iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 22/07/2026

Really enjoying reading through the code for [bombadil](github.com/antithesishq...). It has that lovely quality where I find each file is comprehensible on it's own, without having to have the definitions of every type in the codebase loaded into my brain.

github.com

GitHub - antithesishq/bombadil: Property-based testing for web and terminal UIs

Property-based testing for web and terminal UIs. Contribute to antithesishq/bombadil development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 05/06/2026

Yep but I'm quite happy just using nix directly 🙂️

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 05/06/2026

The VM which I spin up is running NixOS and Zed runs `direnv` when opening a remote project. If the project is already using nix then everything just works. If not then I have to spend a few minutes writing a `flake.nix` to make sure language servers etc. that Zed needs are available in the VM.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 05/06/2026

URLS like this: `zed://ssh/[<user>@]<host>[:<port>]/<path>` will open Zed in remote development mode. I use this a lot. Any development I do these days is done in a project specific VM. I have a little CLI tool which clones a repo, spins up a VM, and gives me a zed remote URL to open zed in the VM.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 29/05/2026

The phrase "tool call" is completely semantically satiated for me. It's just become a series of hooting sounds. Whenever I say it I feel like I'm an owl.

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Reposted by Alex Good

Automerge @automerge.org · 16/10/2025

We have a shiny new website courtesy of @spiralganglion.com and @seaofclouds.com 🙌 🚀 Check it out: automerge.org

A screenshot of the Automerge landing page. It says "Version control for your data. Automerge is a local-first sync engine for multiplayer apps that works offline, prevents conflicts, and runs fast."

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Reposted by Alex Good

Automerge @automerge.org · 15/09/2025

😲 We have a ✨packed✨ agenda for the September edition of the Automerge Community Call on the 24th! Updates & talks featuring @chee.party, @daffl.me, @spiralganglion.com, @seaofclouds.com, @patternist.xyz, @expede.wtf, and John Mumm! Don't miss out — RSVP here: luma.com/70fuozje

luma.com

Sept '25 Automerge Community Call · Luma

🍂 September Automerge Call ✨ Get ready to kick off the fall with the Sept '25 Automerge Community Call! Whether you’re a seasoned contributor, a curious…

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 28/08/2025

Moving ranges of text is really thorny. The problems are with concurrent changes, there's loads of annoying edge cases. E.g. I move paragraph A to be inside paragraph B and you concurrently move paragraph B to be inside paragraph A.

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Reposted by Alex Good

Automerge @automerge.org · 24/07/2025

Want to hear about the latest in Automerge? Come join the Community Call Kickoff on August 20 (and sign up for the calendar while you're at it!) lu.ma/zv6tpuu4

lu.ma

Automerge Community Call · Luma

☀️ Automerge Community Call Kickoff! 🌿🍉 Celebrate the season and kick off something new with our new Automerge Community Call! We’re gathering for a relaxed,…

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Reposted by Alex Good

pvh @pvh.ca · 15/07/2025

Automerge 3 is here: the heart transplant is complete! Huge improvements in memory usage and (in most cases) correspondingly big performance improvements too. Backwards compatible on disk and the network so there's no reason not to upgrade today: automerge.org/blog/automer...

automerge.org

Automerge 3.0 | Automerge CRDT

Automerge is a local-first data sync engine that makes it easy to build collaborative apps. Today we're excited to announce version 3.0 of Automerge!

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 15/07/2025

That's a typo on my part, I've fixed it now, the actual figure is 1.3 _Mb_

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 25/06/2025

Oh that looks great! I just finished Plausibility, so this is next up.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 25/06/2025

I very much enjoyed "The Origins of Evolutionary Innovations", which examines in more detail what kind of relationship you need between genotype and phenotype in order to have robust, evolvable organisms.

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Reposted by Alex Good

Fred Hebert @ferd.ca · 09/06/2025

Why do some have a shit time with LLMs for programming while others love it? To succeed, the latter group tacitly creates tons of scaffolding and gain weird new skills. While it works, this posts explains how doing all that is an incidental consequence of bad interaction design in coding AI agents.

ferd.ca

The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine

My current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they're given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that i...

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 16/05/2025

Local first development is funny sometimes. I just noticed that a sync server I run for a small project was storing it's data `/tmp` - which gets deleted every day. No one noticed for three months because everyone has the data locally so the only symptom was slightly degraded sync in the mornings.

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Reposted by Alex Good

Local-First Conf @localfirstconf.com · 26/04/2025

We’re excited to announce that @patternist.xyz member of the @inkandswitch.com team, will be speaking about Beelay, a new generic sync system.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 19/02/2025

It preserves all the history but it's not syncing the game state, it's syncing the level editor. What you're looking at is someone playing the game whilst someone else concurrently edits the level.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 16/01/2025

I'm using Silverblue on my AMD Framework 13. I had a strange issue getting it booting for the first time (github.com/fedora-silve...) but since then it's been fine. This laptop doesn't have nvidia hardware though so 🤷.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 18/12/2024

Under the hood this is using automerge to sync state between two Godot editors.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 05/12/2024

This reminds me of the "dust hypothesis" in Greg Egan's Permutation City. The idea being that given a cloud of dust with enough particles you could map each state of the dust cloud to each state of the brain and thus interpret the dust cloud as a simulation of a brain.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 27/11/2024

I sat down at my desk this morning so full of ideas about what I was going to do today. I have now spent the whole morning fighting with GitHub Actions.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 23/11/2024

Excellent! I love this sentiment from the site: "what if building websites didn't have to be so complicated", 💯. Drop me a DM and let's arrange a call.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 23/11/2024

The quick start definitely needs some work. Any chance you would be up for a chat about it? I want to improve the docs so I want to hear from new users about what is confusing or strange.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 22/11/2024

Just discovered that `gnuplot` has a `kittycairo` backend which can output an image directly to a terminal which supports the kitty graphics protocol. This makes writing little one off scripts which produce a nice graph much easier.

A screenshot of a JavaScript function which calls `gnuplot` with the `kittycairo` backend so that it outputs the plot directly to the terminal

A picture of a plot rendered in the terminal.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 22/11/2024

Babies are also a great progressive overload weight training program, no need for spreadsheets, just keep feeding them.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 20/11/2024

I've changed my homepage (and handle) from memoryandthought.me to patternist.xyz. Mostly because I was bored of the old one.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 18/11/2024

We're working on something like this at I&S. Initially we're building E2EE for Automerge but I think there's a good chance we'll end up with something that can readily be generalised. Here's some lab notes from @expede.wtf who's leading that project www.inkandswitch.com/beehive/note...

inkandswitch.com

Beehive lab notebook: Local-first access control

Local-first access control

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 15/11/2024

I got two usb-c, a usb-a, a display port and an hdmi.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 12/11/2024

Reporting back. I am very happy with this device! The keyboard and touchpad are not quite as satisfying as they could be but still very good. The speakers sound great to my unrefined ear. Also, everything just worked out of the box with Fedora. This is the happiest I've been with a new laptop.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 08/11/2024

This article has convinced me that I should try Bluefin lwn.net/Articles/954.... Gonna be an exciting weekend.

lwn.net

Project Bluefin: A customized Fedora Silverblue desktop image [LWN.net]

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 08/11/2024

Oh interesting, thanks for the tip! This looks like it's related to Bluefin, do you happen to know what the relationship between Bluefin and Silverblue is? They seem like really similar projects from the outside.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 08/11/2024

I'll report back once I've got it set up 🙂. As to Manjaro, I prefer vanilla Arch if I'm going to be in the Arch ecosystem. The appeal of Silverblue is that I'm intrigued by the immutable model they are using and I want to have a play with ostree.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 08/11/2024

My Framework 13 arrived today. I'm extremely excited to never buy another laptop again. I might try a different distro to my standard Arch Linux this time around. Maybe Fedora Silveblue.

A Framework 13 laptop with the keyboard and bezel removed, exposing the internal components.

The same laptop with the keyboard and bezel fitted so it looks just like any other 13 inch laptop.

A set of stickers including one which says "You should be able to fix your stuff"

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 06/11/2024

What I'm suggesting doesn't require any changes to the file format so it's backwards compatible in that sense. But older implementations might see different materialised state to newer ones

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 06/11/2024

As to the "cards" problem. I think that generating a unique ID for each card and modelling your data as a map from ID to card is reasonably straightforward and works for most cases at the moment.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 06/11/2024

I think we can achieve a better API with a smaller change than this. Merging conflicting objects at the same key would be a lot less surprising than the current behaviour IMO, there are still lots of edge cases but I think object initialization is the _most_ surprising thing at the moment.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 06/11/2024

TLDR; when an two objects are conflicting at the same key merge them rather than choosing one or the other.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 06/11/2024

I think for people (like me) who are coming from a filesystem or database world "data loss" is a specific term which means the data is unrecoverable in principle. I do think it's important to distinguish this from "it's a hard programming task to recover". Maybe we should call it "hidden data"?

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 06/11/2024

That said I agree with your main point that this behaviour is undesirable and I want to change the merge behaviour in Automerge to be more intuitive.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 06/11/2024

I think "data loss" is an incorrect characterization here. The data is still in the document history (I think in all the libraries you've mentioned) and can still be retrieved. It might be tricky to do from a DX perspective but that's very different to data loss IMO.

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Alex Good @patternist.xyz · 02/11/2024

Maybe you could have redundant versions of the AppView run like DNS root nameservers? That would require an equivalent of domain name registration fees to fund the operators I guess. E.g. you have to pay a similarly nominal fee to register a PDS for indexing by an AppView? (Just spitballing)

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