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On Doomerism
Some thoughts about Terrence Edan’s post against doomerism. Continue reading →
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Enjoyed Adam Wunn’s post about FileMaker, via ATP. I’ve never used FileMaker, but as an avid reader of the technology section of the Green Guide back in the day, I always saw ads for it and wondered what it was. I guess one could, if they were be uncharitable, describe it as something akin to Microsoft Access. Anyone remember Access? Does Access remember Access? 😉
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So many links in one post. I ended up going down all kinds of rabbit holes off the back of this single post.
Followed Kev down that rabbit hole and I agree. It was quite the journey.
The backbone of the internet is the hyperlink, so go forth and link out to your fellow bloggers with reckless abandon. It’s what makes the web, the web. 🕸️
Paying it forward in kind. Thanks, Kev, for the links.
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🔗 Unsung: Paste And Match Style is not the answer
The problem is that PAMS is drunk with power and flattens everything on its way: [bold, italics, etc.] None of these are “style.” This is actual information that should not be removed. If you wire PAMS as your main ⌘V shortcut, or even if you use it occasionally, you might remove valuable data from text you’re moving around, without even noticing.
I can sympathise that styles might be valuable information to some, but there must remain a way to remove this, leaving only the text. Too many apps implement styles badly, and most of the time, I find it much easier to copy as text and apply the styles again, despite how long it takes. That’s if I want to maintain the styling at all (most of the time I do not).
Simply appealing to apps to improve Paste won’t give us that. Remove PAMS if you must, but for the love of God, make sure there’s something like a “Paste Without Styles” which allows me to paste text as plain text. And make it easier to set this as the default systemwide: why are we still rebinding system shortcuts to get this feature?
(I did not expect to feel so strongly about this, but I just more fired up about this opinion as I wrote this. Paste as it’s implemented now just frustrates me sometimes).
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🔗 A time machine in Logic Pro:
Like with most such apps, you can press R to record playing an instrument. However, if you forgot to start recording, or were just goofing around and stumbled upon something wonderful, you can press ⇧R and the recording will appear anyway
This sounds like a really useful feature. There’ve been times I would play out a riff, found it good, reach to record it, only to completely loose the feel of it. I think recording all MIDI events since the start of the session is simpler than the whole discard-after-20-min-pause. It’s 3 bytes per event; we’ve got the space.
Just tried it myself. Worked like a charm.
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🔗 Jim Nielsen’s Blog: A Well Known URL For Your Personal Avatar
The fact that this post from 2023 still comes to mind whenever I need to remember how to get my avatar image/URL suggests to me that this is a pretty good idea.
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🔗 Mort’s Ramblings: SQLite should have (Rust-style) editions
Come for the opinion. Stay for the techniques on tuning an Sqlite database to support foreign keys and avoid DB lock errors.
Via: Lobste.rs
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🔗 Robin Rendle: EP-1320 Medieval
So the EP-1320 is not simple. You either learn it’s way of doing things or go to hell. Like computers from before my time, this thing is modes-galore.
There’s something to be said about the feeling of accomplishment that comes from learning a complicated UI. Things like this, or software like Vim or Photoshop, are not approachable or intuitive. But they still have something to offer: a sense of mastery.
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🔗 Daring Fireball: OpenAI Help Center Describes What Is Wrong With the New ChatGPT
These three paragraphs, from OpenAI’s own Help Center, sound more like a critic’s scathing review of what’s wrong with the new ChatGPT “super” app than a guide to how to use it.
I read those paragraphs and was reminded of the complex feature sets that came from various flavours of commercial software from the 90’s, usually from Microsoft. Here’s an AI slop impression:
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🔗 Birchtree: A blown up iPhone, not the next Mac:
I think it’s reasonable to say that fifteen years ago, the iPad was where more software innovation was happening compared to the Mac. Today, however, we’ve moved onto a new era.
I think iPadOS has hit a local maxima, and as long as Apple continues to apply its iron grip on the device, it won’t break free from that. But you know what, it’s fine. The iPad doesn’t need to be anymore than it is. But don’t call it a replacement for your Mac.
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🔗 Tom MacWright: Accidental anonymity
I saw a couple of people link to this post. Understandable. It’s one that left me thinking, especially this line:
[P]utting your art, writing, expression out to be judged by others is an act of bravery as much as talent, and a lot of people lack bravery. Sorry to say it but if you need your work to be polished and beyond reproach, that’s a determination and character problem, not a skill problem.
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Jeroen Sangers: You never learned to delegate. AI just made it obvious.
Delegation and management were once skills for people who had teams. […] That changed.
If you work with AI in any meaningful way, you are now managing something. You are setting direction, communicating intent, and evaluating output. The same skills apply, and the same gaps get exposed.
The irony for us techies that preferred staying in a technical role over a managerial one is that the technology has made managers of us all. 😏
Via: Hunter Gatherer 21C
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To his later point about wireless networking, it’s true that wireless enabled a whole bunch of new mobile apps. But AI is not just a supporting technology. It’s inseparable from the new products that it enables. Makes sense to build new devices around AI assistants in particular.
I don’t see it myself. I think people like using their phones too much for a complete wholesale replacement. If I could take the tiller of the Ship of Theseus for a moment, I reckon if it does come to pass, it’d be closer to what happened to Ethernet: Apple replaces the AppKit layer with a whole new AI-based interaction model, but it would still be called the iPhone. Maybe it’d still be called iOS. I guess they could call it SiriOS, if that brand wasn’t already tarnished (or they weren’t being “serious” 😛).
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Daring Fireball: AI Is Technology, Not a Product
Levy’s argument reminds me of the hype around “the cloud” when that first became a term. It’s so meaningless when used broadly (e.g. “Everything will soon be in the cloud”) that it could mean anything.
Hearing this reminds me of a story from In Search for Stupidity, in which Borland was trying to sell their suite of office products by extolling the virtues of Object Oriented programming. Techies’ gonna’ techie, and think everyone is excited as they are about their new toys or methodologies. But for heaven’s sake, know thy audience.
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How many MacBook Neo buyers would have bought an Air before?:
My suspicion is that the majority of those buyers are going to be new to the Mac. However at least some percentage are going to be people who would have bought an Air previously
I don’t know. I wonder if these are Apple people that wouldn’t have bought anything at all. If one already has a primary Mac, and wants a secondary that’s a little more capable than an iPad, a MacBook Air feels just a little too much. The Neo feels like it’s just enough computer for this sort of role.
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🔗 Josh Michielsen: Separate Your Go Tests with Build Tags
Huh, it never occurred to me to use build tags to separate unit and integration tests. Looks like a nice pattern.
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🔗 Blain Smith: Just Fucking Use Go
There are not enough “this"es in the English language I can add in support for this post.
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🔗 The Homebound Symphony: Predictable (emphasis added):
Every university function that is on the internet is a security vulnerability. (Just look at how many online systems we have!) But every university function outsourced to a giant company whose tools are used by many universities is a far greater vulnerability, because there is so much money to be made from exploiting all that data. Locally owned and managed data is a smaller and less appealing target for hackers.
It’s kind of ironic that the move away from home-spun and locally managed data stores, usually done in the name of “security”, has not left us more secure at all. All it’s done is made larger, more valuable, targets.
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🔗 Manton Reece: Inkwell app review history
Get it together, Apple! This is an app I’m interested in using, and your review process is getting in the way. What the heck is the problem?!
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🔗 Pixel Envy: ‘Knowledge Fight’ Is Over:
Sometimes, periodical media is created with an elaborate plan or story arc. Often, though, there is no predetermined structure and, especially in the case of reactive or commentary media, the next entry feels almost inevitable. Until it stops. Then we get to feel what our world is like without it and, if it leaves a void, it is a sign it was valued.
Knowledge Fight has been a guilty pleasure of mine. The subject matter is awful, yet Dan and Jordan approached it with the attitude it deserves, namely mockery. I still have the back catalogue to enjoy, but I will miss this.
Follow up
I didn’t want to publish this as a new post, but I wanted to share this with someone. In episode #1102, when Dan and Jordan were exploring the poetry of one of Jones’ sponsor, I wrote this limerick. My intention was to submit it as a support message to the show. I guess I don’t have the opportunity now, so here I am posting it here:
There once was a Texan named Jones,
On air, with his screed, he doth drones:
“With the devil I tangle!”
But he’d much rather mangle,
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🔗 Forking Mad: Disparaging Nouns
I might use the word walloper to refer to someone. I think it is quite common parlance. “He’s a walloper” - an unkind reference to his annoying character. […] Apparently in Australia it means Policeman! In Ireland it’s a cudgel (short heavy implement, used as a weapon). I guess that one could be phallic … but Policeman‽
How about Twat. I love this word. Again, derogatory towards someone who is a fool. It can also mean to hit or slap! (new to me). Our cousins down-under seem to think a Twat is a vulgar term for [censored].
Speaking as someone who grew up in Australia, I’ve never heard “walloper” or “twat” used in that way. Probably just the circles I travel in, or just the amount of British TV I watch, but I tend to associated them with the Irish and British meanings respectively.
Now, vulgarity out of the way, this is a useful frame of reference for me to explain that I’m not really one to alter my language to make it understandable for an international audience. The subheading makes it clear that I’m someone from Melbourne, Australia, and I tend to be a little precious about the importation of words from other English speaking nations squashing those I grew up with (a futile activity, I agree, but that doesn’t change my feelings). So take this as a general reminder to anyone reading just to keep this context in mind.
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🔗 Forking Mad: Who knows that you blog?
Question for the audience: Do you tell people you blog?
I found this post via Kev Quirk who posted his own answer to this question. Mine are quite similar: I don’t really make a point of telling people I have a blog. It’s not like I keep it a complete secret: if someone talks about writing or keeping a blog of their own, I do mention that I also have one. And I may say a few words on what I tend to write about. But I rarely mention the URL or send links to people.
That said, I know of a few people that are aware of it. I have a link to it on my LinkedIn profile and one or two people I work closely with stumbled upon it that way (hi, K.K. 👋). And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. It keeps me honest, and resident of the fact that whatever is written here is public. That’s always been true, but it becomes quite tangible if you know the people who can read it.
But no, I generally don’t make it a point that I keep a blog.
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🔗 Interconnected: We need RSS for sharing abundant vibe-coded apps
It’s amusing imagining a world where custom apps are just as abundant as posts on a blog, but it kind of feels like we’re heading towards that future. I do like this idea, though.
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🔗 The Verge: The creative software industry has declared war on Adobe
Lot of links to high quality creative tools that are free and cheap. Cavalry looks really interesting.
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🔗 Platformer News: The scientific case for being nice to your chatbot:
Being polite to a large language model can feel strange or even silly — roughly equivalent to thanking a toaster. And yet a recent paper from Anthropic lends scientific weight to the theory that chatbots work better when you’re nice to them.
Looks like in this brave new world, we’ll all be saying thank-you to our doors. 😀
That said, I did apologise to Claude today when I interrupted it’s work while trying to adjust permissions.
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