Graveyard
My Mind Looks to the Future
I'm human, and I keep score. A lot of this work lived in private, so take the "ahead" column with a grain of salt. I used AI to hunt themes in old notes and line them up against what later became popular. This is not a claim of priority. It is a barometer for how my mind actually works. The ledger also helps me cope with early retirement: I already played the game hard, and I do not have to keep proving it.
Furthest ahead
| Project | Idea | Year | Age | Popular later | Ahead |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zengine | Interval columns as the world | 2000 | 18 | Minecraft column-chunked voxel world (2009) | +9 |
| Zengine | Interval CSG with five cases | 2000 | 18 | Minecraft column-chunked voxel world (2009) | +9 |
| Evolution eXPeriment | Prices as the integral of a scarcity curve | 2002 | 20 | Uniswap / bonding-curve AMMs (2018) | +16 |
| BNJv3 | Algorithms that narrate themselves, reversibly | 2004 | 22 | VisuAlgo (2011) | +7 |
| BNJv3 | Pseudocode with live variable bindings | 2004 | 22 | VisuAlgo (2011) | +7 |
| Vec4U | A type system as the safety net for intrinsics | 2004 | 22 | ISPC; Halide (2011) | +7 |
| Cauldron v2 ZMLC | The vtable transplant, generated | 2005 | 23 | Cap'n Proto (2013) | +8 |
| ZMLC | Zero-copy loading by pointer fix-up, generated from a schema | 2005 | 23 | Cap'n Proto (2013) | +8 |
| Edu Lang | Heap cells that remember their last read and write | 2005 | 23 | Python Tutor (2010) | +5 |
| Edu Lang | Delta-compressed frames | 2005 | 23 | Python Tutor (2010) | +5 |
| Cauldron v2 | The file is the object graph | 2006 | 24 | Cap'n Proto (2013) | +7 |
| Cauldron v2 Engine | Vtable transplant deserialization | 2006 | 24 | Cap'n Proto (2013) | +7 |
| Jovian Suite | Reactive dataflow compiled at build time, with cycle detection | 2007 | 25 | Svelte compile-time reactivity (2016) | +9 |
| Kitchen ZMLC2 | Vtable transplant, generated | 2007 | 25 | Cap'n Proto (2013) | +6 |
| Kitchen Cauldron | Zero-copy object graphs by vtable transplant | 2007 | 25 | Cap'n Proto (2013) | +6 |
| Kitchen | Zero-copy loading by vtable transplant | 2007 | 25 | Cap'n Proto (2013) | +6 |
| HUROX | A desktop in the browser on one heartbeat | 2007 | 25 | Meteor (2012) | +5 |
| Jovian Katana V1 | A client-side write-behind cache and command VM | 2007 | 25 | Meteor / Firebase (2012) | +5 |
| HUROX JS | A batched, remapped read cache with write coalescing on a heartbeat | 2007 | 25 | Meteor (2012) | +5 |
| Inferno | Restoring vtables by copying a static instance over raw memory | 2008 | 26 | Cap'n Proto (2013) | +5 |
| Kira Project | Reactive state with typed ports between applications | 2008 | 26 | Elm architecture; Redux (2012) | +4 |
| Jove 3 | The reactive state graph as a language with typed ports | 2008 | 26 | Elm architecture (2012), Redux (2015) | +4 |
| World Bootstrap | Undo history as diffs that survive save | 2016 | 34 | Figma branching (2021) | +5 |
| Adama | Privacy that is also efficiency | 2019 | 37 | Electric and Zero (2024) | +5 |
| Adama Core | Lazy per-viewer deltas | 2019 | 37 | Electric and Zero (2024) | +5 |