April 25, 2025 @ 09:49 PM UTC
Prediction: People will be defining voice agent behavior using React-esque semantics sooner or later. I don't mean as part of a web app, I mean that voice-only agents will have conversational flows defined using React/JSX. Something like this, essentially (this will seem familiar if you've built a voice agent flow with Pipecat Flows or another orchestration tool): export function ConversationFlow({ patientName, patientBirthday }) { const [authStatus, setAuthStatus] = useState('unauthenticated'); return ( <Conversation> <Node> <System>You are a friendly voice assistant.</System> <System>Ask the user to confirm their name and their birthday.</System> <Tool name="verify" properties={{ name: ..., birthday: ... }} execute={(props) => { if (props.name === patientName && props.birthday === patientBirthday) { setAuthStatus('authenticated'); } else { setAuthStatus('forbidden'); } }} /> </Node> {authStatus === 'authenticated' ? <AuthenticatedFlow /> : <UnauthorizedFlow />} </Conversation> ); } This probably won't be the exact form, since you need to keep in mind that: 1. You can't "re-render" because you're laying things out in time instead of space. 2. The ordering of elements is meaningful, and state (such as `verified`) can only flow downwards since you can't go back in time. ...and design the affordances accordingly. But this model definitely feels more amenable to building good abstractions than defining conversation flows in code.
April 11, 2025 @ 06:57 PM UTC
Fired off a quick thread about a pet peeve of mine: git diffs. https://x.com/KabirGoel/status/1910768886955614672. This... might need a blog post.
April 09, 2025 @ 08:54 PM UTC
Something I've noticed about my work style: I'll hotfix things where necessary, but I'm uncomfortable with treating hotfixes as solutions. I strongly prefer to ask why something happened and how we can change the system around it to make it impossible--all the way down to the system's core design. (Of course, part of gaining maturity as an engineer is being able to weigh the benefits of changing a system with the cost of wranlging debt.) This is a useful way of thinking about and debugging organizational processes as well, and there you don't have to worry about the cost of paying off debt.
March 14, 2025 @ 08:55 PM UTC
You should never use magic numbers for your z-indexes. Centralize them using CSS variables in a global file. Your future self will thank you.
February 13, 2025 @ 11:09 PM UTC
Hah, this is interesting. Steve Klabnik likes to write tutorials for things as he learns about them, and apparently that's how The Rust Programming Language came about: https://steveklabnik.github.io/jujutsu-tutorial/. He seems to have a nice setup for writing these tutorials that's based on mdBook (https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/index.html).
February 12, 2025 @ 10:36 PM UTC
Convert a ReadableStream to whatever format you want (JSON, Uint8Array, text, etc.) using the Response constructor: await new Response(myReadableStream).json()
February 04, 2025 @ 11:34 PM UTC
It would be super sick to have a Mac app that allows you to map domain names to ports on the local machine. It would make local development when you have multiple backend servers so much easier. It would be pretty easy to build too—just a UI around /etc/hosts.
January 28, 2025 @ 03:29 AM UTC
// Convert a Uint8Array containing pcm_s16le data to a Float32Array containing // pcm_f32le data. function toFloat32Array(uint8Array: Uint8Array) { const dataView = new DataView(uint8Array.buffer); const float32Array = new Float32Array(uint8Array.length / 2); for (let i = 0; i < float32Array.length; i++) { const int16 = dataView.getInt16(i * 2, true); // Read little-endian int16 float32Array[i] = Math.max(-1, int16 / 32768.0); // Normalize to [-1.0, 1.0) } return float32Array; }
January 26, 2025 @ 09:58 AM UTC
Neat video on animating height to auto with just CSS, useful for accordions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_n4YONte5A
December 20, 2024 @ 03:27 AM UTC
Being able to implement traits on external types in Rust is super nice—wish you could do the same for interfaces in Go.