Posted by david927 1 day ago
Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
Markdown is really interesting. For most readers and most writers it's dead simple and you just get the idea from a few examples or reading a short description. In practice, it's dozens of dialects (though 3 related ones dominate) and dozens more implementations. It's hard to write new, compatible implementations, so they tend to fracture.
(This may be less true with LLMs nowadays, but it might also be worse.)
Often, someone wants to write a Markdown variant because they wish it supported some new extension to help it mesh with the use case and tool they are envisioning. Each one of these is a new fracture.
My goal is a simple specification that's easy to reimplement that eliminates years of cruft and subtle complexity. I'm designing it to be simple and obvious to extend and building a governance model so that extensions can live together, grow, maybe even become mainstream all without ever breaking compatibility.
I initially made it as a lightweight, keyboard-centric alternative to dbeaver/pgadmin, and it now covers 95%+ of the database-related tasks I need to do at my job.
So many more languages have been added to the basket after reading: https://www.norvig.com/21-days.html
==> An FPS game editor, using photos as 1st imput. ==> It delivers a realistic FPS game. immersive-visit-game as we like to call it. ==> The FPS-Runtime is the lightest FPS existing today. It works on any web device, even Smartphones.
I think I have found three, and they will keep me quite busy for a while.
Read/Think: Bioelectric networks as the software plane of morphology
cf. Allen Center / Levin labs / TAME
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.10346 and other work from that fecund lab is ever-fascinating. I have been following their work for five or six years. Much of that informed a giant essay I wrote prompted by an essay contest on Consciousness: https://www.evalapply.org/posts/consciousness-lives-in-a-ded...
Read/Think/Research/Write: How to write a Hard SciFi novel that does not have magic technology genius, and certainly not magic ET showing up to save the day?
A spec fic author friend is on my case about it, because he said "why the hell haven't you written your novel yet?" and I foolishly said "yeah why not? okay let me do it", and now I'm stuck in an honour pact. Write or die trying.
Side-quest of $DayJob: Um, how does the weather even work (metrology)?
Because that's what happens when you're helping an applied sciences team run weather forecasting models, like WRF (pronounced "Worf", which I absolutely love :D). My day-to-day is packer and FreeBSD and shell scripts, but I have to also understand enough about the domain to be somewhat dangerous.
And also... why isn't everybody using FreeBSD + ZFS for all their server workloads?
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x-posted from my earlier question [0] that David offered to fold into this regular Ask HN he runs... Thanks again; this is cool :)
https://github.com/joswayski/captures
Managed to snag a cool domain for it too!
Would love any feedback from anyone that tries it