Welcome to “stupid jj tricks”. Today, I’ll be taking you on a tour through many different jj configurations that I have collected while scouring the internet. Some of what I’ll show is original research or construction created by me personally, but a lot of these things are sourced from blog post, gists, GitHub issues, Reddit posts, Discord messages, and more.

Things we wish we didn't know

I just learned that
you can use it to review a git commit like this and I thought that was really
cool.

Why do people keep telling me to use PGP? The answer is that they shouldn’t be telling you that, because PGP is bad and needs to go away.

Storage for private, distributed, offline-first applications. Earthstar is a specification and JavaScript library for building connected applications owned and run by their users.

In modern Java, the visitor pattern is no longer needed. Using sealed types and switches with pattern matching achieves the same goals with less code and less complexity.

A somewhat compact implementation of the awk programming language

Most functional languages rely on some garbage collection for automatic memory management. They usually eschew reference counting in favor of a tracing garbage collector, which has less bookkeeping overhead at runtime. On the other hand, having an exact reference count of each value can enable optimizations, such as destructive updates. We explore these optimization opportunities in the context of an eager, purely functional programming language. We propose a new mechanism for efficiently reclaiming memory used by nonshared values, reducing stress on the global memory allocator. We describe an approach for minimizing the number of reference counts updates using borrowed references and a heuristic for automatically inferring borrow annotations. We implemented all these techniques in a new compiler for an eager and purely functional programming language with support for multi-threading. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate our approach is competitive and often outperforms state-of-the-art compilers.

In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites

Sales pitches are the only place where “self-serve dashboards" work. In the real world, it's a different story.

Why "business" people don't use metabase/power-bi.

Rust and Node aren't bad for encouraging dependency use -- your favorite language's tools just suck.

piku, inspired by dokku, allows you do git push deployments to your own servers, no matter how small they are.

Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.