markjgsmith

2023/11/01 #

• Brian McCullough from the Techmeme Podcast has some great analysis of the rapidly expanding AI space. Tldr, big tech giants which are the incumbents are crying wolf to regulators about the dangers in order to cement their monopolies. Smaller AI companies and VCs are responding by open sourcing everything, to let a million flowers bloom. #

• Things comming together - I've been continuing my work on the interleaved everything redesign of the website. It's all part of the bigger epic of sorts to get the blogging balance right. I wrote a few days ago about possibilities spaces and refactoring, something that amazes me each time.

  This morning was another small milestone on the journey. I'd previously refactored the base layer so all posting goes through the same code. All the various post types are accomodated and you can turn different features on and off easily. Things that previously took weeks to implement are now just a single boolean config. The blog, linkblog, podcast, newsletter and notes plugins were updated already, and they appear to work fine with the latest common base layer.

  Yesterday and this morning though I was updating the archives plugin. The archives plugin is a biggie because it uses components inside all the other plugins to create archives in a standard way, but in the style of each plugin. I don't mean style in the CSS sense, but more just way to refer to the general shape of the HTML of each item. I also wrote the archives plugin quite a long time ago, when things were very different. I was expecting some difficulties, and maybe even for things to get a bit nasty.

  There were difficulties for sure. I had to rename a whole load of variables. So many, in so many places, that I just thought this is going to get ugly. I also had to update some component interfaces. I took the time to clean things up, and more intentionally use the different ways of passing data throughout the render pipeline. But this morning, after finding a silly bug where I had passed a variable into the wrong level, it all worked!

  Now I'm genuinely excited to test all the latest plugins rendering the real website. It feels a little bit like christmas eve, but much more serious of course. This part of coding is great, you actually wake up in the morning and can't wait to get it all working. It makes all the hard work worth the effort.

  Update: It's funny, shortly after writing this note I remembered a few things I still have to do in order to test with the real website. You can't hold everything in your head, another reason why writing it up like this is very useful :) #

• How many? - A great example of what I was talking about when I wrote about the strangeness of possibilities spaces in software development and how we forget how strange and non-obvious things are. It happens all the time.

  Brian Keating interviews mathematician Eugenia Cheng, and she tells the story (12:30) that it took humans a really long time to get used to the number zero. They got used to natural numbers like 1 2 3 etc relatively quickly, but the idea that no things was an actual number didn't occur to people for literally ages. That seems very odd now. Software development is full of these types of realisations.

  "Once you realise that zero is everywhere...I hope everyone can see that in their house now there are zero elephants, unless of course, you have an elephant in your house".

  Believe it or not people were very suspicious of the number zero. Some still are! In mathematics it's often about accepting some things are rather weird AND going ahead as well.

  Mathematics is fucking hilarious sometimes, but also one of the most useful tools we have. #

• This morning outside the internet place: a seemingly abandonned person in a wheelchair. How strange that that would happen just a day after I published a writeup of the weird wheelchair + rock incident. That's definitely unusual. Abandonned wheelchair people isn't normally a thing here. #

• 20000 Hz Podcast just released a new episode. It's all about audio in product marketing and branding over the past 70 years or so. A delightful audio trip down memory lane. It's called Sounds that Sell. #

Today’s links:

• Apple unveils the new MacBook Pro featuring the M3 family of chips, making the world’s best pro laptop even better - These look amazing. If there was one thing that would make my life infinitely better it's a new MacBook Pro M3 Max. Just putting that out there into the world in case that's in any way a possibility. www.apple.com #

• A DNA turbine powered by a transmembrane potential across a nanopore - They sure have a way of making their work sound boring with these technical titles and the scientific paper style of writing, but when you take the time to read through, the stuff they are doing is pretty amazing. It's like a motorboat propellar for tiny boats. How tiny? 24 nanometers. For comparison, the cutting edge of transistors on microchips is 3 nanometers. And it's made from DNA, so they could potentially lead to nanoscale robots that fix your body from the inside. Material science is cool. www.nature.com #

• NixOS Reproducible Builds: minimal installation ISO successfully independently rebuilt - Important step on the journey to reproduceable builds. From the HN thread: "It's not about proving that the result is 100% trustable. It's about proving it's 100% faithful to the source. Which means that should monkey business be detected (like a sneaky backdoor), it can be recreated deterministically 100% of the time. In other words for the bad guys: nowhere to run, nowhere to hide". discourse.nixos.org #

• Bloomberg invests in Nodejs. Shouldn't you? - Qudos to Bloomberg for leading by example. More companies should invest in the Nodejs ecosystem, from core but also into the libraries that power the things we build. The ecosystem is complex and many different places need support. Do your bit. www.nearform.com #