Notes

Just Works™

Alex hits it home with when using to-the-point, no fuss device and software from days of tech old.

The Palm Pilot is from an era where boutique software developers crafted applications to provide value, rather than stick you with another subscription fee. Shareware on the Palm was a pay once ordeal, and for that you typically got exactly what you expected. No ads, tracking, internet requirement or bloat.

Surely we can re-establish this era when software and devices weren’t as needy as they are now, right?

All this reminiscing fires me up to repurpose my Sony phones, listen more to self, non algorithmically currated music on my PSP, revive my offline MP4, and, heck, even install new OS on my aged Toshiba. Why not?

The point is the journey

Ina recent newsletter, Josh shares an experience in using llm-tools to realise a user interface. Findings?

“The syntax was never the important part. Even before AI, you could quickly google to find the syntax. The important part has always been to have a robust and solid mental model of the underlying systems and mechanisms. Building software is so much more fun when you can rely on your intuition, rather than your memory.”

The point is the journey, not just the destination.

Irreplaceable gift

In a digital encounter event, Pope Leo tells how Ai can never replace the unique gift that is all of Us.

Ai can process information quickly, but it cannot replace human intelligence. And don’t ask it to do your homework for you. It cannot offer real wisdom. It misses a very important human element. Ai will not judge between what is truly right and what is wrong, and it won’t stand in authentic wonder, before the beauty, the beauty of God’s creation.

There really isn’t any reasoning going on, just extensively backed statistics. And Ai doesn’t really think, but we do. We need to hone that skill.

So be prudent, be wise. Be careful that your use of Ai does not limit your true human growth. Use it in such a way that if it disappeared tomorrow, you would still know how to think, how to create, how to act on your own, how to form authentic friendship.

This is what deeply worries me. Without proper supervision, students might mistake overeliance on Ai tools to produce results as a success. The true success is the journey towards the output. At best, LLM tools should assist students, not slop out finished products for them.

Remember, Ai can never replace that unique gift that you are to the world.

Each of us is a gift. And if the tech bros can’t see that or willfully go about their day despite the fact, then, like King Antiochus, they’ve secured their demise.

Three Debts in Software

I bet there’s more, but recently these are the ones I’ve read about in relation to software development. As if sleep debt wasn’t enough haha.

1. Technical Debt

   the future costs associated with relying on shortcuts or suboptimal decisions made during software development. These compromises are primarily due to quick fixes, poor documentation and reliance on outdated code. Over time, this debt must be addressed, requiring additional effort. This “repayment” typically involves refactoring, debugging and ongoing code maintenance.

   You know the code well enough to establish there’s debt to be paid.

2. Comprehension Debt

   When teams produce code faster than they can understand it, it creates what I’ve been calling “comprehension debt”.

   Accumulating code you’d have to understand later.

3. Cognitive Debt

   Cognitive Debt is where you forgo the thinking in order just to get the answers, but have no real idea of why the answers are what they are.

   You don’t understand how to build it, just focused on getting the output.

Loser lane

Imagine that brick game where you drive an 8-brick F1 car whizzing left to right to avoid obstacles, but do it with characters. Loser lane is a game made by Marie Flanagan where you control a bike user to avoid obstacles on the bike lane. This has a special place in my heart because of the advocacy of active mobility merried with programming. I felt the same when I encountered a frogger-like game made by advocates against road widening.

Recent flood control issues, among other important things, impeded our transportation to a halt. It’s ripe for a similar game.

Ebony and ivory

What does Florian’s, Andre’s, Drapper’s, Aleksandr’s, Geerling’s, Vasilis’, Hojberg’s, and Meiert’s site all have in common?

Some sites will depend on your current system theme.

Taking note of these here because I’m just amazed how simple yet proffesional these sites feel even if the design and theme uses mainly black and white.

Oh, and there’s also Pickering and Bell’s website for Every Layout, a book on making better and resilient CSS, dawning black and white. Beyond the colors, you can see the intentions in spacing, layout and identity commanded by the site; an algorithmic layout design is at play.

Preoccupied

Ethan shared Jenny’s post on choosing friction and I faintly recalled a scene from Jurassic Park. It was during the presentation scene where Malcom (Goldblum) says to the owner and scientists,

Malcolm: Don’t you see the danger, John, inherent in what you’re doing here. Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet’s ever seen but you wield it like a kid that’s found his dad’s gun…I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here: it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You know, you read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn’t earn the knowledge for yourselves so you don’t take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of genuises to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox and now you’re selling it!

Hammond: I don’t think you give us our due credit. Our scientists have done things which nobody has ever done before.

Malcolm: Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

“Pain does not mean growth, but growth does require pain”, Jenny says, and nothing can be farther from the truth in our age. There’s a certain discipline needed to wield such power from current LLM tools; discipline gained from frictions we face in life. But what if those who sell us LLM tools package it as a friction buster? How can we hope to gain that discipline?

It’s also good to ask if these tools’ creators stop to think if they should have made it the way they did now.

Webhord in the wild

Starting to see more Links pages across personal sites.

Ethan Marcotte, Infreqeuntly, and this one shared by Kev. Sure feels Hoffman’s post on resurgence of directories is slowly happening and close to what we ought to be doing as we experience the onslaught of unregulated llm search/prompt results.

PHP docs redesign

Finally! PHP foundation heard and responded to calls for redesinging the docs site of PHP, starting with the v8.5 release page.

Maybe something like git’s or Ruby’s or Laravel’s? Modern but not too razzle dazzle. But one thing I absolutely hope is that the people invested in this doesn’t come with Tailwind-riddled suggestions.

Cheat Sheet

Git Gud with a newly added cheat sheet.

A few days ago Julia Evans contributed a new cheat sheet at the git website. Funny how there’s a multitude of cheat sheets out there, including Evan’s, but only now did git-scm gain its own. I like their discussion at the pull request at the repo where they tackle the design and size considerations. Developers putting the priority for users in action.

Julia is also making other changes to make the git docs much more readable. Keeping an eye out for the updates.

Declarative partial updates

A native way to include site fragments.

Declarative partial updates (calling it DPU for now) is a transclution method using a html native element instead of relying on server-side code. Imagine a <fragment> tag that calls a header.html file like so:

<fragment src="parts/header.html">
...
</fragment>

It’s an HTML native way of doing an include like in PHP. Introducing such a feature opens up multiple questions. Here’s some from the discussion I read at github:

1. how to style fragments?
2. how to reference files (css/js), fragments local directory or the calling html file’s directory?

Keeping track of the progess at the WICG repo.

Bookmarklets

Big help from small tools.

As the name suggests, bookmarklets are small javascript functions you can add to your browser’s bookmark bar. Clicking them triggers their functionality.

Here are some bookmarklets I’ve encountered:

• 2Vid, allows you to screen record browser and saves it into a file.
• Just recently, a More opener for Github and text-fragment link generator.

Web Dev series

Learn and relearn making in the web.

A few weeks ago Dr. Alex started a blog series, Learning Web Development. It’s a great refresher even for experienced devs IMO so go check it out (being updated as of writing).

I personally like the build up of the lessons as it approached the Using web servers part. He eases you in to the terms and concepts on the the foundations of the web, get’s you up to speed with urls, protocols, the works.

Jekyll in the Wild

Finding sites using this ssg sparks joy.

I’ve learned long before Alex Chan’s site was made with Jekyll. After researching for Ruby on Rails, I then stumbled upon Yoko Harada’s (yokolet) website. Just recently, and I can’t believe I’m just knowing this now, Jan Wildeboer’s web home is also Jekyll under the hood. There was also a stirr about a certain Ai post by Anthony Moser, another Jekyll site.

When I decided to create a personal site I was lead to believe that I need to go big or go latest with the frameworks and fancy tech. Turns out all I needed was what I started with. And a lot of people in the web still use it after all.

Social Exodus

Leaving corporate socials is a Choice.

Many say it’s hard, including me. But it might not be the case…

“But, as someone who dumped social media many years ago, let me tell you: it’s not that hard. Life will continue just fine. It will probably feel strange for a week or two, and then your brain will adapt, and everything is gonna be ok. Sure, you’ll probably miss a few completely pointless updates from family and friends. That’s ok. That’s fine. Humanity has worked that way for most of its existence, and we’re still here, chugging along.” - Manuel Moreale

“For a long time, I fell into a trap of feeling like I needed to be online all the time. I needed to consume all the bad news to stay informed. This is a trap. We are not meant to consume the amount of content we do. It’s paralyzing. The smallest act of resistance you can do right now is unplug.” - Stephanie Stimac

“I deleted the apps from my phone to prevent the muscle memory of opening them, but when they weren’t there, I just didn’t really think about them. There’s only so much Discourse my simple brain can handle and I should only be dealing with that during work hours as I see it.” - Andy Bell

PH in Web History

When our country became an incubator for the Web.

“…Douglas Engelbart gets shipped to the Philippines during the war. An in his stay, he reads on ‘As We May Think’ by Vanivar Bush.” - Layers of the Web