Links
Hmm, it’s hard not feeling a little unsettled after reading this Stratechery post. One thing’s for sure, I’m a bit more doubtful of the post I wrote two days ago.
I tried ChatGPT for the first time this morning. I needed a shell script which will downscale a bunch of JPEG images in a directory. I’m perfectly capable of writing one myself, but that would mean poking through the ImageMagick docs trying to remember which of the several zillion arguments is used to reduce the image size. Having one written for me by ChatGPT saved about 15 minutes of this (it wasn’t exactly what I wanted, I did need to tweak it a little).
I don’t know what the future holds with AIs like this, and I acknowledge that it has had an effect on some peoples' living (heck, it may have an effect on mine). But I really can’t deny the utility it provided this morning.
🔗 The Magic of Small Databases
I kinda want this but for internal databases. There’ve been several times at work where I’ve had to collect semi-structured information in a spreadsheet or a wiki page comprised solely of tables. There’s always some loosely defined convention around how to represent it (use this colour to indicate this particular state) or when it should be changed (change this label to “In Review” until these people have seen it and then change it to “Confirmed”).
One example is how we manage releases: which services we’re pushing out and what commits they are, which environments it’s been deployed to or tested in, whether the other teams or the person on-call are aware of it and have signed off, etc. This is all managed in wiki pages that follow a standard layout, and it’s… okay. It was a convention that has grown out over time as we were working out our release procedure. And it made sense keeping it relatively informal as we were trying to work out our groove. But that groove has been formed now, and it would be nice to formalise the process. But doing so means that there’s a lot of manual labour keeping these release documents correct and up to date. And since it’s all in a centrally managed wiki, it’s difficult to automate away things that are managed by other systems like our code repositories.
A tool that can be hosted on-prem which will allow anyone to spin up a new document-base database (either for the team or themselves), define a very loose schema and some views, and put a very simple workflows and code macros would be great. The trick is trying to walk the line that separates something that basically is like a hosted version of Excel verses something that will require so much setup work that no-one will bother with it. I’d imagine that’s a tricky balancing act to follow.
What gets me about Twitter killing access to third-party clients is the lack of comms to the developers. No shutdown timeline. No chance to let the devs communicate this to their users. Nothing but cowardly silence. How utterly disrespectful!
🔗 Jean-Michel Jarre’s “Oxygene Pt. 4” in 19kb of JS code
A pretty good recreation of Oxygene Pt. 4. Also, I’ll have to explore this tool a little more.
Via waxy.org.
🔗 Twitter suffers major outage in Australia and New Zealand
I was about to make a joke about Twitter not paying their PagerDuty bill. But then it occurred to me: you probably don’t even need PagerDuty if you can just hear about outages from the news.
A Mac with everything you’d want in 1995.
A fully loaded version of System 9 running in your browser. Posted here because I found myself opening and playing around with this over the last few days.
(via. podiboq in the Hemispheric Views Discord)
🔗 github.com/charmbracelet/vhs
This little tool is awesome. It allows you to easily make GIFs of a command line session from a text-based DSL. I tried it on the full screen TUI app I’m working on and it worked flawlessly.
Now wondering if I could use it for automated testing. 🤔
Endless driving game in the browser. Pretty frickin' well done. There’s also a Medium post on how it was put together.
(via. Ars Technica)
🔗 Pocket Casts Mobile Apps Are Now Open Source
Wow, I did not expect that. Although I probably should have since it’s owned by Automattic now.
🔗 Who is ready for a fleet of cubesats flying over cities, displaying ads?
The well of bad ideas may not be bottomless, but it certainly is deep.
🔗 Google suffers from a digital petro curse
Hearing the story about Stadia reminded me of this post by DHH. His thoughts on why Google can’t keep a new product around for more than a few years is insightful.
Google’s damaged reputation made the death of Stadia a self-fulfilling prophecy. No one buys Stadia games because they assume the service will be shut down, and Stadia is forced to shut down because no one buys games from it.
What’s there more to say? 🤷
🔗 Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA replacement lacks crosswalks, checkboxes, Google
I wonder: if Google, as many suspect, is using CAPTCHA for image recognition training, how certain are they of the positive results? If everyone were to start clicking anything other than crosswalks, would that screw up their training data?
Drop in replacement for the github.com/pkg/errors package. The original package is archived as there’s a plan to change how Go handles errors. But not all of us are ready to adopt this yet.
🔗 A delightful reference for HTML Symbols, Entities and ASCII Character Codes
A great reference site I stumbled along when I was trying to find the perfect arrow to include in a webpage. Nice, clean, and quite comprehensive. No awful ads either, which is a breath of fresh air.
Dad and I have been watching YouTube cab-rides of the NYC subway system recently. Part of the fun is trying to understand the various track configurations and how the system operates. The size of the network never ceases to amaze.
Facinating website for the casual Melbourne train buff. A lot of great photos of rail infrastructure, plus what appears to be routine “photos from 10 years ago” posts, which brings me back. Link via my dad.
🔗 Publishing your work increases your luck (via Github’s The Readme Project)
I found this very inspiring. Given where it was published the subject matter is about software, but I believe that it could apply to pretty much any creative endeavour.