In the last 7 days I implemented a complete XPath 1.0 parser & evaluation system from scratch in C++20. Right now I'm adding support for XPath 2.0.

Codex in the cloud has been leveraged to do 95% of the work and Claude 5%. We've output 10.5K LoC and 774 individual tests to ensure compliance to the spec.

Lately I've been feeling like we're living firmly in the future. This would easily be an 8+ month project on my own not including the tests, yet we're now on track for completion in 10 days. A min. 25x speed increase is a crazy level of productivity for me and it's hard to believe I'm still seeing articles claiming that AI coding isn't productive.

I'd imagine part of it is that there are xpath parsers on github already, so it's not entirely greenfield for the models.

Partially, but I think it's moreso the W3C spec being so thorough and the wealth of samples online. I found that during code review both Codex and Claude would refer back to the specs for certainty on expected outcomes. Their understanding of how to deal with unusual edge cases was also impressive, so it seems they have a lot of baked in knowledge & training of how XPath works and they draw from that.

Same experience here. In the last week I've successfully managed to build a complete C++20 XPath 1.0 parser with Codex, and am now onto supporting XPath 2.0. Codex has been nailing it time and again - the only caveat is that I have to use their cloud version as local execution is buggy.

Sonnet on the other hand gets tripped up constantly due to the complexity. I'm not seeing the improvement I was hoping for with 4.5, and it's just given up on attempting to implement support for date-time functionality. Codex has nailed the same task, yet Anthropic claim OpenAI have the inferior product?

I'm pretty sad about this as I'm gunning for Anthropic and would have loved to see them at least match Codex with this new release. If OpenAI stays on this course then Claude Code is toast without an important breakthrough. It doesn't help that they're also the more expensive product and have service quality issues pushing people to quit the platform.

In the UK it is very easy to find scented roses from specialist growers. David Austin for instance has a 'Best for Fragrance' category on their website. They even go into some detail in describing the smells.

I find that scents don't last too long, but I think this is to be expected. On my property most of the scent from roses is produced in the first week's bloom before dissipating.

I work on a project that builds an SVG compliant vector scene graph and allows for detailed interaction via its API. Writing client code that can plug into the rendering pipeline or just altering the existing code is also fairly easy - comparatively at least.

It's at https://github.com/parasol-framework/parasol but fair warning though, it is in alpha right now and going through an overhaul.

I've had my Aeron for 15 years (second hand, so it's probably 20 years old by now!). It's still as good as the day I bought it. The gas lift is going strong too, but I've had to replace the front pad every 5 years as they flatten over time.

Before I had the Aeron I'd replace my office chairs every 4 years or so. Not only have I saved money long term, their longevity makes them the better choice for the environment.

Enjoy your chair, you'll get a lifetime of use out of it.

Yes, I got my Aeron secondhand too, about 5yr ago, and it's been great this last year. I did replace the stock wheels with rollerblade casters[1] which are made by a bunch of companies (it seemed like OfficeOasis was one of the originals, so I went with them, though it looks like some of the more recent ones use sealed bearings for the swivel along with the wheel, which might be cool).

1: https://theofficeoasis.com/products/rollerblade-office-chair...

Oh how cool!

I never thought I could get excited about office accessories, yet here I am.

Don't forget to read the reviews though... rollerblade wheels are good for tiles/wooden floors, and not so much for carpet (they won't spin on carpet and just be annoying).

Really? I found that the larger roller blade wheels work much better than stock plastic castors on carpet.

Yes, I am using them on hardwood floors, good point!

My circumstance exactly. My Aeron was used when I first started using it 15 years ago. I’ve always liked it a lot, and just bought another (used) that I could return to my employer so I could keep mine (which I took home a year ago).

I found mine (large) preferable to the newer one I bought (medium). The depth of the seat pan on the medium was just too shallow. (I’m 6’ 1”).

It’s amazing how well this 15+ year old chair has held up. No signs of wear to the seat or back, nor visible scratches on the frame. It does need a new pneumatic cylinder post though ($45).

> ... but I've had to replace the front pad every 5 years as they flatten over time.

Would that be the pad behind your (upper) back? I never replaced anything on mine in 10/11 years but I may have not been paying attention. I'll definitely check for any flattened pad when I get back from vacation (they seem super cheap to replace moreoever).

It's right at the front near your knee. The level of discomfort would vary between people, but I find it to be very noticeable once the padding's worn out.

that's why I got rid of mine. front of the seat behind the knee. too much feeling the hard rim that holds the mesh. despite numerous tries to adjust the chair properly, it still bugged me. got rid of it for a steelcase leap. much more comfy.

I second the Steelcase Leap. I have used both the Aeron and the Leap a lot. The Leap is a significantly better chair

I am very happy with my steelcase leap. It has the right balance of cushion and support as well as lumbar support, and it is quiet, long lasting.

But a chair, like a bed, is a very personal thing. We all have different bodies and different support requirements.

This reminds me of the time I found two flies in my house despite the windows being closed. I vacuumed them up (more fun that way) and the next day there were two identical looking flies in the house. Did they get out of the vacuum cleaner? I vacuumed them up again.

The next day, same story. The flies were now appearing throughout the day. They all looked the same. Where the hell were they coming from? The windows were still closed. I kept vacuuming.

Eventually things were starting to get very irritating. I hunted for an entry point for days without finding anything and the flies just kept on appearing. I was pretty good at vacuuming flies by this point.

By day six I spotted a group of them hanging out near my Kentia palm. Aha! A fly had laid eggs in the soil of the plant. I had no idea that it was a suitable food source for larvae. Needless to say I quickly filled it with gravel and I guess that's the story of how I became a qualified Fly Detective.

Another fun thing you can do with flies, and also bees and wasps, apart from vacuuming them up, is put them on a leash. But first you have to freeze them.

Catch one in a cup or plastic bag and stick it in the freezer for about 10 minutes. When you take it out it will look dead, but it's not (unless you leave it in too long.) Being careful not to rip it's wings off, tie a small string or fishing line to one of it's legs.

In a few minutes it will thaw and start to walk around, and then start to fly. You can now walk it around the park like you were carrying a balloon.

Where would you say it falls on the spectrum of animal abuse in relation to going fishing, fly swatting, and walking the dog? Those are all activities I'm personally ok with.

*insect abuse

I think repeatidly slapping them with a pretty soft plastic attraption until they stop moving is even harsher though.

Or slapping them outta the air, trying to electrocute them but having too little power on the shitty device so only their wings get burned.

Or vacuuming them up

Or flushing them down the drain.

Honestly, whatever people usually do to them it's way way crueller

> I think repeatedly slapping them with a pretty soft plastic contraption until they stop moving is even harsher

It's soft to you, not to the fly. You don't slap a fly "until it stops moving". When you swat a fly, it explodes.

Not the big ones. The first slap stuns them at best, sometimes not even that.

This was far more engaging of a story than it deserves to be

That's scary. I used to be a hardcore insectaphobe, but I got over it over the last couple years. Now I don't care that much when I see insects in my house. But it is within reason! I wouldn't want bugs reproducing in my house, that sounds like a slippery slope!

> I wouldn't want bugs reproducing in my house, that sounds like a slippery slope!

Don’t Google dust mites.

Or Face Mites.

I admire your perception. I'm personally unable to distinguish different fly specimens, they all look the same to me.

It's only the size and age of them that makes one fly distinguishable from another. When they're all being born at the same time there's absolutely nothing that makes them distinct, and that's your clue that eggs have been laid somewhere in the vicinity.

> It's only the size and age of them that makes one fly distinguishable from another.

Because of their rarity, I find that the ones that wear tiny top hats are easily distinguishable too.

Come on... make is a perfectly good choice (and for me, preferable) for any project that is small to medium sized. However if you get to a stage where you have to compile for 3 or more platforms and need to account for different compiler versions & systems that people may be using, 'make' quickly becomes hell to use. The possible build combinations just get out of hand, and you can't if-then-else your way out of every situation. Ultimately you get to a point where makefiles can't deal with the growing complexity of a big project.

That is where CMake really shines - it takes the headache out of managing complex, sprawling builds once you get it setup, and you won't have to keep tweaking the config to manage every other dev's system. I grant that the documentation is not perfect and there is a significant time investment in getting everything 'just so', but the long-term time savings make up for that completely in my experience.

> Oh. You can almost hear the designer saying "well fuck it, we'll just jam it all into a string.

I'll throw in my 2 cents here because the responses aren't addressing why the path descriptors are stylised in this way. Whether SVG's underlying document format was XML, JSON, SGML, CSS or whatever is irrelevant. However else you did it, any alternative would be more verbose because the 'd' tag already offers the most compact way of describing vector paths in text form.

And that's the point - it's small. Even in this compact form, it's not unusual for path strings to reach kilobytes in length when floating point numbers are catered for. Thus we need the path descriptions to be as small as possible for optimal parsing of the file and keeping the file size down.

As a side-note I disagree with the author's conjecture that SVG doesn't succeed as a machine-focused language or a human-focused language. I think it serves both sides of the coin quite well in practice (certainly more-so than HTML) and a pared back version already exists in the form of SVG Tiny.

I wonder though why does that matter for a web format that can be served with GZIP encoding? Wouldn't GZIP eat the duplicative <move-to /> tags for breakfast? It would be so much easier to write, read, manipulate and animate.

Let's imagine for a moment that path instructions could be mapped out with more verbose instructions. Would this really get enough practical use to be worthy of standardisation?

For the most part, SVG path outlines are almost always defined in software like Illustrator and Inkscape. Bezier curves are beyond the average person's ability to create or modify without visual aids. Simple path constructs aren't all that common in practice and the examples I see posted here aren't representative of real-world use.

SVG does provide transform capabilities to move, rotate and scale paths easily, and those features can be applied within a text editor. For anything else there are plenty of visual tools to aid path modification. Personally I've modified many an SVG file manually, but when it comes to the paths I can't say that seeing them laid bare would be of a help to my workflow.

I'll reference you to a comment elsewhere in the tree, and its parents[0], which came up with this s-expression:

    (path (M 10 10 H 90 V 90 H 10 L 10 10) :color red)

It's legitimately hard to beat sexprs for the combination of compactness, generality, and ease of use. If I were to start from first principles in making a vector graphics format, I'd probably make it a schema over EDN. I bet the extra complexity of having explicit maps and vectors would pay off.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26118727

I think that's reasonable, but is syntactic sugar really going to help you modify a path when the vector points will look more like this in reality:

  (path (M 368.296, 1.514) (c -0.908, 0 -1.818, 0.011 -2.716, 0.021) 
  (c 0.053, 0, 0.106, 0, 0.159,0) (c 147.196, 0.836, 265.306, 94.672, 267.029, 183.784)
  (c 0, 0.581, 0.065, 35.087, 0.065, 35.087) (h 49.415)
  (v -33.471) (h 37.094) (v -31.376)
  (C 719.342, 77.099, 575.826, 1.514, 368.296, 1.514)
  (z))

I've used SVG pretty heavily for years, in particular for the last couple of months as I've been writing libraries/tools that render SVG output (parsing for the cli tool side, lots of hand-writing & testing, cleaning, rendering).

Yes an s-expression is imo normally the best representation (more specifically, an x-expression (see Racket) would be ideal). However, practically, it's not actually that useful. It is very useful as an intermediary step.

For example for a tool where the SVG is parsed to an x-expression and cleaned then compiled back. This is one of the [aborted] things I was working on, as the three best existing tools [in JS, Python and Rust] for this all have issues of one kind or another. Or you have a tool that allows you to write x-expressions then compile. But always with this, if that's the case, can't really directly jnterop with the host language/platform -- as you say, would have to be from first principles. And further to that, it would need HTML from first principles because one of the huge, huge benefits is that SVG drops directly into HTML with virtually the same semantics, same styling, same JS interactivity hooks. And the issue is compounded by SVG not just being XML, that it is also a DSL (NB solution is normally to restrict to a subset of features), so the clean structure breaks down pretty often. Imo SVG has to be the way it is, that the tradeoffs of the bastardised XML it uses have to have been made for it to be actually useful. Those tradeoffs also make it difficult to use, and often very difficult to parse easily. But without changing how HTML works, how web browser rendering works, I don't see how there are any alternatives that are substantially better.

I think the other desiderata mentioned in the original post are more important than choice of serialization format. SVG already exists, and we're kind of stuck with it. There are other applications where having a better-designed vector graphics format might pay off, and tying it to the browser all over again wouldn't be a win.

At that point, using an s-expression format (x-expression, EDN, I'm agnostic) should be the first choice. One of the first things that would have to be implemented, of course, is a translator to SVG.

My interest in vector graphics is such that, on the few occasions I need them, I just shrug and deal with the format we have.

You say that like someone that is yet to experience the absolute hell that is OpenSSL 'documentation'.