Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

Starting to get interesting - now you can write operator modules which behave based on some properties of their children - here repeating the children in a grid.

You can't do something like this in OpenSCAD unless you also pass a separately-calculated size for the children.

Code editor showing cylinders repeated on a 3x4 grid.

Code:

```
// Repeat the children a certain number of times in the
// X and Y directions to form a grid
operator repeat(xs, ys) {
// Draw the children to a virtual buffer once
t = buffer() children();

for (x = [0:xs-1]) {
for (y = [0:ys-1]) {
// Based on the size of that virtual buffer,
// stamp out copies of the children
translate([t.size.x * x, t.size.y * y]) {
copy(t);
}
}
}
}

repeat(3, 4)
cylinder(5, 5);
```

November 30, 2025 at 1:40 AM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

Having a crack at a project I've been thinking about for a while. An OpenSCAD-alike where you can introspect objects you've already drawn - which means less thinking about how to structure your variables for quick thrown-together 3D prints. First prototype works well!

A code editor showing an STL preview with a small cube on top of another big cube. The code beside is:

```
// Create an object and make a binding for it
big_cube = cube([20, 20, 20]);

// Reference that binding to create another object
translate([0, 0, big_cube.size.y])
cube([5, 5, 5]);
```

November 28, 2025 at 10:28 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

I found out about the “Paged Out!” Magazine, which publishes one-page articles about programming and computing. I absolutely LOVE this

pagedout.institute

Paged Out!

Deeply technical zine. And it's free.

pagedout.institute

November 9, 2025 at 2:19 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

Seeing if I can put together a tiny macro pad to live in my work’s office - I miss my macros when I’m not working from home!

First steps - a 3D-printed plate with hardwired Gateron Browns (with jumpers I now realise I’ve made far too long)…

Six Gateron Brown key switches inserted into a black plastic plate, with jumper wires coming out the back

November 1, 2025 at 9:50 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

New Twilight Sad, wooo! Fantastic start, can't wait for more...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9zu...

THE TWILIGHT SAD - WAITING FOR THE PHONE CALL

YouTube video by thetwilightsadofficial

www.youtube.com

October 28, 2025 at 6:15 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

My Jujutsu problems were caused by .gitignore being case-sensitive. Turns out I've been relying on case-insensitivity for a long time - macOS and Windows will do that to you ;)

Patched in case-insensitivity, and now Git and Jujutsu agree with each other: github.com/AaronC81/jj/...

October 25, 2025 at 9:32 AM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

I’ve landed a little warning improvement in this release! Gleam was a lovely codebase and community to contribute to - high hopes for where this language goes in the future

$A helpful error for Rustaceans, C#ers, and friends Gleam has a consistent syntax for constructors at the type and value level, using () for both. It does not use () for value constructors and <> for type constructors, as is common in some other languages. To help folks coming from other languages a set of helpful errors have been added for when they try to use this non-Gleam syntax in their Gleam code. error: Syntax error ┌─ /src/parse/error.gleam:2:12 │ 2 │ type Either<a, b> { │ ^ I was expecting `(` here. Type parameters use lowercase names and are surrounded by parentheses. type Either(a, b) { See: https://tour.gleam.run/data-types/generic-custom-types/ Notice how the error message includes the correct syntax for the specific code that the programmer has written. The programmer could copy/paste the correct version into their code, if they so desired. A link to the documentation is also provided, linking to whichever feature the syntax error is for. Thank you Aaron Christiansen!$

October 20, 2025 at 10:24 AM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

What if we were 3D printing decades ago? Downloading STLs over dial-up?

I mocked up Cura for Windows 95

October 15, 2025 at 6:31 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

After a few days - this works alright!

Only issue is there's some disagreement between Git and Jujutsu about a few files from LFS - Git is tracking them, but Jujutsu thinks they're new.

If I delete them, Git sees the repo as dirty, but Jujutsu is happy and works a treat.

Aaron Christiansen @aaronc.cc · Oct 4

No support yet for submodules and LFS limits how much I can use it, sadly, but I’m keen to see whether I can just ignore all that stuff in Jujutsu and fall back to Git’s CLI instead

October 9, 2025 at 6:05 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

Having a play with Jujutsu VCS: jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/

You can move back to a previous commit and edit it, and all the later commits rebase automatically… coming from Git, that feels MAGIC

October 4, 2025 at 6:16 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

I don’t know how long this has existed, but I’ve never spotted it before… Apple Photos smooshing together geotagging and event listings to give concert photos an artist tag - which you can search by! - is such a damn clever feature

A screenshot of Apple Photos on iOS showing “Magdalena Bay Concert” as a tag

September 22, 2025 at 8:54 PM

Reposted by Aaron Christiansen

K'eeg

@armormodekeeg.blacksky.app

all the best windows software in history is called something like "joe's thing doer". it does the thing and nothing else and is available on a html website in plain text and takes up under a megabyte of space and uses default windows ui elements and will work until the heat death of the universe

August 31, 2025 at 9:53 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

This looks really promising - I’ve read a lot of praise for uv in Python-land, so having something similar on the horizon for Ruby is exciting

andre.arko.net/2025/08/25/r...

August 26, 2025 at 9:37 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

Echo Point Nova is one of my favourite recent indie games, a super fast movement-shooter, and the first game in a while I’ve 100% completed

…and it just got an entire second map as a free update. Time to 100% complete this too 😁

A screenshot of Echo Point Nova. Looking from a height over a dense forest, surrounded by water, with snowy mountains in the distance. Checkpoint markers are visible as tall blue and orange streaks of light are visible, sprinkled across the world.

August 23, 2025 at 8:28 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

I enjoy using keyword-argument-heavy languages, and IMO an underappreciated feature is letting arguments have different external vs internal names.

An example in Swift - variables named “of” and “with” would be unintuitive inside the function body, but read naturally when calling

Apple Developer documentation for the method “replacingOccurrences(of:with:)”.

Returns a new string in which all occurrences of a target string in the receiver are replaced by another given string.

func replacingOccurrences(
of target: String,
with replacement: String
) -> String

August 22, 2025 at 7:21 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

I suddenly remembered the Parallax Propeller - a microcontroller with a custom architecture and language, which I saw mentioned on Arduino forums back in the day and thought looked super cool.

Turns out they released a second generation a few years ago! Awesome…

www.parallax.com/propeller-2/

Propeller 2 - Parallax

Multicore Specs

www.parallax.com

August 17, 2025 at 6:14 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

I've been playing with Gleam, a little compiled language targeting BEAM (Erlang's runtime) and JS.

I like a lot of its ideas, it's the closest I've felt to writing "garbage-collected Rust". My favourite trick is the `use` keyword, which is like a generalisation of JS' async/await transform:

import gleam/io

pub fn invoker(f: fn(String) -> Nil) {
f("Hello")
}

pub fn main() -> Nil {
invoker(fn(i) {
io.println(i)
})

// is equivalent to

use i <- invoker()
io.println(i)
}

August 5, 2025 at 9:30 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

New article! Ruby's blocks share many similarities with the anonymous functions found in other languages - but how are they different? The unique control-flow features of blocks make them perfectly suited to a wide range of applications in Ruby.

aaronc.cc/2025/07/07/r...

Ruby blocks aren't just functions

When you call a method in Ruby, you can pass a block, an additional piece of code which trails the method call. Let's explore how this is different to anonymous functions found in other languages.

aaronc.cc

July 7, 2025 at 9:03 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

I want to start Posting More - ideally about programming, electronics, and the like.

But instead, since we’re half-way through the year, I’ll kick off with a short thread about some music released this year which I’ve really enjoyed.

Hopefully, you might enjoy some of it too 🎶🧵

July 1, 2025 at 8:00 PM

Aaron Christiansen

@aaronc.cc

This is really exciting!

Standardised RBS syntax + Sorbet's developer ergonomics = a big win for Ruby static typing

Nithin Bekal @nithinbekal.com · Feb 25

Sorbet now has (experimental) support for RBS comments for adding types to methods. Now the major type checkers for ruby are all converging towards RBS for annotations, and this could be huge for the future of types in Ruby!

sorbet.org/docs/rbs-sup...

#ruby #sorbet

RBS comments support · Sorbet

> This feature is experimental and might be changed or removed without notice.

sorbet.org

March 1, 2025 at 5:45 PM