new typescript just dropped

 Announcing TypeScript 7.0 - TypeScript

douglas adams, prophet

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is probably the perfect book for this moment in software, because it is basically about trying to survive inside a universe that is absurd, bureaucratic, overconfident, badly documented, and somehow still convinced it is operating according to a plan. Douglas Adams understood that sometimes the systems around you are not secretly intelligent, they are just stupid at a scale too large for the human brain to process.

--awesome-coding in Software jobs in 2026 look brutal...

Douglas Adams was so ahead of the curve, from predicting how annoying gesture based computing could be, to outlining how insanely reckless fast-evolving code would be to how programming is like teaching a very dumb student (and when done right, sharpens the teacher's understanding more than the student's) and how many of us can share the vibe of being "rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand"

a thought on nintendo hard game design

Sometimes it's fun to apply vaguely UX thinking in terms of things like game design...

His design rules for Mega Man 2 were specific and deliberate. Enemies appeared in small waves, three or four at a time, using the same attacks, so players could actually learn the pattern. Terrain and placement adjusted the challenge, not random enemy behavior. And here's the detail that reveals everything. The last enemy in each wave was easier than the ones before it. I'll say that again on purpose. The final enemy in a wave was easier. Why? Kamura explained the psychology this way. He'd notice that people don't replay games, even good ones, because when they think back, their minds go to the hardest parts, and that memory makes replaying feel like work. He didn't want players remembering Mega Man 2 as a slog. He wanted them to remember feeling like they were getting better. And then he said something that is essentially the entire point of this video. I quote, "I wanted the player to feel like he was improving at the game, too."

--From this pretty good video on Mega Man 2 by OTG Gaming.

Although it calls out "Battletoads" as being brutal relative to Mega Man in part because of having 3 continues / no passwords (along with punishing "gotcha"/ MUST memorize design) it underplays the addition of continue password grids as being a HUGE quality of life improvement in Mega Man 2 over 1.

I remember my pride in beating the original "Nintendo Hard" Mega Man, telling my mom about it - an early lesson in standing up and getting through a big challenge.

Also I think about Mega Man in the sense of novelty. Not only was it a master class in terrain and enemy placement as "something new", but of course it was one of the first to give you an array of weapons with different mechanics. Later games (such as Kirby) would expand that so that it let the player control novel mechanics and interactions (often by capturing those of enemies) as the game progressed - now it's one of the biggest tools Nintendo has, from Kirby's inhales, to Mario Oddyssey's Hat Capture, the new animal transformations, etc.

So there probably is a split - most games provide some kind of novelty as they progress. Some games, like RPG, it's gradual and cumulative, and intrinsic to the character or the inventory. Other games, it's closer to a temporary toy (or in the case of GTA, knowing where the good toys are.)

just f***ing use html

 Funny rant domain: Just f***ing use HTML. (Is it weird that I'm "censoring" cussing?)

(Not to nerdily miss the point, but I think the PHP/JSON-on-Filesystem//HTML5/CSS/Vanilla JS stack  is the logical extension of that when you actually do need to get a little data onto or off of the server. Buildless, evergreen, runs for years, avoids package dependency hell...)

It reminds me of The iPhone is a piece of s***, and so is your face, extolling the virtues of the clever foldy keyboard Nokia E70 over the then new iPhone. Obviously iPhone-ish slabphones won - but it took iPhone a while to catch up to that -- recording video, an app store, even copy and paste weren't there at first...

(I suspect that second rant page - a "cgi" page still surviving like almost two decades now - has the same "technology should just work for years" attitude of the first rant.)

the new assembly

I've always liked Processing and P5.js as ways of... just having a little canvas to do cool low level graphics and interactions and small games in. He's got some kind of campaign going using this splash image:

It was interesting seeing the blob of code on the left. It reminded me that while I can still "live code" P5 ok I'm starting to get rusty about some of the bread and butter commands (like if "stroke()" was for color or width)

But then somehow it's like... there's that line that says "Javascript is the new assembly language of the web", that people will be coding in higher level things that turn into JS. But now with so many people coasting on LLM, it kind of feels like there might be a time when, any code whatsoever will have that "assembly language" vibe. 

text editing is hard

 79: Text editing with Michael … - Complementary - Apple Podcasts

Heh. Katie Langerman is a designer I worked with at CarGurus, and she's been working at GitHub, and she cohosts a design podcast... it was a little triggering - relivingsome things we're struggling with at my current job -  but they had a whole episode on "text editing". ProseMirror comes up a lot. And the issue of rich text editing are thorny for everyone. (Like if the user copies and pastes from inside a bullet item list, maybe not respecting item boundaries... what all should that even look like on paste, in terms of what structure should it assume or replace or ignore... )

AI doesn't replace best practices

 At work in our AI discussion forum someone posted this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4F1gFy-hqg

One thing I'm wrestling with is... how do devs/LLM-wranglers ensure we get good "value for money" in terms of the pre-prompting stuff? To a large extent, decent coding practices are built into LLM. (Admittedly, the LLMs have been more trained on toy example which might cause them to be more likely to take shortcuts.) So in theory, it might not make sense to stuff your context window with things the LLM already knows deeply. (Or maybe this is a false economy, and that the number of tokens spent compared to what can be saved is small... this is why non-deterministic programming might always have an aspect "as much an art as a science.")
 
Another topic I want to refine my thinking on is testing. The TDD (Test Driven Development) mindset makes a case for itself more strongly in this LLM world in versus what we had before - in part because of the "pain in the butt factor" of it all. In UI at least, most medium to low level tests depend on content pieces (page structure, test-ids) that aren't in place UNTIL implementation - real chicken and egg stuff, where you would have to architect fine grained structure while writing the test, which isn't really a comfortable way to work. But with an AI, that discomfort might not exist (or at least not felt by humans)
 
Finally I wonder about the "software fundamental" of unit test. Like, I LOVE that this video suggests "grey box" modularization - limiting coupling to specific points between higher level modules. To me that points to where the real value in testing is, at integration of those modules, and end to end testing. In the old world, it was difficult to get real value from unit tests, tests that were real canaries in the coal mine vs false alarms, so I was always in the camp that preferred higher level tests.
But I'm not quite sure what the answer is for the LLM world. Anecdotes suggest that sometimes LLM care about tests too much, will keep code around just because there's a test for it after a refactoring. I appreciate that at the very least LLMs have helped lower the cost of unit test creation.