hacking on AR/VR @apple, previously: engineer @envoy · founder @getbotmetrics (acq by @microsoft) · founder @nitrous · Inadvertently started Addressgate in 2012
San Francisco
Joined January 2008
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exciting news from bot land! @HowdyAI has acquired @getbotmetrics, our side of the story: blog.getbotmetrics.com/howdy… xitter.cf/benbrown/status/884823…
dat feeling of stolen valor when FSD gives way for a biker on the freeway and they flash me a V-sign. Not me boss
I got into @NYTGames mini crossword in the fall of '24 after seeing @snehamenon do it for months and have been obsessed with it since. Two years later I've completed every mini crossword 😅
Eagle-eyed viewers might notice that there are two incomplete days in Nov '16 but I swear it's an @NYTGames bug. My OCD brain implores you to fix it!
Arun Thampi retweeted
android foldables could have been out for another decade and you still wouldn't have seen the ingenuity from developers that you are seeing for the Duo even before it is publicly available
Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo. Open the Duo to pick and 'insert' the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening.
Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman!
It was fun making this at @bitrig hacks today.
Arun Thampi retweeted
Today we’re releasing the Wego CLI with an accompanying skill for your AI agents.
For me, planning a vacation used to mean opening 12 browser tabs and managing a spreadsheet, over multiple weekends.
Now I ask my agents to:
1. Remember I hate red-eyes at the start of a family vacation.
2. Search across multiple dates.
3. Show me the cost of time: how much a stopover saves me vs how much time it costs.
4. Show what flexibility costs: refundable flights and hotel rooms.
Then turn the results into something I can understand quickly. My go-to is an HTML artifact with data visualizations, so I can see the trade-offs at a glance. A few examples below.
Wego CLI is in Research Preview: docs.wego.com
Excited to see what you do with this! Do share what you build and tag @wego
ALT Calendar comparing total and per-night costs for 5-, 6- and 7-night trips across different departure dates. Controls let you compare hotel cancellation policies and flight fares.
ALT Scatter plot comparing flight prices with total travel time for both legs. In this search, nonstop flights are cheapest and fastest across all 15 date windows, taking roughly 15 hours in total. Connecting itineraries cost more and take longer.
ALT Flight fare comparison for three travellers, 21–28 December. The chart highlights why checking cancellation fees matters even when a fare is labelled refundable.
ALT Abu Dhabi hotel shortlist comparing family-review scores with overall guest ratings. Al Wathba scores 9.5 from families and costs AED 1,757 per night. Conrad Abu Dhabi Etihad Towers scores 9.4 and costs AED 1,171. Emirates Palace Mandarin Oriental scores 9.4 and costs AED 2,646. All three list free cancellation.
Arun Thampi retweeted
When Dynamic Workers, Facets, Shell, and other cool tech came out at Cloudflare, it was obvious to me what kind of things this unlocked. It was also adjacent to some problems I've been thinking about for a while.
I took a bet on it, left my dream job, and jumped all in.
Excited to share that @tenderprompt is no longer a zero-ARR company and it's growing.
Shopify merchants want to vibe code, we are making it safe and easy.
🍊☁️
Arun Thampi retweeted
Haven’t coded in 15 years. Just vibe coded and deployed a full React app over spring break from a Mac Mini. No laptop, IDE or terminal. Just me and my trusty Claude Dispatch.
We live in crazy times!
whattowear-mvp.netlify.app
(it’s an MVP, be kind)
Arun Thampi retweeted
and fuck every investor, founder, and executive in silicon valley that quietly (or not) goes along with it just to promote their own capitalistic goals
Arun Thampi retweeted
I cannot wait until the White House changes hands and all of you ghouls switch back from "you're a traitor unless you bootlick so hard your tongue goes numb" to "the government asking any questions about my offshore fentanyl casino is vile tyranny and I will throw myself in the San Francisco Bay in protest", like werewolves at the last ray of the setting moon.
Arun Thampi retweeted
David Sacks? Elon Musk? Chamath Palihapitiya?
Trump administration working to expand effort to strip citizenship from foreign-born Americans
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials focused on denaturalization were sent to offices nationwide, sources say. nbcnews.com/politics/immigra…
Arun Thampi retweeted
this christmas, i am humbly asking for your help to support dr. hankinson's research.
if not with $, i would be just as grateful for a repost or a like on this thread.
100% of your donation goes directly to funding the research efforts of Hankinson Lab: gofundme.com/f/help-mira-and…
Arun Thampi retweeted
Apple is expected to sell about 90 million AirPods this year.
That would generate more than $20 billion in revenue for the company.
These were some of the headlines when the AirPods were first unveiled 8 years ago.
It's about time Anil Kapoor got recognized for his tireless efforts to push the frontiers of transformers
✅ year 6 as an @Apple engineer 😅 time flies when you have fun!
❤️ swift is awesome
We've been evaluating a number of C++ successor languages for @ladybirdbrowser, and the one best suited to our needs appears to be @SwiftLang 🪶
Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!
Why do we like Swift?
First off, Swift has both memory & data race safety (as of v6). It's also a modern language with solid ergonomics.
Something that matters to us a lot is OO. Web specs & browser internals tend to be highly object-oriented, and life is easier when you can model specs closely in your code. Swift has first-class OO support, in many ways even nicer than C++.
The Swift team is also investing heavily in C++ interop, which means there's a real path to incremental adoption, not just gigantic rewrites.
Strong ties to Apple?
Swift has historically been strongly tied to Apple and their platforms, but in the last year, there's been a push for "swiftlang" to become more independent. (It's now in a separate GitHub org, no longer in "apple", for example).
Support for non-Apple platforms is also improving, as is the support for other, LSP-based development environments.
What happens next?
We aren't able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that's too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it!
No language is perfect, and there are a lot of things here that we don't know yet. I'm not aware of anyone doing browser engine stuff in Swift before, so we'll probably end up with feedback for the Swift team as well.
I'm super excited about this! We must steer Ladybird towards memory safety, and the first step is selecting a successor language that we can begin adopting very soon. 🤓🐞