Links for Janurary 2024

Sun Feb 04 2024E.W.Ayers

1. Linkdump

• Learning Jai via Advent of Code is the best review of the mysterious Jai programming language.

• How cockroachdb encodes table rows in a kv store

• What is the big deal about kv databases

• Atomics and Memory Ordering

• Zed Editor is now open source. I use Zed for taking notes, but every time I switch from VSCode, I bounce off because some feature is missing. Usually it's the lack of debugger or becuase the LSP is messing up. My personal feature wishlist:

  • debugger support

  • diff view

  • Elastic tabstops

  • Zed has a cool feature where you can do syntax aware selection. If I'm selecting syntax node a + b in foo(a + b, c + d), I want a command that will move the selection to the next sibling node c + d.

2. Products

Linear had a data loss incident. Related: this talk about their backend.

2.1. Perplexity

I'm having a go at using Perplexity instead of Google. It's a search engine where an LLM will have a go at writing the answer to your query based on the top hits for the search. I like:

• It tells me the answer to my question with citations.

• It gives me the StackOverflow snippet I need without needing to go to SO.

• I get to avoid browsing those awful SEO'd popover-ridden websites.

• I've yet to see it hallucinate.

I dislike:

• Staring at spinners.

• It's not good for recall tasks where I already know the page I'm looking for.

I wonder how much of what makes me dislike using Google is the fact that everyone SEOs for Google. And I like Perplexity because the critical mass isn't SEO-ing for Perplexity yet. But if LLM-search becomes popular, people are going to make the SEO-equivalent for LLMs, which is wacky adversarial examples and SolidGoldMagikarp stuff.