iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 25/09/2026

They said the kids focus better that way and retain what they learn better. It's reassuring to see caring, smart professionals out there trying to do their best for our kids.

2230

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 25/09/2026

Last night was curriculum night at my kids' high school. Multiple teachers said they are moving back towards having the kids write and do assignments on paper instead of screens.

3230

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 22/09/2026

I wrote a comment with some thoughts about the post here: lobste.rs/s/bvrhgq/arg...

lobste.rs

Arguing about arguments

24 comments

151

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 22/09/2026

I love this post. I have spent way too much of my life working in this corner of programming languages, and I think you covered most of the design challenges.

2120

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 22/09/2026

This is the corner of overloading that gets spooky to me. You need to know argument types to pick an overload, but type inference on the argument often relies on knowing the expected parameter type, so there can be a nasty circularity there if you aren't careful. Then add implicit conversions...

020

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 21/08/2026

It took a long time, but we finally added primary constructor syntax to Dart. If you want some (a lot) of background into how we designed it the way we did, I wrote a long blog post about it: dart.dev/blog/bringin... #dartlang

dart.dev

Bringing Primary Constructors to Dart

An inside look at the design decisions, trade-offs, and syntactic sugar behind adding primary constructors to Dart 3.13.

3426

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 16/07/2026

The set of things they don't know is unimaginably huge.

020

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 16/07/2026

I was driving down highway 706 by Mount Rainier the other day and I swear there was a stand selling cherries and/or firewood every 20 feet. Considering doing another camping trip where I buy all the cherries and firewood I can find on the way and just stare at fire and eat cherries all night.

110

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 16/07/2026

BREAKING: Pete Hegseth Reverses Stance on Gender Affirming Care

Screenshot of news article with headline "US troops to get testerone treatment to make them strong".

2274

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 25/04/2026

What can I say? I was going through some stuff in my personal life and I poured it all into that drone-metal sludge-techno album.

030

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 24/04/2026

Looks like I have my next 21 band names sorted out, thanks.

150

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 25/03/2026

Fingers crossed you find the right set of meds.

110

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 21/03/2026

I've read so many articles in the past year from developers talking about how much more productive LLMs have made them at work. You know what I can't recall a single one of them mentioning? Getting a raise because of it.

510521

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 29/01/2026

It could also be my honest opinion.

000

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 29/01/2026

Typo in the headline, pretty sure they got "Bots" and "Humans" flipped.

070

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 29/01/2026

Forgive me, I wrote a thing about AI: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2026/01/24/t...

journal.stuffwithstuff.com

The Value of Things – journal.stuffwithstuff.com

88311

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 22/10/2025

For anyone in the market for some nerd knuckle tats: P E E K — P O K E E X P R — S T M T P R E D — S U C C T H E N — E L S E

8444

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 22/10/2025

I Reject The Timeline Where It Is Not Butter.

030

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 22/10/2025

Ah, you're right. I assumed that the JSON spec went down to the encoding level, but it doesn't. (Though it does do a funny little dance to acknowledge that JSON string literals may contain UTF-16 surrogate pairs but then punts on whether an implementation treats them as a single code point or not.)

000

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 06/10/2025

The unicorn emoji 🦄 is 1 code point (0x0001f984), 2 code units in UTF-16 (0xd83e, 0xdd84), and 4 bytes in UTF-16 (0xd8, 0x3e, 0xdd, 0x84). The answer is different for encodings like UTF-8 or UTF-32 (JSON is UTF-16). And there is a whole separate ball of complexity around grapheme clusters.

120

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 22/09/2025

Is "length" here bytes, code points, or code units? :) I hate that I can't read anything about string length without that question immediately entering my mind.

240

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 05/09/2025

Emoji Kitchen is the best thing Google has ever made.

1131

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 18/07/2025

Have you considered using AI to detect AI posts? Then you could write a post about using AI to detect AI posts and post it.

120

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 18/07/2025

Oh, yes! I just, uh, keep forgetting about it. :)

110

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 17/07/2025

Really wish Hacker News would fork into "LLM news" and "all the other Hacker News". It's worse now than it was with crypto during the crypto bubble. Yes, gen-AI is important and I want to learn about it, but there are diminishing returns in yet another dude's breathless vibe coding blog post.

6671

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 16/07/2025

Trivia: This use of the word "orthogonal" is older than us too. As far as I know, it's earliest use is in the ALGOL 68 report.

000

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 16/07/2025

I must admit to being a political novice, but wasn't the RNC slightly more instrumental in Trump being elected?

120

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 16/07/2025

There are a bunch of reports in the issue trackers for both books already, but I'm trying to not touch them at all. (It's easy to fix the online versions, but then I worry about the online versions getting out of sync with the print versions and not realizing that if I update the print editions.)

010

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 02/07/2025

Yeah, having written a parser for it... Markdown is just not a great language. CommonMark helps regularize it some, but in the early days, it was wild. I don't have advice that would fit in a bsky post beyond the general "avoid inventing a language unless you have to (or want to)". :)

010

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 02/07/2025

I need to know more about the Tears for Fears Trout sticker.

130

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 15/06/2025

The premise of LLMs leading to AGI is that if just you wordcel hard enough, a shape rotator magically pops out.

1514

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 12/06/2025

I still don't really understand this one. 🙃

120

Reposted by Bob Nystrom

Dart @dart.dev · 10/06/2025

Introducing Dart 3.8! Here's everything you need to know ↓

2426

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 03/06/2025

It's good to be writing again!

000

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 31/05/2025

I use a stitch counter app on my phone, or a polyhedral die to keep track of counts.

120

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 31/05/2025

I wrote a blog post about, of all things, knitting: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2025/05/30/c...

journal.stuffwithstuff.com

Consider Knitting – journal.stuffwithstuff.com

2282

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 31/05/2025

@mrale.ph would definitely know better than me. Compiler folks who work on optimizations are by nature cagey about definitive answers to questions like this because they want their future selves to have the freedom to change optimizations without breaking users who rely on them.

110

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 26/05/2025

Wrote a blog post on noodling around with syntax for access control modifiers in my hobby scripting language: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2025/05/26/a...

journal.stuffwithstuff.com

Access Control Syntax – journal.stuffwithstuff.com

3392

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 15/05/2025

Sure! Thank you for asking. :)

110

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 15/05/2025

"It is a rare privilege to be able to spend ten years building a tool you want to use, and then be able to spend your time at work using it." So true. One of the things that makes me excited to work every day and grateful that my career led where it did.

1170

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 30/04/2025

Yeah, it was a deliberate choice to not use those (even though I personally love those features). The goal is to make the code as readable to as many people as possible, so I tried to stick within a fairly small subset of imperative/OOP code.

000

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 31/03/2025

I'm 2,000 miles from Florida and have no intention of ever moving back but, God, do I miss Publix fried chicken and Pollo Tropical.

150

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 28/02/2025

Doing Russia's bidding is a foreign entanglement too.

060

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 25/02/2025

It's definitely not intentional! The book is mostly print-on-demand and some small fraction of times, it seems that the print gets messed up and someone gets a bad copy. Usually you can return it and get a replacement. Most of the copies look great.

010