Announcing IC-Sandbox

Today, I open-sourced 4 months’ worth of my self-conducted research, study, and iteration in the field of graphical parallel computing. Available on GitHub (dowlandaiello/ic-sandbox), ic-sandbox represents the culmination of months of fully self-directed learning in this burgeoning field of computing, all from first principles.

Interaction Computing

Interaction computing (IC) is a rapidly growing field of research in computing building on proof nets, linear logic, and graphical computing. IC programs are characterized by their encoding of computation through local graph rewriting rules. The computing model poses numerous benefits for “massively parallel computing,” due to its determinism and lack of requirements for global synchronization. IC programs are composed of agents that “interact” through primary ports. Interaction causes auxiliary ports of the agents interacting to be rewired according to rules. Many variations on the model exist, the most prominent being Interaction Nets (LaFont), and Interaction Combinators (LaFont).

Lambda Calculus: Part II

As I recounted in my previous post, I’ve been enthralled in studying higher-level CS in my free time. Lambda Calculus has long been a particular interest of mine, so I recently took to writing a Lambda Calculus interpreter. The interpreter takes in a lambda expression and attempts to reduce it, step by step, or to infinity–or termination. As usual, I grew bored with the project with time and eventually decided I was content with its degree of completion and correctness. As of writing, the interpreter can reduce church encoded arithmetic and list expressions, and attempt to reduce the paradoxical combinator, step by step, or by causing a stack overflow. Surprisingly to those who will peruse the source code, almost all of the components are handwritten. It uses no parsing libraries and has no dependencies, aside from, implicitly, Rust’s standard library. This was a mistake.

Rice: Noun or Verb?

Ricing, in the Linux community, is the practice of configuring a system to match the user’s aesthetic or functional goals. Ricing is primarily achieved through theming UI elements according to a desired look, though users frequently receive praise for other customizations, including niche or rare operating systems, shells, and window managers.

r/unixporn is the de facto home for “ricing,” on the internet, with 500K members as of writing. r/unixporn is a diverse collection of both the beautiful and the ugly in the ricing community. Making an aesthetically pleasing “rice,” these days is not particularly difficult. Window managers like Hyprland, provide built-in support for so-called “eye candy.” Hyprland comes out of the box with see-through blurred windows, smooth animations, shadows, rounded corners, and standard window management features that automate window placement according to specified layouts, allow for multiple workspaces, and provide keyboard shortcuts for moving between and transforming windows. Since Hyprland’s release, r/unixporn has become inundated with cookie-cutter “rices:” Hyprland + Arch Linux + Wayland, and call it a day. Here are a couple of examples of such rices:

Welcome to my personal website, where I will document my creative and intellectual pursuits. Expect topics ranging from my newest Rust passion project to my amateur research around my latest obsession.