For me at least, the post is kinda confusing and feels a bit overwrought (“there exists a raven such that the vector of hours”?), and was hard to understand at first. Sadly, in the wonderful year of 2026, I can’t help myself wondering if it was all written by an LLM, prompted by “be mysterious” or similar — though I still wouldn’t bet on it.
The project is cool! It’s a simple visual graph layout system for making your own clock.
I don’t think I have ever seen ∋ used to mean “such that” so I was very confused until I got to the explanation (as it were; why CONTAINS AS MEMBER is being used to mean “such that” is never explained).
I love this: a DSL that makes clocks out of birds and math. Really, this is a glorious little project.
The thing I bounced off isn't the high-concept art, or the abstract math. It’s the combination of the two without enough bridge between them. You have to infer too much about how the poetic layer, the mathematical notation, and the actual machinery relate.
You can do mind-expansion by induction in a math journal. This is not that venue. And this project is too good to waste by letting people walk away confused.
I’d love a very plain “one clock, end to end” walkthrough: primitives, composition, graph, rendered result.
Although the notation choice is tediously abstract (imo) the set of available scalars (and vector components) here is actually a relabeling of Q[e^i], the smallest field containing the rationals and e^i.
It was a fun three minute proof, if any of you are like me in enjoying this kind of thing.
I keep hearing about the "Recurse center". I tried to understand from their website what exactly is it, but only thing I got was "a sabbatical where you work on random stuff and talk with people doing the same" which still doesn't really click. But clearly it leads to cool stuff like this.
I attended a decade ago and it was great, lots of people working and exploring a lot of cool stuff! I think what I would quibble with is that yes it is “random” what people work on, but there’s certainly themes and some people have pretty clear directions about what they are up to and want to learn. If you want to focus on That One Open Source Project for a couple months, that’s cool and encouraged.
Which part of it doesn't click? Attending the Recurse center means you commit to spending a few weeks on spare time programming projects and you get to work on these projects around other people who do the same.
Do the concepts of meetups or hackathons make sense for you? Take that concept and stretch it out to a few weeks.
I’m a little lost though this seems like it could be fun, on safari mobile whatever I build keeps losing some of the connections as I tap on other things so it’s hard to get far with it.
For a moment I thought this was another case of AI psychosis, like the post from week ago about the "content-addressed lattice heap" but this is actually pretty neat.
The project is cool! It’s a simple visual graph layout system for making your own clock.
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