blood... blood... blood...

 [During an argument with an absurdly matriarchal computer personality] Ford slumped against a bulkhead. He started to count to ten. He was desperately worried that one day sentient life forms would forget how to do this. Only by counting could humans demonstrate their independence of computers.

[...]

Ford carried on counting quietly. This is about the most aggressive thing you can do to a computer, the equivalent of going up to a human being and saying Blood... blood... blood... blood...

---Douglas Adams, "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"

P to the H to the P

There's a decent chance that the danger around the recent PHP exploit was overstated. I mean, upgrade for sure, but the chances of "was I pwned by this" are pretty small.

I have mixed but generally positive feelings about PHP. I think there's real power in its "buildless" paradigm, and the way its monolith avoids the "package update hell" other platforms face - those hells vastly increase the cost of maintenance for long running projects.

(Its important to note PHP gets some of its mindblowing "on 75% of all servers" numbers specifically in its Wordpress mode... and for a long time I've preferred to roll my own CMS than wrestle with Wordpress) 

ai-yi-yi

So, I think "intense ambivalence" - in the sense of being pulled in two directions - is the most reasonable place to be about this whole AI thing.

That's kind of a disclaimer - I don't think AI is evil enough to be worth not messing around with, and depending on how things shift, adapting to an LLM doing gruntwork may be a survival skill.

My friend JZ (no not Jay-Z) has been messing around with the AI music maker Suno and I decided to give it a shot... I put in one line of prompt, something about New Orleans Street Band / Second Line style, funky, and got Step On Over. The horns are kinda synth-y, but it's a rollicking bassline, and some of the lyrics are sorta brilliant... I especially like the last line of the chorus "We got room for one more in this song" (although the first line of the chorus "let the good feet roll" is a bit iffy.) Also the final verse during the background is a banger: If your week ran long, come walk it off / If your shoes feel tight, loosen up / Take my arm, we'll find the beat / There's a place for every pair of feet.

Also, a personal friend (and fellow bloger) Shaun McGill set Gemini to make a video summary of his e-book "How did we get to the iPhone" and the result was also pretty impressive.

It's (another, unfortunately) interesting moment in AI. With "Character.ai" filing for bankruptcy, it's easy to wonder if this is the start of a bubble pop - these remix machines have been heavily subsidized for years now, and what happens to the supply/demand curve when and if that becomes untenable?

use the platform, luke

 Why Don't More Developer Use the Platform? 

Sometimes I think not having a build system for 90% of my side projects has been great at keeping me grounded. Browsers do so much, they're such a stable platform year after year.

As a UI/UX engineer, I like to think about how people arrange their virtual workspaces.

15 years ago I wrote about how I liked to move the Windows taskbar to the side, vertically. It made better use of landscape mode monitors, and the width could be adjusted to show full-on title bars when needed.

Since then, Windows has followed OSX's lead in having the default be "one taskbar item per app", not "per open window". Also, on every platform, most apps have switched to preferring multiple tabs over multiple windows. 

So I was interested when Chrome started telling me about its new vertical task bars; the visual parallel to how I would set up Windows back in the day was striking.

It's also interesting whether people tend to have fewer browser windows with lots of tabs, or many browser windows with a few tabs each. I fall into the latter camp; I guess I see each window as a fresh context.

(Of course people who depend on keep specific windows available in perpetuity kind of scare me. They're meant to be transient!)

Destroy Any Website - desktop only, sound on. Super clever; looks like they analyze the page into DOM-ish bits then put it all into a big canvas, and have a lot of fun doing it. 

web app to desktop

Webapps are still an enormously powerful and egalitarian paradigm. 

I've been enjoying using my own webapp "Bubbler" for all my Todo needs. I "add to home page"ed it on my iPhone a while back and it feels and looks great. (The one challenge has been lack of a good offline mode, more on that later.) 

Anyway, it's asburdly easy to use Safari on Mac to make an appified-version of this webpage; I just went "File -> Add to Dock":

Claude helped with a few extremely minor details, but basically everything had been set when I had it help me with the mobile friendly version earlier. 

That's one of the interesting thing about using LLM to help code; stumbling over what's actually quite easy even though it looks a little hard. (The experienced coder has some advantages here, but sometimes the lack of assumptions a vibe coder brings to the table wins out. Beginner's Mind all around!)