Tags: XP

The origins of the steam engine

The fascinating pre-history of steam power, illustrated with interactive widgets.

The subjective experience of coding in different programming languages (Interconnected)

I love the analogies Matt uses to describe the vibes of different kinds of coding:

When I’m deep in multiple nested parentheses in a C-like language, even Python, I feel precarious, like I’m walking a high wire or balancing things in my hands and picking my way down steep stairs.

I haven’t done much Haskell but what I did felt like crawling underground through caves and tunnels.

Opening a terminal window to a distant server is like reaching through a hatch with my arm, but a long way; ssh tunnel is well named.

Writing code with GitHub Copilot and Typescript in full flight feels like, well, flying, or at least great bounding leaps like being on the Moon.

Invokers (Explainer) | Open UI

This is a really interesting proposal, and I have thoughts.

Marbla

A fun variable font with three axes: inktrap, balloon, and curve.

Losing the imitation game

The hard part of programming is building and maintaining a useful mental model of a complex system. The easy part is writing code. They’re positioning this tool as a universal solution, but it’s only capable of doing the easy part. And even then, it’s not able to do that part reliably. Human engineers will still have to evaluate and review the code that an AI writes. But they’ll now have to do it without the benefit of having anyone who understands it. No one can explain it. No one can explain what they were thinking when they wrote it. No one can explain what they expect it to do. Every choice made in writing software is a choice not to do things in a different way. And there will be no one who can explain why they made this choice, and not those others. In part because it wasn’t even a decision that was made. It was a probability that was realized.

This post also has a really good explanation of how large language models work.

There may be real, productive uses for these kinds of tools. There may be ways to build and deploy them ethically and sustainably. But that’s not the situation with the instances we have. AI, as it’s been built today, is a tool to sell out our collective futures in order to enrich already wealthy people. They like to frame it as being akin to nuclear science. But we should really see it as being more like fossil fuels.

An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid

This is a terrific interactive explainer!

CSS { In Real Life } | Stop Using AI-Generated Images

I have yet to meet anyone who wants to hang AI art on their walls (although I fully expect to see it in hotel chains).

Personalization

A look at how personalisation works in digital interfaces and real-world objects.

Statement on Generative AI | Ben Myers

I endorse this statement.

“If It Sounds Like Sci-Fi, It Probably Is”

Emily M. Bender:

I dislike the term because “artificial intelligence” suggests that there’s more going on than there is, that these things are autonomous thinking entities rather than tools and simply kinds of automation. If we focus on them as autonomous thinking entities or we spin out that fantasy, it is easier to lose track of the people in the picture, both the people who should be accountable for what the systems are doing and the people whose labor and data are being exploited to create them in the first place.

Alternative terms:

• Stochastic parrots
• Spicy autocomplete
• Mad Libs
• Magic Eight Ball

And this is worth shouting from the rooftops:

The threat is not the generative “AI” itself. It’s the way that management might choose to use it.

Generative AI: What You Need To Know

Generative AI: What You Need To Know is a free resource that will help you develop an AI-bullshit detector.

You can read all the cards on one page, print them out, or print to PDF.

Space Elevator

Scroll up to the Kármán line.

The Splintered Mind: The Black Hole Objection to Longtermism and Consequentialism

Stick a singularity in your “effective altruism” pipe and smoke it.

Jeepers Frigging Cripes Crypto and NFTs are so stupid and dumb and bad and I can’t even. I’m out. Goodbye. Burn it down please. - Chris Coyier

Literally every experience I have in this world is gross at best and criminally evil at worst. Who it benefits that actually needs the benfefit is vanishingly few.

Here are some rhetorical questions from Chris:

How many years into this are we with no practical use cases for the world? How many resources have to be burned before this is seen?

The stupidity of AI | The Guardian

A great piece by James, adapted from the new edition of his book New Dark Age.

The lesson of the current wave of “artificial” “intelligence”, I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. And don’t be intimidated by them either – they’re really not that complicated. As the science-fiction legend Ursula K Le Guin wrote: “Technology is what we can learn to do.”

Audio Session API Explainer

Jen pointed me to this proposal, which should help smooth over some of the inconsistencies I documented in iOS when it comes to the Web Audio API.

I’ve preemptively add this bit of feature detection to The Session:

if ('audioSession' in navigator) { navigator.audioSession.type = "playback"; }

Why Not Mars (Idle Words)

I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.

Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.

Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.

And don’t skip the footnotes:

Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.

Why the super rich are inevitable

The interactive widgets embedded in this article are excellent teaching tools!

A year of new avenues

All along, from the frothy 1990s to the per­co­lat­ing 2000s to the frozen 2010s to today, the web has been the sure thing. All along, it’s been grow­ing and maturing, sprout­ing new capabilities. From my van­tage point, that growth has seemed to accel­er­ate in the past five years; CSS, in par­tic­u­lar, has become incred­i­bly flex­i­ble and expressive. Maybe even a bit overstuffed — but I’ll take it.

For peo­ple who care about cre­at­ing worlds together, rather than get­ting rich, the web is the past and the web is the future. What luck, that this decentralized, per­mis­sion­less sys­tem claimed a posi­tion at the heart of the inter­net, and stuck there. It’s limited, of course; frustrating; some­times maddening. But that’s every cre­ative medium. That’s life.

An Interactive Guide to Flexbox in CSS

This is a superb explanation of flexbox—the interactive widgets sprinkled throughout are such a great aid to learning!