Nikita nikivdev

Self Types for better languages

This post intends to promote self types as a safer, simpler, and faster alternative to inductive types and dependent pattern matching at the core of programming languages.

In summary, it should go through the problems that self types try to solve, the problems that they introduce, and then a concrete solution proposed at the end, with a syntax-directed, bidirectional type system with decidable checking.

SYNTAX at the Syntax section.

The problem

During the past days, this great article by Sam Pruden has been making the rounds around the gamedev community. While the article provides an in-depth analysis, its a bit easy to miss the point and exert the wrong conclusions from it. As such, and in many cases, users unfamiliar with Godot internals have used it points such as following:

Godot C# support is inefficient
Godot API and binding system is designed around GDScript
Godot is not production ready

In this brief article, I will shed a bit more light about how the Godot binding system works and some detail on the Godot

The art of prompt coding 🦾

Apps used: Cursor.so / github copilot chat / Amazon Q / codeium

⚠️️ Before you disregard the idea of prompt coding ⚠️️ Don't! Because everyone will be prompt-coding soon enough.

Anti-hype LLM reading list

Goals: Add links that are reasonable and good explanations of how stuff works. No hype and no vendor content if possible. Practical first-hand accounts of models in prod eagerly sought.

Foundational Concepts

Pre-Transformer Models

`$HOME`, Not So Sweet `$HOME`

Preface
1 What is $HOME to you?
2 Setup
- 2.1 Linux
2.1.4 xdg-user-dirs

Binary Lambda Calculus

The Binary Lambda Calculus (BLC) is a minimal, pure functional programming language invented by John Tromp in 2004 [1] based on a binary encoding of the untyped lambda calculus in De Bruijn index notation.

Creating an Expo app in 2023

12th July, 2023. I'm going to try creating an iOS app called Paranovel, using Expo. My environment for mobile app dev (Xcode, Ruby, etc.) should be in reasonably good shape already as I frequently develop with React Native and NativeScript.

Creating the app

Go to https://docs.expo.dev, and see the Quick Start: npx create-expo-app paranovel

This runs with no problem, then I get this macOS system popup:

Adapting the twelve-factor methodology for "Qubes-native" multi-VM applications: a preliminary sketch[^1]

Introduction

Virtualization is the conceptual technology on which modern services (server applications) are built. Whether an application happens to run on a fully- or para-virtualized VM[^2] or is containerized—or even runs on a “bare-metal” physical server after all—most modern services are designed in isolated, replicated, disposable components on commodity hardware.[^3] The [“twelve-factor methodology”][wiggins] (2011) is an influential articulation of the principles

	"""
	The most atomic way to train and run inference for a GPT in pure, dependency-free Python.
	This file is the complete algorithm.
	Everything else is just efficiency.

	@karpathy
	"""

	import os # os.path.exists
	import math # math.log, math.exp

	import { Database } from "bun:sqlite";
	import ronin from 'ronin';
	import { Transaction, type Model } from 'blade-compiler';
	import * as rawModels from './schema';

	const database = new Database('db.sqlite');
	const models = Object.values(rawModels) as unknown as Array<Model>;

	const { get } = ronin({
	fetch: (async (request: Request): Promise<Response> => {