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Robert Byrne

@kapitar.bsky.social
832 followers 233 following 831 posts

Founder / Web developer (F#) / Filmmaker Currently working on loosethought.com Film/Art: kapitar.com

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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Yes, it seems to be stuck at a 'journeyman' stage of software design. Not bad in the small, and can solve real problems for sure, but can't mark creative leaps and find those nice design abstractions. When the design is good, adding things gets easier over time, not harder.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
Weary of #ai It poisons the task with a lot of stupid assumptions and clumsiness. You spend all day cleaning it up. The next day, when you're fresh and creative, you realise all the simple and obvious approaches. Even still, the whole thing feels like a net loss.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Seeing a lot of these fancy 404s lately, how come people are hitting them so frequently I wonder, bogus AI referrals? Or just a fashion trend?
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Hey all, aware of any good 'done for you' site submission services? All the various listing/category places that you should submit your app to. Just updated loosethought.com and it's quite a drag doing it all manually.. #buildinpublic
loosethought.com
Visual Mindmapping for Creative Thinkers - Loose Thought
A mindmapping tool for visual thinkers who want to understand things deeply. Make sense of complex topics.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 26/05/2026
Hi Niklas, been away from bsky for quite a while! I don't think I do I'm afraid, I hadn't even realised there *was* a waitlist!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
I think there's an obligatory xkcd that goes into this, but only for line endings!
A screen capture of some plain monospaced text, showing how words sometimes line up and create 'vertical text rivers'
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 21/02/2026
Very interesting indeed!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 19/02/2026
Was such a luxury when you could eventually assume 1024x768 as a minimum screen size.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
Was such a treat letting those little grit patches build up on the wheels and then scraping them off! Like getting a brand new mouse 🙂
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
Jesus..
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 05/02/2026
Congrats 🙂
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Ah yes I see what you mean. I like the way the computer works in Star Trek. You talk to it and it’s intelligent, but it doesn’t have a personality or any sense of consciousness. The sycophantic personality-driven LLM approach feels like the wrong direction.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
Why replace? If conversion was the whole deal we wouldn’t have developed pre -omputing communication technology! I think there will always be a desire for visual and conceptual specificity.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 29/01/2026
Yea it seems like this will be a complimentary form of computation. In the same way that the brain is split in two and provides different forms of attention - the certain specific and the fuzzy whole. Computing has only had the former up till now and it seems like both are best.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
I agree and all that, but it would be interesting to do a ‘double blind’ analysis of handmade LOB/Enterprise software and see how they compare
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Wow, I suppose subtle isn’t going to get you results
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
Woot!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 18/01/2026
Interesting. Is there an rss feed ooc?
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
This idea of letting it run roughshod over real projects seems bizarre to me.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
Yea I suppose thats the nature of the beast, re popularity in the training corpus. Out of desperation I asked it to diagnose a “select must be broken” style bug in F# with a custom MobX mvu style state lib. (I fed it the code for this lib as well) It was just utterly useless 🙂
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
In what way ooc? I don’t use it but theres no shortage of people claiming it’s substantially different etc (in a positive sense 🙂 )
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Right, didn’t occur to me!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Ah! I was more thinking of Gary though, bringing a phone into the actual steam room 🙂
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 15/01/2026
Yea my first thought too, you brought a phone into the sauna? 🙂
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 12/01/2026
The kind of damage it must do to you to reflexively spit this venom all day long, with a chorus of others..
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
Seems like the actual bug I'm hitting is something else, a timing issue, the numerics there aren't affecting it. Ach. The still cause problems elsewhere, but it's not solving the issue I have today..
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
There are other issues with `int option`, where it will add this | 0 to an expression and make it impossible to have a None value. the compiler *really* wants to add these and its very hard to work around it. However, I suspect this will not be a pleasant or easy thing to fix
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
It's not very clear from the screenshot above, the left is Fable 4 output, and the right is Fable 5. The later version of the compiler has injected another of these into a really complex numeric expression (~~value_4 | 0) which has caused it to act differently.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 02/01/2026
by 'numeric' above I mean 'an integer'. this trick forces the JS engine to convert the number to use its internal integer representation. This means sense, but Fable uses it too much, and it causes really hard to trace bugs. ..
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 10/11/2025
Yep this will be my last year as well. Apart from the obnoxious marketing, I occasionally doubt that will actually sync stuff, that it will definitely be available on other machines. I don’t trust it anymore.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 04/11/2025
Thankfully it’s 11-4 but yep!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
Agreed! It's nice to have both, but thinking really requires good keyboard support.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Added richer keyboard editing to loosethought.com Personally, I really love the the 'jump' tool, which assigns shortcut keys to each note you can see 🙂 Brainstorm, capture notes and run through research without using a mouse, and keep the benefits of visual thinking. #buildinpublic #ux
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Youll also see this if you are using decorators/Mediatr in C#. The decorators set up the context (database connection, impersonation, tenant id etc) so you want the actual work to happen there, rather than passing it out to some upstream caller.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 28/10/2025
Count me in!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
I saw the keynote DHH gave at the most recent Rails conference, very inspirational! My Windows days are definitely numbered. If only the Framework as good as a Macbook, wrt battery. I have a 4 your old M2 Air, and I still toss it in a bag without bringing so much as a USB cable with me.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
Yes please do, curious about how this works out. How much information do you need to provide, copy/screens etc? And of course, what kind of impact it might have!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
Yes, Id completely forgotten about this!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
If you have any Apple devices Ive found their built in password thing works just fine. Integration on Apple devices is obviously great, and tolerable on Windows as well
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
And not so slowly!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 18/10/2025
Hey! I think you’ll have more luck if you add a profile picture (of yourself) and use your actual name. My first reaction was “spambot”, but you appear to be genuine, as you say 🙂
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 14/10/2025
Fantastic! Always forget that ‘shadowing’ doesn’t work and end up with a more laborious double property workaround
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
*doesn’t
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
One you do this and see that the world does end you can let more of them go back into the void. 🙂
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 10/10/2025
Always amazes me that there are so many good ones still there. There’s almost an infinite supply of them, waiting to be found
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 09/10/2025
Yea I was also curious about that. 300 is not nothing, but submitting to these directories is such a drag, some of them have several pages of stuff to fill out.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 08/10/2025
Woot!
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
All the time, exact same thing (DMARC) Agreed that they seem to be auto generated and appear whenever you publish a site somewhere, particularly a startup directory.
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Robert Byrne @kapitar.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Yes there really is no substitute! Particularly when you get into that spinning your wheels/hopeless state of mind!
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Reposted by Robert Byrne
Braidpoint @braidpoint.bsky.social · 06/10/2025
Forward progress with #fsharp for #javascript with CloudflareFS. Three sample projects: "HelloWorker", "R2WebDAV" which is a port of the TypeScript project I updated, and a "Simple-CLI" that manages them both via management API (No TOML, no wrangler). @cloudflare.social github.com/speakeztech/...
default page for R2 WebDAV server sample projectDefault page for HelloWorker sample project
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