Software engineer in rural exile, working on Bombadil at @antithesishq. Generative testing, web, graphics, and systems programming. Also Bach and mandolin.

Joined June 2011
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Wake now, my merry friends! Forget the nightly noises! Ring a ding dillo del! I recently joined Antithesis, where I'm building a new browser testing framework called Bombadil. We're doing this openly, no stealth mode shenanigans this time: github.com/antithesishq/bomb…
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Reading "The Elements of Typographic Style", I got way too inspired and went down a CSS rabbit hole trying to reproduce some of it. Everything doesn't transfer to web. (First image is my version, second is from the book.) Now I want to write something real with this stylesheet!
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Trying out Alegreya.
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Book uses Minion Pro. I'm using Crimson Pro from Google Web Fonts.
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Bombadil playing Tetris at 900 actions per second. Can't really see what's going on (replays, menus, etc just flashing by). This is running the full spec language verifier on every frame. libghostty is awesome.
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cc @mitchellh your point about the importance of performance holds up
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I summon you @jlongster 😁
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Oskar Wickström retweeted
I'm using Antithesis (@AntithesisHQ - the presenting sponsor of the podcast) more to better understand how they test deterministically to find bugs. For one, they have a test infra that can run hours worth of testing in minutes. Eg it ran 24 hours of testing (!!) in 33 minutes:
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Poor man's LTL until operator. The TUI I'm testing accepts Ctrl C and exits *some time after* with a blank screen in the last state, which would fail the `hasIndicator` invariant unless I did this hackery. But it's pretty neat to do this in LTL anyway.
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The property I *would* like to write is: now(hasIndicator).until(justExited)
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Oskar Wickström retweeted
Tom Bombadil is the most mysterious character in The Lord of the Rings. He's the oldest being in Middle-earth and completely immune to the Ring's power — but why? Bombadil is the key to the underlying ethics of the entire story, and to resisting evil yourself... Tom Bombadil is an enigmatic, merry hermit of the countryside, known as "oldest and fatherless" by the Elves. He is truly ancient, and claims he was "here before the river and the trees." He's so confounding that Peter Jackson left him out of the films entirely. This is understandable, since he's unimportant to the development of the plot. Tolkien, however, saw fit to include him anyway, because Tom reveals a lot about the underlying ethics of Middle-earth, and how to shield yourself from evil. The hobbits meet Bombadil early on in their quest, before they reach Bree and the Prancing Pony Inn. He rescues Merry and Pippin from Old Man Willow, and invites the hobbits to stay at his house in the Old Forest. There, the hobbits realize something strange about him: the Ring has no power over Bombadil whatsoever. When he wears it, he remains visible. He treats it as a plaything, making it disappear with a magic trick. Indeed, at the Council of Elrond, Gandalf rejects the idea of giving the Ring to Tom, for he would likely misplace it or forget about it entirely. So just who is he, exactly? When Frodo asks this very question to Tom's wife Goldberry, she simply responds "He is." It's a cryptic answer that echoes God's famous answer to Moses in the Book of Exodus: "I am who I am." Thus, many theorize that Bombadil is God, some kind of angelic being, or even the spirit of the Music of the Ainur (due to the fact that he is constantly singing). But Tolkien's letters reveal something considerably more interesting… In April 1954, Tolkien wrote: "The story is cast in terms of a good side, and a bad side, beauty against ruthless ugliness, tyranny against kingship… but both sides in some degree, conservative or destructive, want a measure of control.But if you have, as it were, taken a 'vow of poverty', renounced control, and take your delight in things for themselves without reference to yourself… then the questions of the rights and wrongs of power and control might become utterly meaningless to you, and the means of power quite valueless…" So, Bombadil is a representation of what it means to take pure delight in the world around you — to experience people and things simply as they are, without any thought for what they could be or how you could use them. And this is why the Ring has no power over him. To Bombadil, the One Ring is simply a ring, and the possibilities of what can be achieved through its power are of no importance. He is able to resist its evil precisely because he is entirely content with the world around him. At the end of the story, having accomplished what he set out to do in Middle-earth, Gandalf pays Tom a visit before returning to the Undying Lands: "I am going to have a long talk with Bombadil: such a talk as I have not had in all my time." If Bombadil is the epitome of simply enjoying life and being, Gandalf is the epitome of doing. He guides the hobbits, fights the Balrog, and runs up and down Middle-earth to help destroy the One Ring. But now that he's finally liberated from doing, he immediately heads to Bombadil's. He does so with a sense of relief, as if he's at last able to access a purer and higher mode of being — a sort of innocence that cannot be fully experienced by those consumed by doing. Of course, by this Tolkien doesn't disparage the value of action. The entirety of LOTR displays the importance of rising up against evil, even in the face of all odds. But with the inclusion of Bombadil, he does remind readers that fighting isn't all there is. Bombadil reminds us that while it's important to strive and *do*, it is just as important to occasionally step back and *be*. Indeed, your ability to do so plays a crucial role in helping you resist the allure of evil… Read the full piece here: theculturist.io/welcome The unsung hero of The Lord of the Rings...
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Tempted to write a macro that takes a trait and a sync impl and turns that into an impl that runs the original on a worker thread with an enum for the messages and errors and handles all communication. This comes up every now and then.
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Word has it we're above 1000fps. Now it's time to optimize your TUIs and test them with Bombadil.
s/460/760/
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Oskar Wickström retweeted
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s/460/760/
`bombadil terminal test` with the baseline (just testing `cat`) reached 460 state captures per second today. That's the terminal grid scrollback and the full LTL specs machinery in each iteration. Looking forward to making this and the browser testing even faster! 1000 FPS?
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One welcome side effect of switching to jj is no longer relying on Neogit or Magit. Both are awesome tools but I prefer a standalone and independent workflow.
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`bombadil terminal test` with the baseline (just testing `cat`) reached 460 state captures per second today. That's the terminal grid scrollback and the full LTL specs machinery in each iteration. Looking forward to making this and the browser testing even faster! 1000 FPS?
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I've done nothing amazing here, just removed async and OS threading where possible, removed clones and worked towards simpler straight-line execution. The crazy bits are all in libghostty and the Rust bindings. @mitchellh and @UzaAft keep up the good work!
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De-asyncing the Rust code base today, feeling like
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The terminal testing got 50% faster just from that...
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And a follow-up optimization of 13x in the terminal test driver made this a good day.
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