Look, Twitter is trash now, let’s be honest. It used to be a gold mine for discovering stuff as a developer, but since the Musk takeover, finding anything of value is hard. We’re all fragmented now too, spread around Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads and LinkedIn, so finding stuff is still tough on social media. I’ll always back RSS — it’s why we...
[Cooper, 2013-2024] Earlier this week, Ross Andersen for The Atlantic considered the current state of comparative thanatology, or the question of how similar or dissimilar is the understanding of death from...
Cooper, 2013-2024 Earlier this week, Ross Andersen for The Atlantic considered the current state of comparative thanatology, or the question of how similar or dissimilar is the understanding of death from one species to the next. The current state mostly is the same as it’s been for awhile: there are glimpses of possible understanding on the part...
Well, this was (ahem) unexpected. Seriously now, early commentators seem to be so narrowly focused on the chain-of-thought demos that they completely miss the point that o1 has the potential to bring to the table one thing that most AI-driven systems lack: Explainability–i.e., the ability to lay out the reasoning behind its internal processes in...
originally posted on cohost.org i dont have any bandcamp friday recommendations rn cuz ive just not been listening to a ton of new stuff but i have been obsessively listening to Collage's debut album, Memento Mori. They're the Taiwanese rock duo that created the credits theme for Nine Sols1 and I've been pretty floored by how phenomenal the album...
Exactly one year ago, Unity’s former CEO shot the entire company in the foot and caused a massive exodus of developers to Unreal and Godot (for which I am grateful), and their new CEO has finally come around to undo the damage and restore some sanity to their ecosystem (better late than never, I guess). This is nice. I mostly liked Unity and...
I wrote about how much I love fish in this blog post from 2017 and, 7 years of using it every day later, I’ve found even more reasons to love it. So I thought I’d write a new post with both the old reasons I loved it and some reasons. This came up today because I was trying to figure out why my terminal doesn’t break anymore when I cat a binary...
Chapter 5 of the Designing Data Intensive Applications (DDIA) book discusses strategies and challenges in replicating data across distributed systems.Replication is critical for ensuring data availability, fault tolerance, and scalability. One of the key challenges in replication is maintaining consistency across multiple replicas. Leader-based...
How to optimize how your company goes from idea to execution with many steakholders
I was researching for my last article when I stumbled upon this post from John Gruber in 2011 where he responds to a bad article on Time.com about Windows 8. What was interesting to me was this bit about how Excel on an iPad with the ability to open
(This is part 10 in a (This is part 10 in a series on the scientific methodseries on the scientific method.).)In 1966, well within living memory as I write this in 2024, Digital Equipment Corporation released the In 1966, well within living memory as I write this in 2024, Digital Equipment Corporation released the PDP-10PDP-10, later rebranded as the DECsystem-10 or, more colloquially, the DEC-10. The base model cost , later rebranded as the DECsystem-10 or, more colloquially, the DEC-10. The base model cost
Apple on their developer site today: Set Up Win-Back OffersIf your app offers auto-renewable subscriptions, you have the option to set up win-back offers to encourage lapsed subscribers to re-subscribe on the App Store. You can configure offers in App Store Connect to be displayed to eligible customers on
There’s a trope online where someone will post pictures of the iOS screen when alarms and timers are going off and they’ll lament, “why are the actions reversed, it’s confusing!” This post will get lots of engagement with people agreeing, but there
A couple of months ago, I got a message from App Store Connect pointing out that one of my iPhone apps - Berio’s Sequenza VII - had not been updated in 3 years and so would be removed from the App Store unless I updated it within 90 days. I disagree with this policy, but small developers like me can’t fight Apple. Since I want the app to remain...
Today—I’m delighted to announce that 11ty is joining the excellent team at Font Awesome!Today—I’m delighted to announce that 11ty is joining the excellent team at Font Awesome!
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Eleventy Blog: Eleventy Blog: 11ty is joining Font Awesome11ty is joining Font Awesome
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Technical debt isn't the monster under your bed, but it can become one if ignored too long.
When we encounter new information that conflicts with our current beliefs, we typically follow one of the preceding options: Ignore the new information. Place it into your existing belief system, regardless of whether it is consistent with your other beliefs. Create an ad hoc explanation to keep our beliefs intact. Adjust or revise our existing...
In Notes on buttondown.com and How Buttondown uses HAProxy, I outlined the slightly kludgy way we serve buttondown.com both as a marketing site (public-facing, Next/Vercel, largely just content pushed by non-developers) and an author-facing app (behind a login, Django/Heroku/Vue) and recommended developers not do that and instead just do the...
I always struggle with the syntax for redirecting multiple streams to another command or a file. LLMs do help, but beyond the most obvious cases, it takes a few prompts to get the syntax right. When I know exactly what I’m after, scanning a quick post is much faster than wrestling with a non-deterministic kraken. So, here’s a list of the...
I recently rewrote the interests section of my blog to be more concise. The primary interest I wrote down was “making things that alter thinking at scale.” When I distilled what I believed to be one of my long-term goals I landed on that. Recently I thought about how this is both similar and different to YC’s goal of “Make something people want”....
In Notes on buttondown.com and How Buttondown uses HAProxy, I outlined the slightly kludgy way we serve buttondown.com both as a marketing site (public-facing, Next/Vercel, largely just content pushed by non-developers) and an author-facing app (behind a login, Django/Heroku/Vue) and recommended developers not do that and instead just do the...
a keynote from CppNorth This one is about everything else that a team needs to accomplish, besides writing the code, in order to provide useful capabilities to people.
a keynote for YOW! London Playing games, we can focus deeply and work really hard and also have a good time. This is what I want out of work, too. Traditional gamification adds points, competition, and badges to make work appear more game-like. This corrodes collaboration, replacing a deeper meaning with superficial characteristics of games. ......
The Python Developers Survey 2023 has an interesting result that is incorrectly reported. By incorrectly, I mean the raw data is there, but there is no attempt at presenting it in a meaningful way. I’m talking about the professional experience level of Python programmers. The...
Mental toughness gets developers through challenges like debugging, picking up new tools, and hitting tight deadlines. It’s about staying calm and pushing through when things get tough.
Here’s August’s book haul: This month I enjoyed three novels. The most experimental of which was Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A workplace novel of the 22nd Century, which has the form of a series of witness statements from the crew of a ship, now far away from earth. The workers, both human and artificial, have been tending a number of exotic...
I have vivid memories as a child of my dad buying an Amiga 500 and letting me have exclusive access to the C64. I'd plugin in cassettes and 5 1/4 inch disks and play California games. One day I was in the local newsagent and I saw a comic about computers. On the front of the comic it had two little horned devil things called Rom and Ram. I have...
Building Python with --enable-framework changes some stuff around; should you care?
Introduction This is an essay for the course Game Design and I’m going to give you a ride through the evolution of RTS game genre. I like RTS games and I’ve played them for as long as I can remember, from the classic Red Alert and Age of Empires to the newer Supreme Commander and Starcraft 2 (beta). First of all what is a Real Time Strategy game?...
Introduction This is the second essay for the course Game Design and this thime I will be analysing the game World of Goo a bit. The first level The game is very simple. You begin with a structure and a few Goo balls, the charming balls bobbing around there, which you can drag and drop to build on the structure. Your goal is to reach the pipe and...
My brain is a curious thing. I’m on a business trip right now and I’ve set aside time to finish some important todos I want and need to get done. But instead of focusing on them, I started playing around with Gleam—a young and interesting programming language. My (current) favorite programming languages are Rust and Elixir. They’re really...
I have an evolving theory that buttons are amazing and people love them.There were rumors Apple was going to remove all physical buttons from the iPhone. As recently as April of this year, there was reporting that the iPhone 16 lineup would have no physical buttons! But in 2
My first Half Ironman! I guess I just want to brag (or encourage other to take the challange too!) that I finished my first Half Ironman! Ended up under 5:54h, really happy with that, I thought that sub 6h is out of my reach. Till April my longest effort was half marathon. Everything went surprisingly well, no incidents, no pain, just 6h of full...
I’ve mentioned it before but practical, easy-to-understand articles are what make things stick in my brain. That’s exactly what Ryan Mulligan has cooked up for us. I’ve only slightly touched @property — mainly for container filling text — because I don’t really do high interactive stuff. I’m starting to see how @property could be useful away...
Over the past few years, the evolution of AI-driven tools like GitHub’s Copilot and other large language models (LLMs) has promised to revolutionise programming. By leveraging deep learning, these tools can generate code, suggest solutions, and even troubleshoot issues in real-time, saving developers hours of work. While these tools have obvious...
Immediately following the presidential debate last night, Taylor Swift announced her endorsement of Kamala Harris on Instagram:Recently I was made aware that Al of 'me' falsely endorsing Donald Trump's presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around Al, and
JetBrains Rider has garnered attention as a modern, cross-platform IDE, especially for .NET developers. However, Visual Studio remains the reigning heavyweight in the development world, thanks to years of evolution and refinement. While Rider offers impressive features, there are still several areas where Visual Studio shines brighter. Here are...
When it comes to .NET development, Visual Studio has long been the go-to integrated development environment (IDE). However, JetBrains' Rider has emerged as a serious competitor, offering a fresh alternative with features that many developers now prefer. While both are powerful tools, here are five reasons why Rider is considered better than...
I use a lot of programming languages, I use them in different ways for different things because they are tools to do a job, just like a hammer is a tool to hammer in nails and a screwdriver (shockingly) drives screws… And while you can hammer in nails with a screwdriver, and you can drive screws with a hammer… They are not the best tools for...
I’m still digesting this, but I must say I find the knee-jerk reactions from mainstream Apple blogs amusing to say the least, because they all miss the mark where it regards context. Yes, it’s a bucketload of money. No, it’s not to be “paid”, its been in escrow all this time. And yes, it accumulated due to Ireland’s very deliberate setup as a...
React's journey over the last ten years has been nothing short of revolutionary. This popular library has been in a constant state of growth, with each new version bringing fresh ideas and performance boosts. Some updates have even changed how we think about building web applications.The latest
a system that elegantly provides the security benefits of an effect system and ocaps, while also being convenient to use. !--more-- inspired by scala's implicit paramaters and the object-capability model (ocaps). background: what is an ocap put simply, an object-capability is an object that represents a capability to do something. for example, on...
Google’s Gemini pulls summaries from websites and slaps them directly into the search results
We tried telling people to stop poaching, but that didn't work.
The story of how I gained two world-firsts, somehow.This might sound hard to believe but, as far as I know, I published the first ever Language Server for HTML that reports syntax errors, and then I also gained a second world-first after that.VSCode extension (OpenVSX) (or search "SuperHTML" in...
All of my budgeted blogwriting time is going to Logic for Programmers. Should be back early 2025. (I’m still writing the weekly newsletter.)
I’ve been meaning for a while to write more about one of my recent projects, Catch the Wave!. Originally it was made for last year’s Oregon Science Festival and since I’m exhibiting again at the festival this year (this weekend, in fact!
inspiration I frequently lost pencils and never took notes for most of my academic career. Eventually I got to the point in my self-studying and in my learning were notes was necessary. I find that writing things down can 2-3x the amount of stuff I can hold in my head at once, while making it easier to reference, and makes me remember it for...
In my free time, I love creating music. And I want to give it away. So if you run a YouTube channel, TikTok, Instagram, or any other media, feel free to use any of my beats. The post Use my music ↗ appeared first on Sergey Kaplich.
It’s been said Apple cares about themselves first, then their users, then their developers in that order. In this post, I explore whether I think corporate or individual freedoms should be prioritized.
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Logic For Programmers v0.3 Now available! It's a light release as I learn more about formatting a nice-looking book. You can see some of the differences between v2 and v3 here. Why Not Comments Code is written in a structured machine language, comments are written in an expressive human language. The "human language" bit makes comments more...
My electric toothbrush seems to be running out of charge quicker and quicker but is it or am I just misremembering when I last charged it? This is the first world challenge that I set about to change with WDiL! Introducing When Did I Last? (WDiL) WDiL aims to help solve those sorts of problems […]
Previously, we've looked at code generation in both Rails and Thrift. But unlike Thrift, the code generated by Rails is meant to be changed. Any change is fine, so long as it's not too surprising; the only limit is our judgement. Rails, then, doesn't fit the limb-metaphor. Our explanation will not always end with the model. Even so, the model...
The more progressive side of things has done a somewhat decent job educating others about the shaming of other people’s bodies, to the point where body positivity and acceptance is...
It’s been September for a good week now, I know, but you’ll have to forgive me as I’m running a bit behind my usual blog post cadence. The sudden drop in temperature makes it painfully clear that the summer of 2024 is gone, which is fine considering our garden has been ransacked by excavators and other machines. Not entirely fine, though: our...
Between roughly 2001 and 2018, I’ve happy to have done some nice things in quantum computing theory, from the quantum lower bound for the collision problem to the invention of shadow tomography. I hope that’s not the end of it. QC research brought me about as much pleasure as anything in life did. So I […]