It's been uplifting to read everyone's posts about 2021. We all had a hard year, did the best we could.

I entered 2021 feeling very grateful. There was a pandemic on, but my life wasn't impacted. Just some distractions stripped away. But then my father passed away. His condition wasn't diagnosed in time because of the pandemic. So it _had_ been eating away at my life in 2020. I just hadn't noticed.

I feel old without a father. Teliva is very likely my midlife crisis finding expression.

permalink

Running untrusted apps in Teliva

Programming languages assume you trust all code you run. Browsers assume you trust all network access from websites you visit. With Teliva I'm exploring other approaches in search of a sandboxing model that's both more flexible and easier to understand/trust. Here's a first draft.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-teliva-2021-12-25 (video; 2 minutes)

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

permalink

Beginnings of a Gemini browser in Teliva, a way to share small, hackable, text-mode Lua apps.

Try it out:

git clone https://github.com/akkartik/teliva
cd teliva
make linux  # or macosx or bsd
src/teliva gemini.tlv

Largely built from within Teliva. Here's a session of me implementing links. (video; 45 minutes)

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-teliva-2021-12-21

permalink

🤯

https://codeberg.org/ngn/k/src/branch/master/a21

permalink

A simple terminal app for composing multiple toots at once

• Paste in a small amount of ASCII text from the clipboard (no scrolling)
• Edit it at will (insert, arrow keys, backspace)
• Always show the character count
• Anywhere the text contains some delimiter, treat it as a chunk boundary, show character count for the previous chunk.

Amazing how difficult this is to get right.

I've built multiple text editors but still can't figure this out. Data structure this time: just a raw string.

---

I figured out the problem! I didn't have tests in Teliva! Now I do.

It turns out my brain only works when embedded in an exo-brain of tests.

permalink

Advent day 15, part 2

Throwing in the towel. My solution works for the test input.

I get this message for the answer: "Curiously, it's the right answer for someone else; you might be logged in to the wrong account or just unlucky. In any case, you need to be using your puzzle input."

permalink

I'm so stuck on Advent day 14, star 2

No hints just yet, please.

Let's see if this is going to work..

I'm getting some neat visualizations, at least. But I think they're just showing me how screwed I am.

Oh, just needed to print less often. It's going faster now. But still exponential..

permalink

Random page in the Lua book introduces me to a whole new CS algorithm I'd never seen before 🤯

https://www.lua.org/pil/11.6.html

permalink

Finally a day when solving Advent didn't result in me having to add any helpers to Teliva's "standard library".

permalink

For all my years of writing higher-order functions in Lisp, put me in a timed situation and I instantly go back to writing raw loops.

permalink