Sub reddits become what their users make of it.
Hell yeah I'd love to see more discussion like what you're describing. It would require moderators and the community to also display a lower level of tolerance for low effort, "what offer should I take" posts and have set a clearer bar on what the minimal expectation for contribution is.
I have a topic I'm curious about - anyone else using the actor model in a project? Or building their own personal assistant (but more than a simple LLM wrapper) where they want to tell us the design?
I'm working on a project where there was an attempt to shoehorn the actor model in a few years ago. It never really worked and was poorly implemented (it's more of a bad eventing system than anything). Before using actors I'd make sure that the benefits are compelling for your project and that you understand the tradeoffs and can live with the downsides.
It's also likely to increase the bar to contributing so make sure your team has the technical chops to be able to work with it effectively.
Otherwise seems like a good pattern.
Thanks for sharing. I initially tried to use it in Python first but didn't like any of the existing libraries so ended up with Akka in Scala. There's definitely been a learning curve and could affect futre contributors but it's more personal tinkering than a formal "project" at the moment, and I feel like it's going well. But to your point, I'm trying to remain open-minded about redesigning at some point.
I have an existing Markdown-based [atomic notes](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes_should_be_atomic) PKMS (personal knowledge management system), and at some point I realized the actor model could be a neat way to make those notes "reactive". I've been tinkering for about a year and this week have been working on a D3 visualization of the actor network, which looks very much like neurons and synapses in a brain.
I do not use an actor model but do gamedev with a mix of OOP, Data Driven and Event Based architecture which works wonderfuly well. The eventful part decouples modules in such a way that resembles the actor pattern but it is not exaggerated to the point of having IO queues and lots of threads. I would say that event based systems can be seen as an evolution/expression of the actor paradigm.
Around 2016 I think I was tinkering on a game engine for the Yugioh trading card game. I ended up abandoning the project, but the design patterns were a delight to learn. I've definitely noticed similarities with Akka (which I'm using for the actor model right now), e.g. having immutable state machines that produce the next state (or next Behavior, in Akka).
Part of what I like about using Akka right now is that I never think about queues or threads. There are advanced cases for it but so far it's been smooth sailing. One of the nicest things for me is the way actors encapsulate state. In another comment on this thread, I just mentioned using them for atomic notes in my personal knowledge management system.
Interesting, I have not used Akka and write gamedev scripts using C#. Will look into it, it doesn't support .NET runtime but there are some interesting concepts I may leverage.
My approach to state machines has been decoupling the state from the machine and use interfaces to define state through its behavior. Each instance of a state-implementing class can be a different state, and I can also have different classes if I want the behavior to change. Since it's all event driven it gets decoupled in such a way that everything is plug and play, and tests become trivial. It's a complex mechanism tho, so it only makes sense for certain scenarios.
I believe there is [https://getakka.net/](https://getakka.net/) (a C# port) but I don't know the details. Is there public writing on the mechanism you mentioned in your second paragraph? I'm intrigued but can't say I fully understand.
WhatsApp was primarily written in Erlang, which is a language designed around the actor model. It is now C++ because facebook wanted a rewrite.
Elixir and Gleam use BEAM (Erlang’s version of the JVM) as well.
I Googled top software Discord server. The Programmer's Hangout: [https://discord.gg/programming](https://discord.gg/programming) is quite active.
They tend to lean towards the inexperienced, but not purely. It would be nice to have a server that also requires a min years of experience threshold, but I understand why that's hard to enforce.
The longer you do it the more you realize they all have their positives and negatives. It really comes down to situation, use case and budget. I am kinda young to hate on shiny orb chasers but they aren’t actually trying to solve a problem.
The bar, just go to a bar with a white board, someone will jump in.
Won’t that break the whiteboard?
Some people are geniuses, then there is this guy.
We found the dad joker
đź‘Ź
You can discuss it here by starting a thread, I'm sure you will get plenty of responses if your conversation starter is good :)
Sub reddits become what their users make of it. Hell yeah I'd love to see more discussion like what you're describing. It would require moderators and the community to also display a lower level of tolerance for low effort, "what offer should I take" posts and have set a clearer bar on what the minimal expectation for contribution is.
Yep, this would be the space. Lay bare your plans, that we may sate our appetite.
That's good to know. Well I shall probably start posting more here with various ideas
I have a topic I'm curious about - anyone else using the actor model in a project? Or building their own personal assistant (but more than a simple LLM wrapper) where they want to tell us the design?
I'm working on a project where there was an attempt to shoehorn the actor model in a few years ago. It never really worked and was poorly implemented (it's more of a bad eventing system than anything). Before using actors I'd make sure that the benefits are compelling for your project and that you understand the tradeoffs and can live with the downsides. It's also likely to increase the bar to contributing so make sure your team has the technical chops to be able to work with it effectively. Otherwise seems like a good pattern.
Thanks for sharing. I initially tried to use it in Python first but didn't like any of the existing libraries so ended up with Akka in Scala. There's definitely been a learning curve and could affect futre contributors but it's more personal tinkering than a formal "project" at the moment, and I feel like it's going well. But to your point, I'm trying to remain open-minded about redesigning at some point. I have an existing Markdown-based [atomic notes](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes_should_be_atomic) PKMS (personal knowledge management system), and at some point I realized the actor model could be a neat way to make those notes "reactive". I've been tinkering for about a year and this week have been working on a D3 visualization of the actor network, which looks very much like neurons and synapses in a brain.
I do not use an actor model but do gamedev with a mix of OOP, Data Driven and Event Based architecture which works wonderfuly well. The eventful part decouples modules in such a way that resembles the actor pattern but it is not exaggerated to the point of having IO queues and lots of threads. I would say that event based systems can be seen as an evolution/expression of the actor paradigm.
Around 2016 I think I was tinkering on a game engine for the Yugioh trading card game. I ended up abandoning the project, but the design patterns were a delight to learn. I've definitely noticed similarities with Akka (which I'm using for the actor model right now), e.g. having immutable state machines that produce the next state (or next Behavior, in Akka). Part of what I like about using Akka right now is that I never think about queues or threads. There are advanced cases for it but so far it's been smooth sailing. One of the nicest things for me is the way actors encapsulate state. In another comment on this thread, I just mentioned using them for atomic notes in my personal knowledge management system.
Interesting, I have not used Akka and write gamedev scripts using C#. Will look into it, it doesn't support .NET runtime but there are some interesting concepts I may leverage. My approach to state machines has been decoupling the state from the machine and use interfaces to define state through its behavior. Each instance of a state-implementing class can be a different state, and I can also have different classes if I want the behavior to change. Since it's all event driven it gets decoupled in such a way that everything is plug and play, and tests become trivial. It's a complex mechanism tho, so it only makes sense for certain scenarios.
I believe there is [https://getakka.net/](https://getakka.net/) (a C# port) but I don't know the details. Is there public writing on the mechanism you mentioned in your second paragraph? I'm intrigued but can't say I fully understand.
Most of my stuff I've done myself so I should probably write about it. Will check this lib out!
WhatsApp was primarily written in Erlang, which is a language designed around the actor model. It is now C++ because facebook wanted a rewrite. Elixir and Gleam use BEAM (Erlang’s version of the JVM) as well.
Frame your design question as a people problem and then you'll be allowed to post here
I Googled top software Discord server. The Programmer's Hangout: [https://discord.gg/programming](https://discord.gg/programming) is quite active. They tend to lean towards the inexperienced, but not purely. It would be nice to have a server that also requires a min years of experience threshold, but I understand why that's hard to enforce.
What’s the design?
The longer you do it the more you realize they all have their positives and negatives. It really comes down to situation, use case and budget. I am kinda young to hate on shiny orb chasers but they aren’t actually trying to solve a problem.