jnkrtech

Functional programming, TypeScript, tooling.  He/him. Views and opinions my own and do not reflect those of my employer.

I usually only follow folks with pronouns in bio.

Last Notes

2026-04-29 15:36:19 UTC

Common take:
“We shouldn’t need LLMs to produce boilerplate for us; we should just build and use languages with less boilerplate instead”
This has the same energy as claiming that design patterns are bad, because languages should just be more expressive… and then making a new language which ends up with its own set of design patterns.
Boilerplate is not necessarily bad! Maximizing the information density of code is not a good goal! APL has existed for decades. Perl has existed for decades. “Line noise” has incredible information density and is widely hated.
Trying to remove all boilerplate results in over-adherence to DRY, and tons of developers have experienced what it’s like for code to be maximally compacted to avoid any repetition. The result is inflexible systems with arbitrary abstractions, because the degrees of freedom have all been welded shut and because the abstraction boundaries were drawn around syntax rather than around semantics. At very high quantities boilerplate can cause a maintainability burden, but too much is usually better than too little. Quality of abstractions matters significantly more.
Static codegen tools and frameworks are nothing new, and they’ll always have their place regardless of the level of abstraction that languages are capable of.

2026-04-22 21:17:53 UTC

Maybe a long shot: does anyone in the #Seattle area want a free motorcycle? 2009 Kawasaki Vulcan 500, 30k miles. It’s been sitting in my garage for 5 years and its battery is dead but it ran fine before that. I’m moving soon and need it gone in the next 5 days; hoping I don’t have to have it scrapped.
If you want it you’ll need to bring your own battery or a tow truck. I have proof that it was registered in Washington when I first brought it here but I don’t have a damn clue where its title is. (Probably lost in the last 4 moves.) The WA DMV site says I can sign a form in front of a notary to still do the sale: https://dol.wa.gov/vehicles-and-boats/vehicles/buying-and-selling-vehicle/sell-vehicle
Boosts greatly appreciated.
#Redmond #Kirkland #Renton #WashingtonState
https://cache.treehouse.systems/media_attachments/files/116/450/437/710/915/138/original/ee51532331f2ab97.jpeg

2026-01-07 03:42:35 UTC

I have a headless server that sits in the corner and runs all my self-hosted apps. I run them all in screen sessions, so I can easily ssh in and restart them, or turn some on and others off. This works really well until we have a power blip, and I have to log back in and set up 5 more sessions.
Is there a convenient way to spin up screen sessions at startup, and then run scripts in each of them?
I’m running stock Ubuntu.
#selfhosting #linux

2025-12-14 17:13:37 UTC

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@nprofile…rrqe I think about something similar with autocomplete. It’s one reason I love dot syntax for property access. In TypeScript-world we type the name of the values we’re importing on the left and the package we’re importing from on the right, so if you want intellisense on import names you have to do an obnoxious song and dance where you jump your cursor back and forth. Not the end of the world, but an annoyance that really seems needless.

2025-11-18 20:41:57 UTC

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@nprofile…rrqe there’s a brand here (NW US) that sells it pre-fried, in a chewy-but-airy style. It’s one of my staple foods now.

2025-10-22 13:13:51 UTC

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@nprofile…rrqe while I try to avoid potentially upsetting people, I’ve recently decided that replies that interpret my words in the most uncharitable way possible qualify for a block rather than for further explanation. Life’s too short to communicate in fear.

2025-08-06 16:03:46 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 @nprofile…eszm @nprofile…mkep I think a lot depends on not just how hard, but how frequently hard. Java typechecking is undecideable, as is Scala’s, but I’ve never heard of this being a problem in practice. TypeScript’s is as well and its limitations are more obvious because people write whole programs in the type system.

2025-03-30 19:57:23 UTC

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@nprofile…596j TIL about Immer, this looks really nice! I don’t generally do frontend dev but JS’s mutability still annoys me when doing node.js

2025-02-25 17:31:00 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 @nprofile…lpgt If I might ask one more question, I notice that in your Tm type you only store the index, not the type (in the object language sense) of the term. Is that to simplify the example? I’m not clear on whether my life will be easier if I try to store the typing context as a separate lookup table or if I stick the types of my terms directly into the definition of the terms themselves.

2025-02-25 17:15:03 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 @nprofile…lpgt That does, thank you! I was trying to store the indices as ints rather than as an inductive type. Does this indexing make it easier to write proofs about the systems? Or is it to maintain correctness when writing substitution etc operations?

2025-02-25 15:50:46 UTC

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@nprofile…6kk0 @nprofile…lpgt sorry to butt in here, but do you know of good resources on “intrinsically typed de Bruijn indices”? The best I’m finding is a book on agda which I’m struggling to understand. I’m trying to take my first steps coding a type theory in Lean and am falling flat on my face just trying to represent the lambda calculus 😅