valty

I liked the idea of Facebook's watchman. Cross-platform and it would only add a watcher on each dir once, regardless of how many apps needed watcher functionality.

But it's currently uninstallable for weeks on macOS without some pain (https://github.com/facebook/watchman/issues/1199).

There is `rs-notify` and `watchexec` that builds on that but seems a bit unstable.

It's 2024, and we still don't have a good way to reliably watch a large number of files :(

The bit rot is pretty crazy. Watchman's decline was a bit shocking.

There are so many config files that are read in a particular order for each shell, interactive vs login, and for each platform. They all configure themselves using env vars and shell functions. Then every dev tool pastes some config into some of these config files.

It's really out of control.

The shell is probably the most used software on a developer's computer and it's a total mess.

Are there any solutions to this?

I want to build a cross-platform native app that starts up as fast as possible and responds as fast as possible, and has minimal memory use.

Something that when the rest of someone's computer is slowing down, this can stay responsive.

Not everyone has the fastest hardware or much ram; people like to have 100s of tabs open; and CPU's overheat and throttle, especially laptops.

Every service government offers today could be thought of as a subscription service which we are forced to pay for.

Every service exists to offer a benefit (direct or indirect) to the taxpayer.

Why don't we let companies compete to offer these benefits, and let people pay for what they want?

A good way to explore it is: if government ceased to exist overnight...what would be the order in which you would be impacted by the lack of services, and what steps would people take to plug these gaps, considering the fact that we live in a technological age with the internet and nascent AI.

I have watched so many YouTube videos on this and no one seems to be able to explain it properly.

Each explanation is so dramatically different from one another as well.

I feel like its another infamously difficult to explain topic like "monads".

I am desperately waiting for a 3Blue1Brown video on transformers to hopefully resolve this ambiguity.

I am looking for a visual intuition, and something that tries to answer common questions and ambiguities that arise, and explains the history and why we do things this way.

The best approach I found currently is Serrano.Academy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPtG_38Oq8o&pp=ygUUdHJhbnNmb3JtZXIgbmV0d29ya3M%3D. They try to visualize things in 2 dimensions with examples and show the linear transformations.

Karpathy had a unique way of conceptualizing it as a directed graph with a "communication phase" which further confused me.

For such a historic topic, I think we need a better explanation!