Daniel Steigerwald

Daniel Steigerwald

@steida.bsky.social

Local-first (user-owned) software is inevitable. I'm building https://evolu.dev

445 followers81 following118 posts

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

If you loved programming and feel like AI is taking it away from you: the craft isn't disappearing. It's finally beginning. For decades, most of what we called programming was glue. Wiring libraries together, patching edge cases, testing a handful of inputs and hoping the rest behave.

View full thread
Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

It's already happening. AWS modeled Cedar, its authorization policy language, in Lean and proved its core guarantees. Rules about who can access what, the kind of logic most of us implement straight from a ticket.

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

A major obstacle was cost. Proofs were brutally expensive to write by hand. Now AI grinds through the tedious obligations, Lean's kernel checks every step, and we get the part that was always the real work: deciding what "correct" means. Math went first. Let's formalize everything else.

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

If you loved programming and feel like AI is taking it away from you: the craft isn't disappearing. It's finally beginning. For decades, most of what we called programming was glue. Wiring libraries together, patching edge cases, testing a handful of inputs and hoping the rest behave.

View full thread
Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

If you've ever felt flow while debugging, it's the same loop, with a proof at the end. And when AI can generate a hundred proofs, taste matters more: which one is clear, which abstraction is right, which lemma deserves to be reused.

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

Math is already going this way. Mathlib grows every week. My bet: math isn't special. Anything we can state precisely can be formalized, whether it's access control, payment flows, protocols, tax rules or business logic. We've just been writing it in tickets and hoping the code matched.

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

If you loved programming and feel like AI is taking it away from you: the craft isn't disappearing. It's finally beginning. For decades, most of what we called programming was glue. Wiring libraries together, patching edge cases, testing a handful of inputs and hoping the rest behave.

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

We rarely knew our code was correct. We just hadn't seen it break yet. AI is very good at glue. But the craft was always something else: understanding a problem so precisely that a machine can't misunderstand it.

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

That's what formalization demands, and it's why the fun part survives. Writing a proof is hands-on. You state what must be true, split the goal into subgoals, hunt for the right invariant, and watch the goal state shrink line by line.

Daniel Steigerwald reposted

dan
@danabra.mov

prediction: Lean usage will explode in serious software projects in the next five years

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

Delete GitHub spam notification # get notifications, look for the ID of the spam notification gh api notifications # mark that spam notification as read gh api -X DELETE notifications/threads/$NOTIFICATION_ID Also, X is down.

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

The point of work is to make people suffer for money. Until AI feels pain, it will not replace humans. When robots and artificial intelligence can do everything humans can, it will still make sense to pay people to pay attention to you. For example, artists will pay people to consume their work.

Daniel Steigerwald reposted

dan
@danabra.mov

Replying to @danabra.mov

"it's been a long time coming" this is a team effort from dozens of people over many years, and they all deserve huge credit still, a shoutout to @sebmarkbage.calyptus.eu who did much of the initial design on 7 (!) of these projects and convinced everyone else to work on them for a decade

Daniel Steigerwald reposted

Long Covid Advocacy
@longcovidadvoc.com

🌌 A timely reminder from Prof Brian Cox The inability of the scientific & medical community to move on from the rehab model for #ME & #LongCovid stems from the simple issue that they don't want to be wrong. #paradigmshift

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

I wanted to watch a movie with my kids (1, 3, 5), and I finally found something that we can all watch. Great story, educational, we stuck with it until the end. "I Built a Hidden Forest Shelter Inside a Giant Tree" The rest of the post is in images because of the silly text limit here.

Daniel Steigerwald reposted

dietrich
@burrito.space

WebCrypto key management API proposal at WICG, from @pryvitkyle.bsky.social would open the door to hardware-backed keys github.com/WICG/proposa... (background: ~4yrs of chatter in github.com/w3c/webcrypt...)

github.comPROPOSAL: WebCrypto Key Management API Extension · Issue #214 · WICG/proposalsIntroduction As cryptographic key management is becoming more necessary on the Web for security purposes it has meant that many wallets, extensions, and browser features need to re-implement key ma...
Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

@martin.kleppmann.com Hi. I think the new Evolu relay and protocol is a kind of "generic syncing service." I’d be really interested to hear your thoughts on this approach, if you have a moment. www.evolu.dev/blog/scaling...

evolu.devScaling local-first software - EvoluBuilding local-first apps is already a challenge, and making them scalable is an even greater one. It's not just about keeping data local; scalability touches multiple dimensions—from data volume and ...
Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

GetPocket (a read-it-later app) is closing, and I'm wondering whether we need such an app at all. Do we need to remove UI noise and preserve only the text and images? While I believe that "ornament is a crime", this is something else. UI is a face, and I don't want to live in a faceless world.

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

Let's face it, "read it later" means read it probably never, but still having a bad feeling that we should. While it's OK to save a link for later, we also have to work with those links; otherwise, you know (you will never read it).

Daniel Steigerwald reposted

Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

...and we’re back. The new Evolu is here. It’s not true that local-first software doesn’t scale. The real local-first, not offline-first, does. Traditional client-server doesn’t. Read our blog post: Scaling Local-First Software www.evolu.dev/blog/scaling...

evolu.devScaling Local-First Software - EvoluBuilding local-first apps is already a challenge, and making them scalable is an even greater one. It’s not just about keeping data local; scalability touches multiple dimensions—from data volume and ...
Daniel Steigerwald
@steida.bsky.social

...and we’re back. The new Evolu is here. It’s not true that local-first software doesn’t scale. The real local-first, not offline-first, does. Traditional client-server doesn’t. Read our blog post: Scaling Local-First Software www.evolu.dev/blog/scaling...

evolu.devScaling Local-First Software - EvoluBuilding local-first apps is already a challenge, and making them scalable is an even greater one. It’s not just about keeping data local; scalability touches multiple dimensions—from data volume and ...

Daniel Steigerwald reposted

Radley Balko
@radleybalko.bsky.social

One man just wiped out $10 trillion in wealth, is destroying centuries-old legal protections, and seems determined to unravel humanity’s greatest public health achievement. In 3 months. I don’t know how we get out of this. But if we do, one person can never have that kind of power again.

Daniel Steigerwald reposted

NOELREPORTS
@noelreports.com

🇫🇷 Macron prepares for conflict with Trump over his push to support Ukraine. While the US president raises concerns among allies with his geopolitical statements, the French leader is once again in the spotlight, rallying partners ready to support Kyiv. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

bloomberg.comMacron Is Heading for a Clash With Trump Over His Push to Help UkraineAs President Donald Trump rattles US allies with his geopolitical maneuvers, the situation has helped one European leader return to the spotlight: Emmanuel Macron.