Keith Schacht’s Weblog

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💬 from Daniel Miessler (via) #

Fill in this sentence.

"I believe one of the biggest problems in the world is _ _ _ _ , which is why I'm _ _ _ _ ."

Are you happy with your answer? ... Once you've found your sentence, you’ve then found a molten core for a thriving career. And not just your career, but maybe your life as well.

Everything builds off of how you are useful to the world.

This is a really great essentialization. I think his sentences has an incorrect bias against the arts so I'd reword the sentence to, "I believe one of the most important things in the world is _ _ _ _ , why is why I'm _ _ _ _ ."

Notably, I'm deep in the process of revisiting my own answer to this question.

#permalink 10/25/24, 5:23 pm / life-design

🔗 John Carmack on Functional Programming (via HN) #

A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in. In a multithreaded environment, the lack of understanding and the resulting problems are greatly amplified, almost to the point of panic if you are paying attention. Programming in a functional style makes the state presented to your code explicit, which makes it much easier to reason about, and, in a completely pure system, makes thread race conditions impossible.

A significant part of John Carmack’s intelligence is his ability to recognize the importance of having principles while not shunning pragmatic tradeoffs.

#permalink 10/18/24, 8:03 pm / language-design, Carmack

🔗 A complete map of all neurons and the connections in a fruit fly (via HN) #

The brain contains 10^5 neurons and 10^8 synapses that enable a fly to see, smell, hear, walk and fly. Flies engage in dynamic social interactions18, navigate over distances19 and form long-term memories20. Portions of fly brains have been reconstructed from electron microscopy images, which have sufficient resolution to reveal the fine branches of neurons and the synapses that connect them. The resulting wiring diagrams of neural circuits have provided crucial insights into how the brain generates social21,22, memory-related23 or navigation24 behaviours.

I wonder how long it will be before we can run a complete simulation of this brain on silicon? Maybe there is missing information still such as the weight between neural connections.

The brain contains 10^5 neurons and 10^8 synapses that enable a fly to see, smell, hear, walk and fly. Flies engage in dynamic social interactions18, navigate over distances19 and form long-term memories20. Portions of fly brains have been reconstructed from electron microscopy images, which have sufficient resolution to reveal the fine branches of neurons and the synapses that connect them. The resulting wiring diagrams of neural circuits have provided crucial insights into how the brain generates social21,22, memory-related23 or navigation24 behaviours.

I wonder how long it will be before we can run a complete simulation of this brain on silicon? Maybe there is missing information still such as the weight between neural connections.

Ah, indeed they mention:

Finally, the connectome now enables brain simulations—partial connectomes of the early visual system of the fly3 had already inspired simulations of visual processing85. This effort has now been extended to leverage the full connectome34,39 and to—for example—predict taste responses of neurons34. These simulations assume that that physiological connection strength is proportional to anatomical synapse count, either globally34, or for synapses sharing the same presynaptic and postsynaptic cell types85, and have inferred connection signs (excitatory versus inhibitory) from neurotransmitter identity as predicted from electron microscopy images10 or from transcriptomics99.

Fascinating! And there’s more, which I don’t quite understand:

Whereas the simulations mentioned above were based on point neuron models, future simulations could utilize multicompartmental neuron models constructed using the synapse locations and reconstructed neuronal morphologies provided by FlyWire, as well as emerging data about ion channels and receptors from transcriptomics and proteomics.

A couple other points that stood out:

The completeness of the FlyWire brain connectome enables tracing complete pathways from sensory inputs to motor outputs. We demonstrate this capability by examining circuits that emanate from the ocellar ganglion and leveraging cell-type information. In addition to the large compound eyes, flying insects have smaller visual sensory organs89, including the three ocelli on the dorsal surface of the head cuticle (Fig. 7a).

We use the term ‘connectome’ to mean a neuronal wiring diagram of an entire nervous system, or at least an entire brain98. This is in keeping with the intent of the original definition14, which emphasized comprehensiveness. Similarly, the term ‘genome’ refers to the entire DNA sequence of an organism, or at least the entirety of genes. Our neuronal wiring diagram of a whole fly brain arguably crosses the threshold for being called a connectome

I wonder if humans who choose to be frozen upon death preserve enough neural structure that their brains could be mapped?

Read more ▾

#permalink 10/18/24, 7:18 pm / bci

🔗 Tips for terminal colors (via HN) # I increasingly prefer text user interfaces over graphical interfaces. As one example, I switched from the github GUI to lazygit TUI a couple years ago and love the speed and keyboard shortcuts. I think about converting a couple of my utilities to solid TUI so this may be helpful when figuring out colors.

#permalink 10/18/24, 7:13 pm / tui

🔗 Kindle Scribe Review (#). I occasionally think about buying a Remarkable writing tablet. I tried it in the store and was pretty impressed. But I really like the idea of a single device that is both a Kindle reading device along with a digital notebook. I use my iPad almost daily for writing notes, reading books, and the other iPad stuff (email web). It works well enough for reading & writing, but I’d love to try this Kindle Scribe to see how much better it is at those two. Note to self: find a friend who has one.

#permalink 10/18/24, 6:55 pm / gadgets

🔗 The FTC is finally making it easier to cancel (#).

The US Federal Trade Commission is taking action against subscriptions that are difficult to get rid of. On Wednesday, it adopted a final “click-to-cancel” rule requiring businesses to make canceling a subscription as easy as signing up.

This is bad. It’s another small crack in the glory days of web and mobile startups. I’ve had my share of frustrating subscriptions that are hard to cancel, so I’m sympathetic to this. But anyone who has tried to start a retail business is aware of just how difficult it is to navigate a web of regulations to get your store open. Those regulations don’t come all at once, they’re added one “reasonable” regulation at a time, slowly strangling the startup ecosystem.

📝 I’m loving Rails Stimulus; check out this example. #

I’m working on a site that has a left column for navigation. Standard stuff. But I wanted a simple control that lets you hide and show the left column.

When I first started using Stimulus, I would create a left_column_controller.js. Within it, in the connect() and disconnect() methods I would add and remove listeners. It worked, but it was verbose and I wasn’t enjoying Stimulus. Later, I refactored all my stimulus controllers to extract common interactions. Now I finally “get” Stimulus and I’m loving it!

I’m working on a site that has a left column for navigation. Standard stuff. But I wanted a simple control that lets you hide and show the left column.

Check out this example; it’s so simple and useful. When I want a special interaction on my page, I create a CSS class that I can add to the element in order to trigger the change I want. For example, adding “hide” collapses the left sidebar, adding “show” reveals additional fields on a form. Here is how I define this collapsible sidebar:

<div data-controller="transition" data-transition-toggle-class="hidden">
  <div id="sidebar" class="flex" data-transition-target="transitionable">...</div>
  <button name="close" type="button" data-action="transition#toggleClass" />
</div>

It’s simple, but that’s what I love about it. I use this in a half dozen places. Here is the full transition controller.

// transition_controller.js

export default class extends Controller {
  static classes = [ "toggle" ]
  static targets = [ "transitionable" ]
  static values = { afterTimeout: Number }

  connect() {
    if (this.afterTimeoutValue) setTimeout(() => this.toggleClass(), this.afterTimeoutValue)
  }

  toggleClass() {
    this.transitionableTargets.forEach(element => {
      this.toggleClasses.forEach(className => {
        element.classList.toggle(className)
      })
    })
  }
}

Below is a short video so you can see all the different interactions I get from it; you can see just how versatile this is.

Check out how versatile this is!

When I started thinking this way, it led me to extract multiple reusable controllers like this.

This part of my rails open-source ChatGPT app called HostedGPT. You can find the project on GitHub if you want to use it or help contribute to making it better!

Questions? Comment on this Reddit thread.

Read more ▾

#permalink 10/16/24, 10:24 pm

📝 Using Hotwire it was simple to build inline title editing #

After generating the Rails scaffolding for my “Conversation” model, it was just a few steps to do inline editing:

Modify conversations/_conversation.html.erb to wrap it in a turbo-frame
Modify conversations/_form.html.erb partial to wrap it in the same turbo-frame so that the form will replace the displayed title
Add a tiny bit of stimulus to enable submit on enter/blur and to enable discard with Escape

After generating the Rails scaffolding for my “Conversation” model, it was just a few steps to do inline editing:

Modify conversations/_conversation.html.erb to wrap it in a turbo-frame
Modify conversations/_form.html.erb partial to wrap it in the same turbo-frame so that the form will replace the displayed title
Add a tiny bit of stimulus to enable submit on enter/blur and to enable discard with Escape

Check out this short demo and walk-through!

This part of my rails open-source ChatGPT app called HostedGPT. You can find the project on GitHub if you want to use it or help contribute to making it better!

Questions? Comment on this Reddit thread.

And this is my full inline_edit_controller.js for reference:

import { Controller } from "@hotwired/stimulus"

export default class extends Controller {
  static targets = [ "input" ]

  connect() {
    this.originalText = this.inputTarget.value
    this.focusInput()
    this.cursorToEnd()
  }

  focusInput() {
    this.inputTarget.focus()
  }

  cursorToEnd() {
    this.inputTarget.selectionStart =
      this.inputTarget.selectionEnd =
        this.inputTarget.value.length
  }

  submitForm() {
    if (this.inputTarget.disabled) return

    this.element.requestSubmit()
    this.inputTarget.disabled = true
  }

  abort() {
    this.inputTarget.value = this.originalText
    this.submitForm()
  }
}

Keith Schacht’s Weblog

Recent

Oct. 25, 2024

💬 from Daniel Miessler (via) #

Oct. 18, 2024

Oct. 16, 2024

📝 I’m loving Rails Stimulus; check out this example. #

Check out how versatile this is!

May 17, 2024

📝 Using Hotwire it was simple to build inline title editing #

Check out this short demo and walk-through!

Highlights