against complexity

Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’... I saw this and I went "right into my veins".

“I’m seeing a revival [of PHP] now. People are getting sick of frameworks. All the JavaScript frameworks are so… what do you call it, like [un]wieldy. It takes so much work to just maintain this code, and then it updates to a new version, you need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.”

-Pieter Levels

whatever you meter you get more of

 Nike’s $25B blunder shows us the limits of “data-driven”

Heh - and at the risk of saying  another thing you can always say at a meeting and people wil agree with: "It's all about finding that balance".

I do recall one small internal startup I was at that incentivized us with "if we get X,000 trial subscriptions by such and such a date, everyone gets a iPad for the holiday". BUT... marketing had a spigot of ad spend. And there was a pretty direct relation between subscriptions and ad spend. So... the taps were opened wide, we got our iPads, then the budgets went back down to a trickle.
 

So I guess you can never shake the need to be data driven (and not all gut feels) but you do need to be careful.

rock's law

 How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab - 
Best Quote:

These enormous costs are ultimately due to the same factor that has steadily driven down the cost of semiconductors: Moore's Law, the observation that the number of components on an integrated circuit tends to double every two years. (There is a Moore's Second Law, also known as Rock's Law, which posits that the cost of a semiconductor fab doubles every four years.)

throwback thu--sunday

Two articles I found relevant about how the computer scene of the 1980s is reflected today:

Clive Thompson on Back to BASIC. There seem to be a lot of engineers now who don't understand the run-eval loop that BASIC and Lisp used has tremendous power in keeping development dynamic and transparent, which is why it lived on and gained such traction with JS.

Anna Washenko on From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction. That old Infocom parser was such a mind blower back in the day; able to parse moderately complex sentences and even have a sense of context ("Which book do you want to open, the green one or the red one?") at a time when other programs were all like "GET SWORD", "KILL DRAGON" was amazing. I wonder how LLM might come to play in this space, I know there have been some attempts to get one to play "DM" for a one person campaign...

two comics i liked

two notes from the land of LLM

 One:

be really aware of the security holes you could be making especially in terms of markdown and images I guess...

Two:

kind of interesting to see how a company like Apple prompts LLMS to constrain what they will come back with (in terms of not hallucinating, not writing offensive stuff, and in what format.)

react native from react

From Web to Native with React...

the dark ui of endless subscriptions

 I used to think "everything must be free (as in beer)" was the worse thing to happen to the web - people's (maybe understandable) uptightness about being nickel and dimed to death (remember ten cents per text message?) brought us into an age of endless ads and zero privacy.

But now it's also the age of its ugly cousin -vast forests of subscriptions and scams ( https://pleated-jeans.com/2024/08/01/infuriating-subscriptions-scams/ ). It's some of the worst of "Dark UI" (sometimes literally, like a few cases where it looks like the company makes the text for the unsubscribe page unreadable.)

I mean on some level I get it - even maintenance takes work and energy, and who doesn't dream of being a landlord collecting rent forever - but damn, it really is a hellscape out there.

What You Don't See and What You Do

US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, was on a recent episode of the 99% Invisible podcast (in their ongoing coverage of the book "The Power Broker") One thing he said really echoed into the podcast's title, about the importance of what you DON'T see:

Again, to my earlier point, its elegance is often in the fact that you DON'T think about it. The way I always approach and conceptualize these things is the less you have to worry about whether you're gonna get a glass of clean, safe drinking water or for that matter whether there's a hole in the road on the way to work - the more free you are to concentrate on whatever lifts your soul, you know? Whatever matters to you in life. Raising your kids, practicing your faith, starting a business, being a scholar, whatever it is.

But later in the podcast, he points out the power of making things MORE visible:

And I'll give you an example that's less in the realm of building things but is one of the most important things we [of the Department of Transportation have] worked on, which is how airlines treat their passengers. So there are some things we've been trying to to get done, and are still trying to get done, through rule-making. But the rule-making process, the Administrative Procedures Act, the notice and comment period - it can take years. While we were working on that, especially in the summer of 2022 when there were so many frustrations around cancellations and delays, the idea emerged that if we just put more information out in a really easy to understand form, that not only would help passengers know which airlines would take better care of 'em, but knowing it was out there might actually change the airlines' behavior. And living in this world where it takes months or years to do something, I asked the team 'well, ok if we set up a website, like how long would that actually take?' and they said 'we could do it in a couple of weeks' and I said, ok, I'll send a letter to all the CEOs of the airlines saying, 'hey, in a couple of weeks we're gonna put this website up, you might want to change your customer service plan before we do it, because there's gonna be a bunch of green checkmarks and red Xs' - and they DID! This was not an enforcement, we've done those, this was not a rule-making, we're doing those... this was just saying we're going to tell people what you're doing, so you might want to think about what you're doing... and it led to real change.

So, superficially a bit of a contradiction, but really two complementary ideas: both what you can take for granted and what you have awareness of can be greatly important, depending on the context. (Broad stroke implications for my job in UI/UX as well!) 

google, js, and you

I've worked at companies that did a great deal of double rendering to make sure that google saw the content, even when we filled in most of the content via Javascript. (Of course Google REALLY hates it if it figures out your content is different than what it scraped...) We would make a basic version via server side templates (FreeMarker), then redraw the screen - which Google also hates.

There was a lot of mystery about "is Google even rendering our JS?" but now this comprehensive article seems to say the answer is "yes": How Google handles JavaScript throughout the indexing process

Interesting that it treats URLs with ?cgi=something style arguments differently in terms of scheduling stuff...