Arun Thampi

hacking on AR/VR @apple, previously: engineer @envoy · founder @getbotmetrics (acq by @microsoft) · founder @nitrous · Inadvertently started Addressgate in 2012

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

exciting news from bot land! @HowdyAI has acquired @getbotmetrics, our side of the story: https://t.co/6p9IjpNmso https://t.co/YWZjPOFx6K

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

@snehamenon Erm

[Sneha Menon @snehamenon]

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!
https://t.co/9jvg15UKVP
(it’s an MVP, be kind)

[David Cramer @zeeg]

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

[Scott Alexander @slatestarcodex]

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.

[Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice]

David Sacks? Elon Musk? Chamath Palihapitiya?

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

✅ year 7 as an apple engineer 😅 time has flown at an even faster rate this year

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

✅ year 6 as an @Apple engineer 😅 time flies when you have fun!

[Siqi Chen @blader]

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: https://t.co/z8DcECGXGS

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

@derrickko No. Write The Future from 2010 is the best https://t.co/vUPSAL3vNS

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

@harlanhaskins All the best Harlan!

[Jon Erlichman @JonErlichman]

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.

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

It's about time Anil Kapoor got recognized for his tireless efforts to push the frontiers of transformers

[TIME @TIME]

TIME's new cover: The 100 most influential people in AI https://t.co/P81KOzsSlC

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

✅ year 6 as an @Apple engineer 😅 time flies when you have fun!

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

✅ year 5 as an @apple engineer 😅

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

American Dynamism

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

If you bent the knee to this asshole, and started furiously inventing reasons to defend him from his critics, there will be a moral stain on that part of your personal history for the rest of your life.

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

❤️ swift is awesome

[Andreas Kling @awesomekling]

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. 🤓🐞

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

Raygun at the Olympics

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

@kamal @ajhodls One of them has the last name Hassan

[Sebastiaan de With @sdw]

Read more about Kino in our announcement post! https://t.co/bTt2f9xkmM

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

@ajhodls I've seen multiple VCs say this, post hoc ergo procter hoc. Are companies doing well bec they send frequent updates or are they sending frequent updates bec they are doing well?

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

@ajhodls Need to get sir Elton John to bite my arm and we'll get to the bottom of this

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

Previously owned by John Voight vibes

[Arun Thampi @iamclovin]

@alexbaldwin Waiting for the perfect g-wagen 🤪