- d2 is a standalone executable compiler, I once tried mermaid-cli (mmdc) but couldn't get it to work properly plus anything I need to install with npm scares the hell out of me
- ASCII rendering: I love rendering to ASCII which I can copy-paste around.
But I do use mermaid a lot embedded in other programs (e.g Obisidian). The selection of different diagram types is amazing.
I've been fully on DDG for years but becoming slowly skeptical & looking for alternatives.
1. They're leaning heavily into "responsible AI", much like Mozilla
2. Might be just me but I feel like their algorithm became significantly worse recently. Over the years they've gone from being worse than Google in the early days to steadily improving & overtaking Google on quality (I made heavy use of !g until I started slowly realising it was no longer giving me better results). But now I feel like they've reversed & regressed again.
Brilliant. Really nice looking TUI.
One thing I noticed is that I still find myself using the mouse to click the form fields. The keyboard navigation seems to sometimes get stuck on fields and I then can't move around anymore. Is there an easy trick for jumping between the fields?
It's interesting how the level of public computer/computing knowledge changed.
The Byte magazine goes into deep details of hardware, software and programming.
I feel that nowadays a lot of it is taking for granted or very few people care how things work under the hood. But probably at the time of the Byte magazine only very few people cared too :-).
I also noticed that they struggle reversing strings.
Ask it to "generate a list of the 30 biggest countries together with their name in reverse". Most of the results will be correct but you'll likely find some weird spelling mistakes.
It's not something they can regurgitate from previously seen text. Models like Claude with background code execution might get around that.
We didn't find many good up-to-date resources online on the hardware side of things - kinda why we wanted to write about it. The networking aspect was the most mystical - I highly recommend "BGP in the datacenter" by Dinesh Dutt on that (I think it's available for free via NVidia). Our design is heavily influenced by the ideas discussed there.
We talked to a few, I think they're called MSPs? We weren't super impressed. We decided to YOLO it. There are probably great outfits out there, but it's hard to find them through the noise. We're mostly software and systems folks, but Railway is a infrastructure company so we need to own stuff down to the cage-nut - we owe it to our users. All engineering, project management and procurement is in-house.
We're lucky to have a few great distributors/manufacturers who help us pick the right gear. But we learnt a lot.
We've found a lot of value in getting a broker in to source our transit though.
My personal (and potentially misguided) hot take is that most of the baremetal world is stuck in the early 2000's, and the only companies doing anything interesting here the likes of AWS,Google and Meta. So the only way to innovate is to stumble around, escape the norms and experiment.
We're blessed with some kickass investors. They gave us just the right level of scrutiny. We were super clear about why we wanted to do this, we did it, and then they invested more money shortly after the first workloads starting running on metal
If you're looking for great partners, who actually have the gal to back innovation, you'd be hard pressed to do better than Redpoint (Shoutout Erica and Jordan!)
I'm using Linux as my main desktop for so long now (>15yrs) that I probably wouldn't be able to handle a modern Windows system anymore. I have not touched any Windows installation for years, and everytime I have to help my wife with some issue on her Windows laptop I just find it crazy how people can tolerate that.
It might not be on the same quality level as MacOS but I like the freedom of choice Linux gives me.
