Working Notes: a commonplace notebook for recording & exploring ideas.
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A busy week with a lot going on and some great memories.
I spent a lot of time looking at named pipes; I really wanted to be able to make a new API where a folder full of named pipes would act a as a way to write to different paths.
Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good way to allow safely allowing multiple processes to write to these paths: as soon as they cross 1mb, things can unintentionally interleave.
Plotly has been surprisingly flexible: at this point I've used it to generate javascript, html, and most recently even JSON. I'm very impressed by the flexibility it offers.
Following another old desire I'm picking up and working with C again, just to have more systems programming under my belt. I spent some time working through the chapter on estimating CPU utilization and fell into all the traps the book mentioned.
I'm tempted to write a general purpose benchmarking script that generates html and run it on every device I can get my hands on.
Another idea I've been thinking about: interpreters, bash shells, consoles in general have very explicit and carefully crafted input/output semantics, so it should be possible to make a Notebook interface on top of them with a very generic implementation: ideally I'd like something extremely lightweight built with HTMX with minimal assumptions on the contents of the shell.
I think this could work very well, particularly as a replacement for
script and even for simpler notebooks. The fancier shell escape
codes could allow for rendering images, with potentially some
extensions to do so more naturally than pure shells.
Instead of implementing anything concrete, I spent most of my time thinking of a good name for this project instead: for now I'm calling it TextBook because I couldn't think of anything better.
As I was writing this a really interesting Tweet floated past and now I'll have to spend some time reading about the new model, and the architecture. The demos were pretty excellent, and if it's as lightweight as claimed I should be able to easily run it locally.
LLMs are a fascinating space.
— Kunal