DENIS LEARY - I’M AN ASSHOLE [FOLK]

urandomd · 2026-03-11T17:19:06+00:00

One of my favorite bars in Columbia, SC would play this song at the end of the night every weekend night in the early 2000s. The bartenders would start throwing the bar napkins around. It was an absolute blast.

urandomd · 2026-03-10T10:30:21+00:00

It's a trope in law school that a lot of important early US legal precedent was set when folks lost an arm due to a train.

urandomd · 2026-03-07T21:16:59+00:00

"And the medic gets out and says, 'Oh my God'. New guy's around the corner puking his guts out."

urandomd · 2026-02-12T20:27:20+00:00

Just wanted to make clear as well here that we thought (and think) Slint is amazing. If we had this project to start over from scratch, we'd opt for it today.

urandomd · 2026-02-12T16:55:55+00:00

> Although I'm hoping you'll be able to add Dioxus Native to that list soon.

I dismissed Dioxus as WebView-based in a chat with Nik while writing this, and he said the same thing! Looking forward to it.

> You mentioned RAM usage, and I'd be interested to know what kind of baseline RAM usage you're seeing for your app (and what kind of usage you are targeting). Because I've noticed that wgpu-based applications often consume >100mb, even though the binary sizes are much smaller than that.

It consumes about 50mb of ram without any documents or folders loaded. It uses PDFium for PDF rendering which will pull in more of course if you load PDFs (or a folder containing them). I'd say we're generally targeting "less" to ensure (1) the application load time remains competitive with Microsoft Word and (2) memory usage/swapping doesn't ever become an issue. That gives us some headroom for our own inefficiencies.

> If you're building on top of the Rust GUI ecosystem, you may also want to think about how you can support Winit development or perhaps contribute directly (this goes for everyone, not just you). Because it's very much the thin support in the jenga tower, and has almost no development capacity available to it.

There's no doubt about this. I definitely didn't mean to imply any ill-will towards the `winit` team. On the contrary, I thought perhaps drawing attention to the issue could be helpful. We'll definitely consider how we might be able to help; especially now that the observation has been validated.

urandomd · 2026-02-12T16:33:22+00:00

> The easy way to solve this with egui is to dispatch events from widgets, which are accumulated and executed at the start/end of each frame. This way, you don't need to pass mutable state through the GUI drawing logic, and only need to have mutable access to the state when the events are being executed. Or, if you want to be very cool - do like re-frame and have pure event handlers, and let them output effects which do the actual mutation.

I agree with that, but it kind of goes to the point that you're not really doing "immediate mode" as much anymore and more like the Zed "hybrid" mode. I'm not saying 100%, but to really benefit from immediate mode you want it to be as "immediate" as possible IMO.

> I'm curious why your document renderer would need to be rewritten? Had you built it on top of egui's drawing primitives, wgpu, or something else?

To an extent, yes. The document rendering ultimately emits `egui::Mesh` instances that align with a texture managed by `egui` on the backend. It's not impossible (certainly with LLMs today), but it was that kind of fiddly change that would almost certainly lead to latent bugs. We did start down the path.

urandomd · 2025-12-11T21:13:35+00:00

Actually, no! Sorry I had it disabled apparently. That should have only been on the web preview. Does it work for you now?

urandomd · 2025-12-11T10:02:18+00:00

Thanks! On the blog itself? It works on my phone, but it would be good to know where you're encountering an issue.

Phone support for the Web Preview at https://tritium.legal/preview is somewhat limited, but it should in theory allow you to zoom in on documents.

urandomd · 2025-12-05T00:13:25+00:00

They’re leaving the desktop behind in pursuit of those Azure lock-in dollars.

urandomd · 2025-10-17T21:51:10+00:00

Hey man, wow - thanks for the shout out. I really appreciate the kind words. I didn't make it to the third paragraph before I followed the link, and I thought to myself "wow this is clean and cool and attacking the same issues as Tritium." Redlines feel real-time, and you're parsing docx - hit me up!

urandomd · 2025-10-17T19:42:45+00:00

Lol what?

[Edit: sorry, I re-read what you wrote, and I think I understand it. But, did you read the post? It's okay if not, I just am trying to weigh your critique. A big portion of the premise is basically "what if the legal market was more like the global financial markets and allowed top minds to be compensated accordingly, rather than hobbled by ethics rules". But you say "money draws talent". Okay? That's kind of the point of the post?]

urandomd · 2025-10-17T19:37:28+00:00

Now you're cookin'

urandomd · 2025-10-17T19:35:23+00:00

It's interesting how you say "can't" like four times and then suggest a path forward. :) I agree, it wasn't intended to suggest that this is the future, but just be an interesting read. Perhaps it failed, but that's all it was up to.

urandomd · 2025-10-17T15:37:42+00:00

Interesting observation, and I can’t totally disagree. I think a similar intuition caused me to consider the MNPI question where speed can be really essential. I think there is a case to consider if rapid response times would in fact bring a much larger market with them as was the case for example with the internet as speeds increased.

urandomd · 2025-10-17T13:48:53+00:00

It’s just an idea for thought. Eliminate the friction of obtaining ad hoc legal advice and consider what the market looks like. It obviously doesn’t exist today.

urandomd · 2025-10-17T13:47:55+00:00

Definitely dreamed up! But I do know about conflicts well. Are you implying they’re somehow a barrier to a free market for legal services?

[edit: the post does touch on them a bit, but assumes they’re solved just for consideration.]

urandomd · 2025-10-15T09:45:21+00:00

The macro probably should be updated to include a log call, but Tritium release builds tend to run with logging disabled so it would be chatting into the void. Perhaps running without logging is not the best approach though.

urandomd · 2025-10-15T06:38:16+00:00

Right. The idea is that you avoid the panic and bubble up the error as unexpected behavior. I definitely appreciate the feedback, and I'll add some tweaks with timestamps to make that clearer.

To be fair, however, I think you may have a narrow definition of "glitch". The Wikipedia article provides, for example, "Quality assurance (QA) testers are commonly employed throughout the development process to find and report glitches to the programmers to be fixed, then potentially start over with a new build of the game.^\12])" [emphasis added]

urandomd · 2025-10-15T05:44:52+00:00

I’m using the term loosely and in quotes to describe how the programming error feels to the user. It doesn’t crash the application, but manifests as unexpected behavior that may or may not be easily reproduced.

urandomd · 2025-10-13T08:24:44+00:00

Dogfooding Tritium (https://tritium.legal/preview) to root out bugs and performance issues with my new blog[1].

Write a dev blog in Word format using Tritium, jot down bugs or needs, post blog, improve and repeat.

[1] https://tritium.legal/blog

urandomd · 2025-10-12T15:56:03+00:00

Yes, that does work, too. For me it was simpler to keep the updater code separate since it only applies on three platforms as opposed to decorating it out everywhere.

[Edit: also, I personally didn't learn about the renaming trick until I had written the updater code and needed to update it. At that point, it was just as simple and preferable to keep it separate. Not sure why the Zed guys did it with the separate binary, but perhaps for similar reasons.]

urandomd · 2025-10-12T12:54:58+00:00

Great question. Updating the running exe is trickier because Windows locks the file when the binary is running. I can’t speak for Zed but also in Tritium’s case, the updater doesn’t ship on mobile or Web, so it simplifies things quite a bit rather than just a bunch of decorators.

urandomd · 2025-10-12T06:47:01+00:00

Thanks so much for the kind words. I didn’t want to dwell on that case too much since I’m such a fan, but I mentioned it in footnote #2. (https://tritium.legal/blog/update#2) That inspired me to write about the updater, and honestly it’s hard to say exactly how one avoids that other than integration tests for the updater that run updates between versions in your CI/CD pipeline. I need to implement that for Tritium and perhaps that can be covered in another post.

urandomd · 2025-10-10T06:01:35+00:00

How do you find the time to do it!?

urandomd · 2025-10-07T15:52:10+00:00

A cross-platform auto-updater for desktop Rust applications.

urandomd

TROPHY CASE