

What being an Open Source Developer means to me

I’ve periodically described myself as an “open source developer” in those pithy biography blocks that you sometimes get (or have) to create. Developing and providing open source software means something specific to me, and I’d like to share how I think about it. At it’s core, it’s only a little about solving problems with codeContinue reading “What being an Open Source Developer means to me”

Language and framing

Quite a few years ago, I was fortunate to sit in a presentation where Yukihiro Matsumoto talked about his inspirations when making the Ruby programming language. One of the references he cited was the 1966 science fiction novel from Samuel Delaney Babel-17. I was in Portland at the time, and was able to get aContinue reading “Language and framing”

Chart

I’m starting, or more specifically re-starting, a project that I envisioned a couple years ago. In some of the apps I’ve created, I’ve found it useful – sometimes critical to what I want – to provide small charts (visualizations) of data from the app. One example of this is a series of histograms that showContinue reading “Chart”