free!

 ChatGPT was able to point me to a half-remembered 2008 Wired feature article Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.  (ironically enough I think that's a pay-walled link, but I am a long time subscriber to the magazine, grew up with it and the internet)

Now, I have little respect for what Elon Musk did to Twitter: Twitter was invaluable as THE breaking news source, the place to follow individual subject matter experts, a fun place to try and go viral with the perfect bon mot, and a way for ordinary folk to talk back at companies out in the open, where the company's reputation was a bit at stake. X is barely any of those things, and has tacked from medium left to hard right in a lot of ways.

But - I think Elon Musk right, that the way "free always wins" (free as in beer, not as in speech) has really hurt our society. I'm not surprised: no one in their right mind feels comfortable with a meter running. It's nice to dream of an Internet where promoting endless binging wasn't the norm and where the ad folks had less sway, but I don't see anyway we get to that from where we started, and I think Wired laid that out clearly 15 years ago.

(I do like Stewart Brand's line: "Information Wants To Be Free. Information also wants to be expensive. ...That tension will not go away.")

the other september that never ended

 

favicon and "add to homescreen"

RealFaviconGenerator seems to far and away the easiest way to make up favicons and the "add to homescreen" icon for iOS + Androud etc. Make up one big image (that will scale down well!) and go.

I collaborated with Craiyon to make this favicon / logo for BABAM Book:

The prompt was A minimalist icon showing a music note and a book with the letter B - the background is black and yellow is strong in the other parts. Then I flipped and cropped it. It's a little random but it gets the job done (the main job being making a more recognizable icon when I am hurriedly looking for the link to get to sheetmusic via my iPhone..

on the limits of the ChatGPT crowd

 Elegant and powerful new result that seriously undermines large language models - LLMS such as ChatGPT make interesting mistakes that point out the limits of what they do, and may prove to be a sidebranch on any path the general "true" Artificial Intelligence. They aren't building their own model of the world "in their head", instead they are phenomenally good at predicting at what our model of the world - communally established in the form of written language - would say when confronted with a new variation.

But that lack of model is weird! The case study they give (which I duplicated via ChatGPT/GPT4) is that it can't tell you who Mary Lee Pfeiffer is the parent of... but then can tell you that one of Tom Cruise's parents is Mary Lee Pfeiffer. And this kind of gap was predicted in discussion of earlier forms of neural networks - which may indicate it's a fundamental problem, a shortcoming that can't readily be bridged. 

It reminds me of Marvin Minsky's late 60s work with Perceptrons. ChatGPT was able to to remind me of the details - 

Minsky and Papert proved that a single-layer perceptron cannot solve problems that aren't linearly separable, like the XOR problem. Specifically, a single-layer perceptron cannot compute the XOR (exclusive or) function.

Of course later multilayer networks (with backpropgation, and later transformers (not the cartoon toys)) overcame these limits, and gave us the LLMs we know are establishing our wary relationships with. So who knows if there could be another breakthrough.

But the results we get with LLMs are astounding - they are a type of "slippery thinking" that is phenomenally powerful... Hofstadter and Sandler called their book "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking" and I would argue that so much of intelligence is an analogy or metaphor - far branches from the human situation of having to make a model with us as a bodily agent in the world. 

And as we find more uses for LLMs, we need to be careful of adversaries thinking one step ahead. Like the once seemingly unstoppable, alien intelligence of AlphaGo derived Go players can be beaten by amatueur players - once other machine learning figured out what AlphaGo can't see on the board. 

Suddenly, Captain Kirk tricking intelligent computers with emotional logic doesn't seem as farfetched as it once did...

heh

 A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages:

1995 - Brendan Eich reads up on every mistake ever made in designing a programming language, invents a few more, and creates LiveScript. Later, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of Java the language is renamed JavaScript. Later still, in an effort to cash in on the popularity of skin diseases the language is renamed ECMAScript.

requiem for visual basic

Hacker News had an interesting Why Did Visual Basic Die? thread.

The highest rated response is a link to this great history of Visual Basic - fascinating to hear the history of how it started as a form designer, with the BASIC bit as a johnny-come-lately add-on. (Also interesting to think of the VB relative to the Mac's HyperCard.... it probably says a lot about the Mac vs Windows communities.)

I picked up Visual Basic on my own during college - it was a world easier than the 16-bit "Charles Petzold book" programming I had been doing for the oncampus software studio - and I designed and taught a for-credit course in it, via Tufts University's "Experimental College". 

I had two main paths leading from VB:

One was "professional", making utilities and leaning on its famous form designer. On the one hand, you couldn't do THAT much with the designer, mostly you just laid out controls at fixed sizes and locations, and everything just looked like a big old dialog. But counterpoint: only now are even professional designer tools such as Figma really incorporating thinking about responsive design and lots of resolution variation. And VB really was an egalitarian tool in many respects. Or I think about small companies that could make a living pulling together some VB forms and a database to right custom apps for other small businesses.

Second was "recreational" - ignoring the controls and just using it it to provide a big old window to draw graphics directly on, to make up a game or toy. (You can still see a few things I made in it at my old Alien Bill Productions Toys for Windows page.) This was a continuation of the fun I had on the old 8-bits (Atari 800XL, Commodore 64) and which I later continued with Java Processing and then onto P5.js (And my toys.alienbill.com site has the fruit of those efforts.)

Microsoft famously bungled the pivot to the web-centric world, and VB was one of the most prominent casualties. From that point of view you see a move from the big servers of the 60s and 70s to the desktop of the 80s and 90s, and then back... I'm not sure what happened to the hobbyist vibe - you could do some stuff in Python locally, but I suppose for server stuff you were back into PHP, which meant you had to find appropriate webhosts, so the barrier to entry was a bit higher...

Anyway, Visual Basic was a fun and empowering piece of software.

catching up on links

How to pass the interview for software engineering roles in Big Tech - Handbook

on React Server Components - The key thing to understand is this: Server Components never re-render. They run once on the server to generate the UI. The rendered value is sent to the client and locked in place. As far as React is concerned, this output is immutable, and will never change. -- that explains a lot, actually. Like you can't use useEffect in part because you don't NEED to- side effects are embraced. Still seems weird that it's so tightly bundled with specific server apps.

How WhatsApp did what it did

I do wonder what the current state of PHP is relative to where I should go next in my career.

The 99% of Developers - like the idea that some stuff is aspirational, i.e. few people really fully practice what they preach

hatin' on Tailwind. I admit I haven't used it enough to see if my kneejerk bias against not being on the metal are justified

WebComponents rah rah rah! I do like the platform agnostic aspect, though Web Components have been "the near future" for like a decade...

I also wonder what I should know about Svelte

RIP

RIP Molly Holzschlag "the fairy godmother of the web" 

getting to quality

 Posted on a small private Slack I enjoy (sometimes I think small Slack workspaces are like the future of social media) was this Forbes piece on how important code quality is, and how organizations absolutely Mug Peter to Pay Paul if they rush things early.

My further thoughts were this:

I think there are 2 ends of a spectrum to "what is code quality" and how to improve it:

1. the first is leans reductionist, like doubling down on confirming that each fine grained component lives up to its contract.

2. the second is more holistic; confirming the higher level pattern is appropriate to the problem space it is trying to deal with, with good inspectable flow and and not too many work arounds.

I think as code bases age and show evidence of needing updating, you tend to big pushes of the the former end. And so you get mandates to increase unit test coverage, and lines like "metrics-wise, we expect as line of code coverage increases faults in production will go down" which is.. quite a bit optimistic. (I am strongly in favor of higher level testing - the closer the context your tests are running in to what your production environment is, the more confidence you can have that whatever refactorings you have made preserve the key business values...)

But when trying to achieve improvements in the latter, holistic category... I think of the counter argument that starting a rewrite from scratch, armed with the experience of having done it once, often doesn't pay dividends because it's weirdly difficult to capture all the small improvements you made for edge cases. And so the obvious cost of doing everything over is still at risk for repeating many of the same mistakes and making its own cruftiness. (I imagine this is highly dependent on the circumstances and problem space.)

So there's no easy solution - if so you probably would have done it already! But I maintain my beliefs that everything good and bad about computer systems is an emergent property of interconnected parts, and as important as it is to be detail oriented, you need to think of forests more than you think of trees.

articles to check up on

What is Vite - interesting replacement for create-react-app...

React as the Old-And-Busted

On JS Testing - I am glad to see that I'm not the only lone voice in the wilderness who will sometimes think that unit testing is over emphasized...

Next.js deployment strategies - this is one of my #1 bottlenecks, especially in terms of making my side projects more like my work things.

React Conditional Render - ha, so basically it looks like building a JSP-ish <if> tag!

Tailwind and the death of craftsmanship - Tailwind is weird, I get different messages from "it's so over" to "it's the future" - but if you've never been on a project with it, it seems weird. I feel like generations of engineers have ignored fundamental CSS and are left hungering for a replacement - and now Tailwind finally has proper anti-bloat features, but still...

Is PHP Worth Learning in 2023? - I really wish the answer was more obviously yes.

50 Most Common Interview Questions [glassdoor] - wish it covered more of the answering strategies...

email apnea

Front End CI/CD 101

Patterns for Reactivity with Modern Vanilla JavaScript - I really do like this thinking as an alternative to being framework first for every problem that comes along...

Using AI and leaning into the weirdness

Embracing weirdness: What it means to use AI as a (writing) tool. It's not clear to me how ubiquitous pairing with AI is  - but now is a great time to get use to the weirdness of it, probing its limits and finding new avenues of expression with it.