Max Battcher's personal blog
I've been trying a great many of the LLM-based "chat apps" and "games". I sort of call it research. It's allegedly a burgeoning field and maybe if I find an untapped niche I build my own and capitalize on it. I also recognize that I've long had a slot machine addiction to manage and slot machines that respond to my personal writing talent level can be particularly addictive. Especially, in that I…
There's a famous Vorlon saying "The avalanche has already started, it is too late for the pebbles to vote" and it is a fun sounding aphorism, but it is also a falsehood, both in context in its moment in Babylon 5 and in general. Spoilers for Babylon 5 : the greater context of the show is a proxy war between the "elder races" the Vorlons and the Shadows using many of the "younger races" as pawns in…
Several years back I thought about building a silly offline-first, peer- to-peer (P2P) application for a small audience and playing around with alternative authentication schemes and felt I came up with a fun one. I was aware at the times of some experiments in P2P authentication involving various schemes of taking a user-supplied password and applying some form of key derivation function (KDF) to…
Warning This post is going to be full of things that are "spoiler shaped" for the MCU films and TV shows of the last several years. I'm about to argue that most of them aren't really spoilers and I don't feel like any of what I will include that is "spoiler shaped" should ruin your experiences watching these Marvel things, but if you are spoiler averse and not caught up on MCU take whatever…
Bell Labs, March 1940 "Lab Director, would you mind taking a listen to this call we found?" The earnest appearing tech at my office door seemed shy, but excited. I didn't prefer to be interrupted in that moment, but it was rare for a tech to come directly to me in the middle of the afternoon like this for just a phone call, "What sort of call?" "Some of the offices forwarded over some sort of…
I was skimming old blog articles and realized it has been a while since I've done small posts. Some quick updates: I separated from my job in April, so I have my shingle out and am now looking for new work. Maybe given my feelings on recent "AI" trends I'm looking for a new career. I procrastinated my job search by spending a week cleaning my house and then hosting my first Thunder party in too…
"AI-Driven Innovation" is an oxymoron to excuse over-relying on "legacy code as a service". I don't think there is any sort of paradox here in the way that "AI-Driven Innovation" as a strategy is in consequence risk adverse and not a strategy for innovation and creativity. I don't see a need to bury any ledes here and I think this is awful on multiple levels. I worry it is going to take too many…
This is a day job project that for a bit I thought might spin out into an open source library but the funny thing about it is that it has been more of a chisel the statue out of the marble type of project. It started from a complicated place and the further we've pushed it towards Redux best practices the more it disappears into "just" being primarily a pattern of C#'s out-of-the-box dependency…
About a year ago, I put together a small add-on for Fantasy Grounds to add a metric calendar (or Stardate calendar) to the extensible calendar system of the virtual tabletop (VTT) Fantasy Grounds because I was contemplating an attempt to GM a one-off session, maybe two, for "Star Trek Adventures" and thought it would be nice to include Stardate logs in the campaign's calendar. The metric calendar…
I offered to write a new voting tool for my favorite book club . It seemed a good use of winter doldrums and new tools. I had several ideas I thought would be good for the club. I wanted another, easily open source portfolio site for Butterfloat and to try to show off some of the techniques I've been concerned with in my professional life that aren't always obvious because most of that code lives…
Butterfloat released a big 1.5.0 with a big new building block (nicknamed Stamps ) for server-side rendering and static ahead-of-time rendering for the static HTML parts of components. This meets a bunch of under-spoken needs for JS-based view engines, fulfills a big early promise of Butterfloat, and does it with hopefully style and convenience. The Promise of Progressive Enhancement My guiding…
I've found myself giving multiple light tutorials on how simple modern ES Module-only packaging can be in Node/npm packages. I've similarly given several tutorials on deploying web apps "bundler-free" (it's more possible than many think). There's a lot of outdated advice on these subjects, and some interesting superstitions, so I thought it would be useful to blog about the state of things in 2024…
I've been working on a modern web view engine named Butterfloat (now in pre-release) that is interestingly Knockout-inspired, but with a focus on Typescript and as pure as possible RxJS Observables. I think it has been a great project, and I'm proud of the results I've gotten as a solo developer doing it in the middle of other tasks in just a few months. How Did We Get Here? I've been on an…
I'd had a passive interest in finding this novel for years. It had been first mentioned to me in the footnote of an autobiography of a modest local 1950s television star as a favorite novel of her childhood. Though she referenced it only directly in passing in the flow of a larger discussion of her much beloved children's show, there was a sense that perhaps this book played a larger role in some…
With version 6.0.0 I released one last feature for the Pharkas Component Framework and with version 7.0.0 I updated it to the Angular's current LTS (15). Pharkas is a mature, battle-tested library for writing user-responsive UI components using RxJS best practices in Angular. These two updates are likely my bow around my involvement in the project. A Brief Intro to Pharkas Pharkas came from my…
The other day on Mastodon I got to thinking and talking again about how some of the ideas of Star Trek: Picard 's first season really with resonated me, but that it was mostly a problem of execution of them to me, and that was part of why I watched the full of its second season despite disliking so much of it. (I haven't finished watching the third season, and am not sure if I will, but I did read…
In November and December I had a maelstrom of different things smash together that all sort of reminded me of strange parts of my education, all the while I was fighting some illness that was mildly Flu-like. First chronologically, while I was in the middle of trying to win NaNoWriMo, Sea of Thieves released their newest PvP mode for which I have a lot of criticism to discuss. Then I was hit by…
I realize that I fell out of the habit of "of the Moment" posts as so much of that sort of discussion moved to social media. I was reminded that it might be fun to adapt this Mastodon thread that started as a discussion on Discord into a "proper" blog post. A Discord-posted meme of a tweet of how hard Mark Hamill looks in Slipstream, a 1989 rarely seen film, reminded me that the movie had been…
Previously I blogged about many concerns that I have about the sorts of examples that Angular sets (deep in its core libraries) and how I feel like it leads to a "pit of failure" when it comes to reliability engineering and performance optimization. In my day job I feel backed into a corner where I have to support Angular application development and have had to become something of the performance…
I wrote what follows this foreword on July 9, 2018. I was sitting with my sister at the bar at the restaurant where my brother worked. It was some of the earliest evening hours the restaurant was open and there was hardly anyone there. We both were drinking as we were waiting to catch my brother. Our grandmother had passed away. We were there for each other, to spread around some hugs, and to cry…