I still regularly think about that guy that would solve each week's projecteuler.net problem first, and his posted solution is in pure assembly.

historical aside: in OCaml, Lwt won out over Async because the guys at INRIA adamantly insisted any successor concurrency library run on their Windows workstations

We had a good thing you stupid son of a bitch. We had COBOL, mainframes, a steady paycheck. Everything we needed. Ran like clockwork. But no, you had to be the man. Too good for unions. Now a model does your job. You and your pride and your '10x engineer' ego.

ChatGPT and I have a very positive relationship

Capturing a dictator whose legitimacy collapsed to the point that his opposition won a Nobel Peace Prize is good, actually

Advent of OCaml, day 12 👹 **SPOILERS** This ended up being a troll problem. You could get to work like a sap, do some best-fit bin packing heuristic and it'll take 1000 CPU minutes (✋) Or you can ignore geometry entirely and pick trees whose area >= max-present-size * number-of-presents 🤦‍♂️

All hail the shape rotators!

Advent of OCaml, day 11, solved! 😼 A welcome reprieve from yesterday. Today's solution can be solved quickly with "merely" coding interview level DFS graph search with memoization.

Advent of OCaml, day 10, part 1 😩 You know it's getting grim when people are posting just their part 1 solutions. Took about 4 minutes of CPU to brute force. I'm sure someone has a cute number theory solution on r/adventofcode that takes 1ms for the whole thing.

Advent of OCaml, day 9 These are starting to take too long to solve! 😅 Part 1 done (after a fun misstep trying to allocate a 100M element array...) Part 2 seems... non-trivial. Might have to throw in the towel so I can do, like, other stuff today.

Advent of OCaml. day 8 By far the hardest yet. Both in terms of time to code but also it pegged my CPU for about 2 seconds to compute the answer 😱

Advent of OCaml, day 7, solved 🥵 This one threw me for a bit but once I drew the path finding out on paper and stared at it for ... uhm, 40 minutes I got it. Even though this is mostly imperative, I contend you still have edge using OCaml when it comes to understanding state machine transitions.

Advent of OCaml, day 6, done (🙀) This one was quite mind numbing. It reminds me of processing those nasty "grid oriented" EDI order/sales formats that were popular as late as the 1990s I'm sure COBOL programmers would feel right at home with this one.

Advent of OCaml, day 5 done Whew. Getting the details right on this one took forever. Happy that the naive brute force solution (just construct a set in memory of the ingredients) couldn't be done and it required a bit more thinking.

Advent of OCaml, day 4, solved wasted about 20 minutes trying to understand what "eight adjacent positions" meant, squinting at only the row instead of realizing it meant also the cells above and below of course

Advent of OCaml day 3 solution: donezo Pleasantly, part 1 and part 2 have similar enough algorithms that you can get away with tweaking only one variable (digits_needed). github.com/mbacarella/o...

Advent of OCaml day 2 solution in the bank! Spent about an extra hour spinning my wheels because I skimmed the requirements and I kneejerk thought it wanted the part 2 style digits scheme. Which it does, but that doesn't get you past part 1! All solutions here github.com/mbacarella/ocaml-aoc2025

(* Vishnu: creating form *) let v = B (3, 4) (* Shiva: dissolving form *) match v with | B (x, y) -> x + y

(with apologies to Philip Greenspun) any sufficiently complicated description of an implementation by a Turing-machinist will eventually lapse into a half-coherent rediscovery of lambda-calculus

I had this stress dream last night where we were trying to catch a flight and when we got to the security line it turned out the tickets I printed out just had a big database connection error message printed on them. And attempting to install the app failed because I can't see my screen in dreams.

how to power up your github contributor graph 1. pick favorite obscure programming language 2. build a really simple app, like a web photo album 3. find that the ecosystem libraries are missing tons of mundane features 4. submit PRs for all of these features useful? kinda. looks impressive? sure

how did Valve get away with making games on Linux work reliably? if Bill Gates was still running Microsoft he would have invited Gabe Newell into a smoke filled room and given him the speech from Network

it's straight up elder abuse that Chrome force uninstalled uBlock Origin on laptops that their grandkids set up for them

the brutality of 3d graphics programming is that you're mostly dealing with arrays full of floats all day and 30 years of software engineering discipline just passes you by because there's not that much that helps with that you may as well be writing fortran

yo what was hypercard? did it run on mainframes or something?

Your kid comes back from his first semester of CS101. First it was Python, you let that slide. Then came Go. "At least it compiles" you told yourself. But now... C++? Your own flesh and blood, wearing that shirt under your roof. This is what happens when you let the universities get to them.

if the net result of an earthquake destroying TSMC/Taiwan is that every LLM gets repurposed towards rewriting Java, C#, Python and Javascript into C++ or Rust ASAP, that'd be pretty cool

I really thought the hardest part of small electronics fabrication would be understanding EE and soldering stuff but it really feels like it's 90% staring at enclosures wondering how you can fit everything together and/or if you should 3d print some stuff

so are the RL agents DeepMind developed that kick ass at video games like Wintermute whereas generative AI like LLMs more like Neuromancer?

Oh. Yes, the reason clang++-18 was not able to compile things on my box is because I forgot to... *checks notes* ... install libstdc++-14-dev

I was not expecting Tim Sweeney on Lex to bring up the Curry Howard Isomorphism and that the thing that would accelerate adoption of the federated metaverse is much stronger types in programming languages! Looking forward to seeing how the Verse language unfolds!

how did Valve get away with making games on Linux work reliably? if Bill Gates was still running Microsoft he would have invited Gabe Newell into a smoke filled room and given him the speech from Network

I remember seeing Silicon Valley (the place) for the first time. I was expecting an endless row of hacker houses, dudes soldering custom chips in garages, arguing about Lisp macros over ramen, rollerblading in massive arcades with ramps but it was just a bunch of office parks???

The modern web is now so slow that I often do errands in parallel so that I'm not just sitting at a throbber for several seconds per step. How did we get here? Networks and computers are faster than ever, yet workflows are more sluggish than ever?

Thank you OCaml

my latest idle hobby is finding personal automation things I had written in Python or F# that consume 100MB of RAM and asking Claude to rewrite them in C++ so they consume 3MB instead surprisingly effective!

So! My static analysis of the DeepSeek Android app reveals it contains significant spyware and malware functionality that a normal chat app shouldn't have. Full technical details in my new blog post: michael.bacarella.com/2025/02/07/s...

Some of my quick thoughts about DeepSeek and the AI arms race michael.bacarella.com/2025/01/31/d...

why yes, business bank, I would love to have to download all of my statements for the year one-by-one and have them all named statement.pdf

if you look closely, tons of minor things are broken on various web sites during Christmas week the B teams can't figure it out, but they don't want to wake the A teams up to fix it

Kind of amazing how much WordPress Hacked Site Repair Services don't know about WordPress.

we're all here on bsky rewriting our blogs in BrianLang 0.4 while researchers at Google are doing quantum supremacy

if you find yourself editing a dependabot.yml file, stop right now and forget about it and use the open source renovatebot instead. it's so. much. better. github.com/renovatebot/...

the tech community on bsky has some of the greatest minds of our generation but it seems overly focused on tinkering with BrianLang 0.4 to build a personal blog can nobody figure out what world-improving things to work on? is our skillset actually not that impactful?

*enters hour three of ruthlessly optimizing his advent of code solution* "maybe I should rewrite this in x86-64 assembler?" I need to stop doing these.

starting a business where we use zero saas providers

dependabot: let me fix this security vuln for you! me: ok! dependabot: I have exposed 115 new vulns me: these aren't new. it looks like you... subverted our overrides rules? dependabot: 🥺 👉🏽👈🏽

never ask * a woman her age * a man his salary * an ocaml developer what concurrency and effects libraries to standardize on