Bob Nystrom

It could also be my honest opinion.

Both at the same time!

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

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

OH SHIT.

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

I Reject The Timeline Where It Is Not Butter.

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.)

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.

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.

Hashtag life goals.

Emoji Kitchen is the best thing Google has ever made.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.)

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)". :)

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

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

I still don't really understand this one. 🙃

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

yes

It's good to be writing again!

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

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

@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.

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...