People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
We watched five minutes of the State of the Union last night, then went to bed. Glad to see the recaps this morning that it was basically a whole lot of nothing. Not even much of a spectacle. 🇺🇸
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
AI coding works now. Here's how to think about it.
Mark Gurman reports about upcoming touchscreen Macs:
…the Mac will gain a refreshed, dynamic user interface that can shift between being optimized for touch or point-and-click input, said the people.
I hope that for developers who have already adopted Liquid Glass in some way, there won’t be major changes needed for touch in the next macOS. Apple’s yearly update schedule tends to create too much busywork for developers.
We rolled out some improvements for uploading audio in blog posts, including a new Record button for Micro.blog Studio subscribers. When a blog post has an MP3 attached, Micro.blog automatically adds it to your podcast RSS feed. Here’s a quick video showing how it works.
There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.
It took me a while to realize..
We're going to spend a while reimplementing all our server software.
It would be super helpful if the whole thing could be packaged up so we can write our servers in English or whatever our preferred Really Simple Language is, and have it compiled to whatever internal language it likes, and not have to learn too much new jargon.
denodell.com/blog/constraints-and-the-lost-art-of-optimization
The entire intellectual and creative output of a team that reinvented personal computing fits in a space that, today, we wouldn’t think twice about wasting on a single font file.
Somewhere in the years that followed we’ve lost the creative solutions, the art of optimization, that being constrained in that way produces.
The best engineers I’ve worked with carry this instinct even when others might think it crazy. They impose their own constraints. They ask what this would look like if it had to be half the size, or run twice as fast, or use a tenth of the memory. Not because anyone demanded it, but because just by thinking there could be a better, more efficient solution, one often emerges.
The principle of least power expressed nicely:
Smaller, dumber things have more applications, go more places, and require less maintenance.
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
