Patrick Smith

@royalicing.com

596 Followers 1009 Following

webassembly in elixir: https://useorb.dev · components everywhere: https://components.guide · blog: https://royalicing.com · he/him

A self-contained Zig file to convert a JPEG to a BMP. The input JPEG can be a maximum of 8MB, and the output BMP can be a maximum of 32MB.
I worry our software industry is drifting towards illiteracy. We don’t want to read changelogs. Dependabot just opens a PR we mindlessly merge. We don’t want to review PRs. Codex can digest them, highlight concerns, and write the alterations. We don’t want to code up prototypes. Claude Code can explore five ideas before breakfast. We don’t want to learn what new capabilities our platforms have. We want to watch a video of someone reading and download a set of Markdown skills.
Phase QIP component Official sqlite3.wasm Download (uncompressed) 19 KB 849 KB + JS glue Compile + instantiate 0.3 ms 46.6 ms Open database (68 KB) 0.0 ms 0.6 ms Read table → CSV (891 rows) 1.3 ms 8.8 ms Total 3.5 ms 146 ms ✓ Both readers produced the identical 891-row CSV (31,420 bytes).
My native Swift web browser
Qwen3.5 thinking to itself the best response to “Hello!”
PRICE LIST WE CODE WITH AI $50,000 WE CODE WITH AI, YOU WATCH $80,000 WE CODE WITH AI, YOU HELP $100,000 WE CODE WITHOUT AI $150,000 YOU CODE WITHOUT AI $200,000 YOU CODE WITH AI, WE HELP $350,000 YOU CODE WITH AI, WE WATCH $500,000 YOU CODE EVERYTHING WITH AI $1,000,000
The error message shown after inactivity in Safari: “This webpage was reloaded because a problem occurred.”
Claude’s login page with “Continue with Google” button first
Demo of the CSS Grid utility classes
Say what again. Say what again. I dare ya, I double dare ya!
https://xkcd.com/303/ for AI coding
A scientifically accurate diagram of how Google relates to its ad business
A Tailwind 4 recipe for overriding the dark custom variant that works with both the prefers-color-scheme media query and with data-theme attributes.
Rendering HTML with a layout (set to Español), and 3 children: a theme stylesheet, a JavaScript snippet, and a primary nav.
We have 4 WebAssembly modules: HTMLExample, CSSExample, JSExample, NavExample. The HTML one acts as the layout providing the base html. The CSS renders the inline stylesheet. The JS renders the inline ES module. The NavExample renders the <nav>. These interleave with body content from the layout.
Origins book by Lewis Dartnell
Step 1: call GoldenOrb. Step 2: call Plug. Step 3: profit.
The GoldenOrb.CSS protocol does the heavy lifting, using Orb to compile to a WebAssembly module definition and then executes using the Wasmex library, calling the exported text_css function and assigning any global variables it detected in the struct.
An Elixir module that uses Orb to define an Elixir struct with the theme, a WebAssembly global for the theme, exports functions to read the possible theme values, and a function that dynamically returns different CSS depending on the theme.
Icons on my Mac for Image Playground and Swift Playground
I think it’s helpful to know which of the two modes you are in. Are you in a familiar mode wanting to accelerate to a known destination? Or are you in an exploratory mode, in uncharted seas not knowing whether to expect a reef or safe waters over the horizon? In your familiar mode the entropy is low. You type a few keys and get lots of predictable signal out. What you see is anticipated, and if there is any code I didn’t bargain for I can fix it or generate anew. The vibe is low surprise, and you can keep rolling the dice until you get what you expect. In your exploratory mode the entropy starts high. The goal is to inform your mind or deliver the output elsewhere. It’s bespoke Wikipedia on command, with a similar risk of inaccuracies. The output is possibly wrong and you won’t know how to directly fix it, though over time you can learn what tends to break. The vibe is high surprise. From: https://icing.space/2025/infinite-bicycles-for-the-mind
A function written in Orb, a WebAssembly DSL for Elixir, that formats a date as the YYYY-MM-DD format.
A SwiftUI Playground app that asked both ChatGPT and Claude the same question, Claude on the left, ChatGPT on the right.
For years I’ve been a JavaScript developer. JavaScript runs everywhere: the browser where it was born, on the server, on your phone, on your laptop. But adopting JavaScript means adopting an increasingly complex and bloated suite of tools. WebAssembly offers a restart, again born in the browser and again running on the server, your phone and laptop. It takes things down to the studs, at a level even lower than JavaScript, which allows even better performance. But take an existing toolset and its WebAssembly output is often hundreds of kilobytes or more, and targets a single platform instead of running everywhere. Orb takes the lesson of components that React taught: give developers the raw ingredients and make them easily composable. Make UI components. Make state machine components. Make decoder/encoder components for common formats. And then make those run everywhere. Orb piggybacks on the existing Elixir ecosystem: it has a module system, it has a package manager, it has a test runner, it has a language server, and it has an awesome community. In fact, Orb lets you run any Elixir code when compiling your WebAssembly. It’s just like how React lets you write any JavaScript when rendering out primitive HTML. Orb is like JSX but for WebAssembly. Orb is the full power of Elixir at compile time and the portability of WebAssembly at runtime. Orb is alpha in active development. My aim is to refine the current feature set and complete a .wasm compiler (current it compiles to WebAssembly’s .wat text format) in order to get to beta. From https://useorb.dev
First we disable JavaScript so we only have server rendered HTML. The test visits with the query parameter page set to 1. It then wait for a redirect to without the query parameter. It’s written very much like if you gave a script of steps to check to a real user.
An example of Ulysses downloading all my content. Again. This has happened many times.
Aims of Orb: Friendly Feel like Elixir or Ruby Access to low-level WebAssembly Composable modules Dynamic compilation