ganja.js VS TiddlyWiki

Some people's brains just work this way. Here's an example of a somewhat popular and regularly maintained library written in a similar style: https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js/blob/6e97cb45d780cd7c66...

Once your learn to recognise the commonalities, you'll see examples everywhere. The most extreme and stereotypical version is the billboards written by some homeless people. You can probably picture it already in your mind's eye: A wall of very dense text with little whitespace or structure, and a mix of fonts and colours seemingly at random.

I had a brilliant mathematician friend who wrote like this. He would squeeze and entire semester's worth of study notes into a single sheet of paper, on one side. It was impenetrable gibberish to everyone else, but the colours and 2D positioning let him build a mental mind-map.

For people like this, if you reformat their code even a tiny bit, their mental map is invalidated, and they lose track of it completely and become upset. I discovered this (the hard way) when applying automatic code formatting tools to the codebases I mentioned previously.

Personally, I find this type of thing to be absolutely fascinating, because it's the intersection of many fields of study, and hence is under-studied. There's elements of pedagogy, psychology, literacy, compute science, etc...

It's an open question how we can get large groups of neurodiverse humans to collaborate on a codebase when they don't even "read" or "think" in compatible ways!

I was watching bivector videos and how it could be a viable replacement for matrix algebra in video games and I have been very impressed by the intuitiveness and consistency of the equations. There is this ganja.js for demonstrating the graphics and has a rust generated code https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js/tree/master/codegen/rust I'm too naive to understand the implementation, but I'm glad a library like ultraviolet is here to start paving the use of Geometric Algebra in computer graphics.

Well I've been on a real Geometric Algebra (aka Clifford Algebra) kick lately, and ran across ganja.js [1]. It's a single no deps file that is...impressive. 120k uncompressed, and with it you can construct any degree algebra (including the more esoteric hyperbolic/parabolic ones), render to canvas, svg or webgl(!). It also includes a clever little DSL parser and interpreter (it overloads the scientific notation to name basis vectors!) that lets you construct more complex things from simple things using various kinds of products.

The author, Steven De Keninck, is quite impressive as well, having got his start in the demoscene some time ago. He has a good video from 2019 that explains why this algebra is better than [matrices, tensors, vectors, complex numbers]. Of particular interest (to me anyway) is the 2D projective geometry.

I don't want to oversell it, but ganja is fucking amazing and there is a great deal I want to do with it. For one, I'd like to recapitulate my physics degree with it.

[1] https://github.com/enkimute/ganja.js

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX4H_ctggYo

Great documentation!

> What does ownership mean here?

It means owning the code and the data. With webapps, the code and data are hosted and owned, the users do not own the code, cannot run it independently. This is a clear dileneation between owner and user, and the owners can use that clear line to create artificial scarcity of various kinds. (The most popular being the subscription SaaS model). It's also easier to defend your IP since end users never see your binaries.

I like to make my software single html files whenever possible. People can just save them and run them locally. Havent met anyone who cares yet though.

I like that idea a lot, and I care. I think others care, but yes, it's a niche interest. Take a look at https://tiddlywiki.com/ for an example of a fairly successful project that uses the single html format running locally. However it suffers from limitations on File|Save which often requires a separate runtime of some kind to support.

Another project that approaches this ideal is https://redbean.dev/, @jart's tiny, performant, featureful single-file webserver. In this case the "single file" is a server executable + zip whose state must be updated on the command-line, but I think hits a sweet spot in terms of practicality, and a global minima when it comes to minimizing dependencies. (Redbean bundles SQLite and Lua so it's also possible to do through-the-web state updates as in a traditional webapp.)

My own project, Simpatico, aspires to be something along these lines. Eventually your browser tab is both a client and server process, connecting via websockets to other connected browsers, storing all state locally. I call this pattern "monomorphism", a play on the "isomorphic" javascript SPA. The server[2] is currently written in ~1 node file, but eventually I would like to port to redbean (and greenbean, the websocket version of redbean, but it isn't quite ready yet). The server grew several features to support a fast, practical BTD loop using markdown[1], and safe, performant execution on the public internet[2], but ultimately I'd like to pare it down to serving a single html file and allow the connected clients to provide all diversity of experience. I've used it to explore all kinds of browser apis, from crypto[3] to svg[4] to writing my own libraries (combine[4] and stree[5]). And it's all running locally, and easily hosted on a $5 VPS, and its all open source.

1 - https://simpatico.io/lit.md

2 - https://simpatico.io/reflector

3 - https://simpatico.io/crypto

4 - https://simpatico.io/combine

5 - https://simpatico.io/stree

I use TiddlyWiki. It's a portable editable wiki that doesn't require a web server or web hosting. You open it from your computer, edit it, and save it. You get all of the linking that you'd expect to see in a wiki, and it's super readable and easy to use.

It is a single-HTML-file TiddlyWiki instance that runs in a web browser (offline as well as online), meant to be downloaded and stored wherever suits you best. Everything that you see when working in BASIC Anywhere Machine (everything that makes "BAM" work as an IDE and all BASIC programs) exist in the one HTML file.

TiddlyWiki still works as intended: https://tiddlywiki.com/#GettingStarted but there are so many different clients to run on. Mobile or Desktop ? What OS? What Browser?

This effort https://val.packett.cool/blog/tiddlypwa/ is remarkable as the mobile side of saving is not as robust as on the desktop side of things and there is a scaling limit on performance as the number of tiddlers grows. Also the syncing between tw documents between different desktop/mobile clients can be a challenge with diffing.

Since then I've moved back to plain vanilla vim for a wiki (map gf :tabe ) but tw.html is still good for data other than plain text and TiddlyPWA https://tiddly.packett.cool/ is a great effort to revisit TiddlyWiki again.

You should check out TiddlyWiki as it’s designed around the concept that small linkable notes are the best way to organize.

https://tiddlywiki.com/

It’s html based so you can access it in the same way you would access a website but it can be locally stored. Saving is a bit tricky but there are multiple solutions detailed on their site. https://tiddlywiki.com/

Hi, you can use tw on nodejs with npm package tiddlywiki....