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Jonathan Carroll

@jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy

#rstats primarily but learning #haskell, #julia, #rust, #python, #APL, #lisp, and many others :rstats: :haskell: :julia: :rust: :apl: :python: :bash: Also […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://fosstodon.org/@jonocarroll, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact

118 Posts137 Follower3 Folgt
Jonathan Carroll@jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 2w ago

Fahrenheit 451: Keeping in mind that this was published over 70 years ago, it's remarkably contemporary. The story itself is okay, but the message beneath it is very nicely presented, and I had forgotten how beautiful the evocative descriptions were.

A highlighted page from Fahrenheit 451 describing an approach to placating the masses which seems eerily familiar to modern times: If the Government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non-combustible data, chock them so damned full of "facts' they feel stuffed, but absolutely "brilliant' with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
Niki@nikitonsky.mastodon.online.ap.brid.gy · 2w ago

I am looking for work! Clojure, or, maybe, something native, closer to the metal. RT for reach please 🙏 https://tonsky.me/blog/work-2026/

Looking for work

Hey, Niki here. This is a bit unusual. My sabbatical is coming to an end, and I am looking for a new opportunity. Full-time or contract, startup or research, remote or Berlin, individual contributor, ideally—tight team, ambitious product. I am a software engineer first and foremost with 20+ years of experience. I work on technically challenging products, foundational technology, dev tools. I’ve been doing Clojure and web recently, but I'm also very excited to explore closer-to-the-metal programming. I have an eye for design, user interfaces, UX, DX. I would love to work with a team that takes interface quality seriously. Or to work with graphics! I am pretty sure I am good at explaining stuff, including what we are building, why, why this way, why is it important, etc. For example. The overarching theme is to understand computers deeply, and then use that to make better and simpler software. If you care about that too, we might be a great match! # Recent work Instant DB is a US startup building a modern Firebase. I worked on the sync algorithm, performance, DX. A summary of my commit log. Roam Research is an OG personal knowledge manager. I worked on database optimization and a plugin system. At JetBrains, I developed a new Skia renderer for Fleet and Jetpack Compose Desktop. I’ve built many open-source libraries, including a database, a GUI toolkit, a Clojure dev environment, a React wrapper, a well-known font... More recently, Clojure+ gives you a taste of my approach to DX, and Fast EDN—to performance. I maintain several active projects — AlleKinos.de, Grumpy Website, this site. If you want to dive deeper, here’s the usual stuff: Projects / Talks / LinkedIn / GitHub # Why this post? It’s an attempt to reach beyond my immediate network. I’ve been doing Clojure for a long time, and now want to explore. If you are working on a compiler, a database, an IDE, a programming language or another technically ambitious product, touching graphics, typography, algorithms, low-level programming, and you think my experience can help, let’s talk: niki@tonsky.me.

tonsky.me

Jonathan Carroll@jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · last mo.

Open resources for the win: https://jcarroll.xyz/2026/07/01/open-resources-for-the-win.html

Open resources for the win

I love community projects that accept submissions - I just finished reading ‘The Trial’ by Franz Kafka courtesy of Project Gutenberg and right at the end there was this line The gentlemen nodded, one of them indicated the other with the top hand now in his hand. which didn’t read right to me (top hand?). The men are introduced as wearing top hats; surely that’s what is supposed to be there.

jcarroll.xyz

Jonathan Carroll@jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 2mo ago

RE: https://mastodon.social/@ulrich/116692861382766187 I had never switched over to the faster version (I was not aware it was a mere `ln -s` away) but on a M3 MBP I can confirm the numbers in the post - massive speedup!!!

ulrich aꜩ@ulrich.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 2mo ago

Did you recently update your #rstats to 4.6? Is your matrix algebra slow? Not #BLAS ting? `sessionInfo()` shows which BLAS library R uses. Switching from reference BLAS to Apple Accelerate is easily a 50x speedup. Let me know if this worked for you. 🚀 Post […]

Jonathan Carroll@jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 3mo ago

Linting prose around code with vale: https://jcarroll.xyz/2026/05/21/linting-prose-around-code-with.html

Linting prose around code with vale

You may be familiar with the idea of linting for code, e.g. via {lintr} in R which “checks for adherence to a given style, identifying syntax errors and possible semantic issues.” It’s super helpful both for ensuring that your code meets your standards, but also when working in a team; no more arguing over nits in PRs about code style — it can be checked against your style guide rules automatically and enforced with tools like {styler}.

jcarroll.xyz

Jonathan Carroll@jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 3mo ago

Linting prose around code with vale: https://jcarroll.xyz/2026/05/21/linting-prose-around-code-with.html

Linting prose around code with vale

You may be familiar with the idea of linting for code, e.g. via {lintr} in R which “checks for adherence to a given style, identifying syntax errors and possible semantic issues.” It’s super helpful both for ensuring that your code meets your standards, but also when working in a team; no more arguing over nits in PRs about code style — it can be checked against your style guide rules automatically and enforced with tools like {styler}.

jcarroll.xyz

Jonathan Carroll@jonocarroll.fosstodon.org.ap.brid.gy · 4mo ago

@mchav has an excellent post about the DataHaskell approach to data processing in #haskell, inspired by the 'pandas vs R' post from a couple of years ago. Fantastic to see how these languages approach the same problem with different trade-offs https://mchav.github.io/being-less-clunky/

Pandas feels clunky coming from R. What about Haskell?

Some years ago I came across an issue in the Frames repo that mentioned a blog post titled “Why pandas feels clunky when coming from R.” The article showed a side-by-side of simple data exploration in R and compared the code to Pandas. At the time, the author concluded that Pandas was “clunkier” than R. The author operationalises the definition of clunkiness but I think it’s really more of a you-know-it-when-you-see-it thing. You can feel if an API is making you drift further away from your task and making you think more about the tool and its idiosyncracies.

mchav.github.io