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!)