Mike Saburenkov, blog
For as long as humans have come up with tools: axes, abacuses, calculators, they have always multiplied the effort and skill of their users. In the hands of a master, they do wonders; in the hands of the unprepared, they cut fingers off. With computers nothing changed: still a force amplifier, a “bicycle for the mind”. Amplification reached new, sometimes transformative levels, but there was never…
Some of the most exciting moments in computing, both technical and creative, happened in gaming. Games push boundaries. LLMs? Thank gamers for the GPU arms race. Type to Play My first computer was a Commodore 64. And there were games. Some legendary, some bizarre . Not all of them came on 5” floppies. Books and magazines used to print entire BASIC programs as source listings. So you’d sit down and…
I was writing an email about a vendor we used before. I couldn’t recall some details, so I ran a search in my mailbox. As expected, I found past threads with some discussions. But also it pulled up newsletters and mailing list mentions I’ve been subscribed to. There were product updates, industry news and a few casual mentions of this vendor. I barely remembered getting those. But they turned out…
I’ve been playing around with MCP lately, trying to figure out what it’s really about. I remember when OpenAI introduced function calling two years ago — that felt like a big deal. It was that missing piece: LLMs struggle with simple deterministic stuff — like counting how many rs are in strawberry, and doing basic math. But they’re smart enough to ask for help, if you tell them how to ask.…
Some years ago, I would have listed these as problems that could be solved by now: Seamless language translation Babel Fish by Douglas Adams. No matter what language one is writing, another should be able to seamlessly read and understand the written. We do have Google Translate, DeepL and LLMs, some of them even built-in in modern browsers, but they still feel a bit clunky. These tools often fail…
One thing that surprised me when I moved to the Netherlands was the difference in how the seasons are observed. It turns out that there are at least two ways: astronomical and calendar-based. I was used to calendar seasons, where each season has three months, starting on the first and ending on the last day of the respective months. While some countries use astronomical approach where it's defined…
I decided to extract a blog engine from my blog repository, even though nobody asked for it. While doing so, I dropped TypeScript but moved it Deno for the rest of the tooling. There's nothing particularly interesting about this, except for one thing I noticed: If I decide to publish this for others to use, it could be as simple as just cloning a repository and periodically rebasing it on my…
Quitting social media is like quitting smoking — easy, done it several times. E-mail correspondence I suggested in my previous update didn’t really work out. Not that I expected it to. So here are some links I found interesting recently: A story how on 1700s Spanish King ordered to an accurate map of the kingdom and that resulted in 500 different maps. WHO Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale
No updates here for a long time. And 2023 has ended, so why not to journal some results. Then I saw others' posts online and realized I would be writing roughly the same, and for some reason, it stopped me. Then, having found no rationale why not to, I thought it still was worth writing about the disenchantment which feels now not transient but getting deeply rooted. It probably all began during…
I'm afraid of being that bear to the gardener, but let's talk about burnouts. Good things first. Burnout is not a stable condition. Once you remove yourself from the environment that caused it, you recover. I did. I even got curious about the work again. A thought of returning too soon and spoiling the time spent recovering was quite scary. At the same time, it was tempting to try to ride that…
Around 8 years ago I started to buy vinyl records. It wasn’t for the vinyl audio quality. The idea was to have the most favourite albums in physical format. I did not even have a record player. I thought of getting one at some point but the goal was to have records on a shelf. I could stream the music online while sitting in the chair and enjoying a rich booklet of a deluxe edition with photos,…
I've just realised that Joanne Dvorak might be not the only one to make such mistake. So let me fix it. I've never been a fan of write-your-own-thing when there are many superior alternatives available. Now I’m even less of it. But when I decided to spin up a stand-alone blog, I didn’t go for Hugo, Gatsby or Jekyll. I thought it’s just a bunch of static pages, right. If you add some basic scripts…
For most of my years in photography I’ve been using digital cameras. I bought film cameras a few times just to play around with the film but always sold it back after several months. And I never got into analogue printing, just developing and scanning with DSLRs. Around three years ago I found a full darkroom set for sale and decided to experience the complete process. It costed almost nothing and…
I was born in late USSR. Some things, somewhat ordinary to Western World, were either in scarcity or just not existing in my childhood. Though my uncle emigrated to Australia so occasionally we were getting something from there. At some point, we got a VHS. The player came with a bunch of cassettes with movies recorded from Australian TV. Sometimes they were re-recorded. And in this case, if the…
Obviously, it turned out harder than expected. My plans to go through all my photos year by year stalled on year #2 (2006). I haven't picked a photo and finished the note but already have an external HDD dead, recovered data from backups, disassembled proprietory photo libraries, found a way to export photos from Lightroom CC (which doesn't have Export option), removed dedupes after merging…
There is no better than to start from 2005. I borrowed a Minolta DiMAGE A1 from a friend and started shooting. That was my first exposure into digital photography and photography in general apart from few episodes in my childhood. Obviously, there is nothing worth sharing from these times, now it all seems very primitive and full of mistakes, but that was arguably the most exciting time: constant…
If you take metro and stand facing doors, it might feel as if the train goes straight without turns. Though if you look back and the previous car can be seen, you'll notice that it's wriggling from side to side. That's what I ended up with while trying to describe my interests in creativity. To capture and share such moments, mostly by photography now, occasionally by text. So at first, it was…
If we take popular JS topics currently out there, type annotations, server-side rendering (SSR) and CSS in JS are probably in the top four. Virtual DOM frameworks have come as a solution to a request of getting more code on a client side. Tools like TypeScript and Flow appeared as attempts to fix some JS parts. Also, people started to seek for ways how not to duplicate ‘view’ code between server…
That's the third article in a series on TypeScript started by ‘ TypeScript. Bad Parts ’. You can read them in any order as they aren't really connected apart from covering the same topic. But if you can't decide, make it chronologically . This time I'd like to show how you can leverage types to simplify your runtime code. Let's say we have a function which calculates a flag's value based on some…
That's the second article in a series on TypeScript started by ‘ TypeScript. Bad Parts ’. You can read them in any order as they aren't really connected apart from covering the same topic. But if you can't decide, make it chronologically . So what do types bring to JS? They fix some bad parts of JS, but that's a byproduct. Mainly they add some semantics to code which helps editors and people to…
I've been writing TypeScript for more than a year now and gone through well-known five stages of grief so it's time to share my experience. It all started as a compilation of tips & tricks I've discovered so far. Then it went to a more meta level of what types bring to JS at all. And as I was writing two pieces asynchronously I began to find myself noticing ‘bad’ parts here and there. At some…
a post testing micro.blog integration.
Прошло полгода после анонса, а я так и не закончил свою первую заметку про Нидерланды. Чтобы как-то сдвинуть дело, начну выкладывать черновики записей: https://t.me/transmith Возможно, позже получится из них собрать что-то полноценное.
Стояло жаркое лето середины 90-х и я пытался изо всех сил угнаться за своим братом на велосипеде. Он ехал на «Украине», я на чём-то поменьше. Первые километра четыре шли по довольно спокойной асфальтированной дороге, одной из тех, которая ведет от шоссе к десяткам деревень и дачных посёлков. Оставшийся же путь надо было проделать по пыльной обочине горьковского шоссе. Там, где-то не доезжая…
On December 2006 I joined a digital agency as a humble HTML coder. There was neither Chrome nor iPhone yet, IE market share was around 85%, table-based layouts ruled the internet and we all were debugging using window.alert calls. Fast-forward 10 years. Chrome's released v.54, iPhone is in its 10th generation, IE has less than 15%. Web standards and its support, development tools and other…
Ну а если серьёзно про 2015 год, то чаще остального мы вспоминаем момент с одной из пробежек. Мы подбегали к небольшой горке, по которой поднимался мальчик лет 5-6 на велосипеде. Ему было тяжело забираться, но он не сдавался, медленно и методично крутил педали. Тут мы с разбега забегаем на эту горку и начинаем его догонять. В какой-то момент равняемся с ним, а потом начинаем медленно обгонять.…
Я очень скучаю по чистой вкладке, пустой белой странице. Когда-то все браузеры при открытии вкладки показывали чистую страницу и пользователь мог либо ввести адрес в адресную строку, либо выбрать страницу из закладок. Потом интерфейс стал обрастать и появился вывод истории недавних посещений, списки популярных сайтов. Гугл начал показывать по сути свою стартовую страницу, одно время показывал свои…
В продолжение « Будущего нативных и веб-приложений » Ильи Бирмана. Да, веб-приложения сейчас часто неудобнее нативных аналогов. На мобильных платформах это еще больше ощущается, чем на десктопах. Одновременно с этим то, что открывается по ссылке в браузере, далеко и давно ушло от понятия веб-страницы. Даже простейший блог со статьями, который, казалось бы, наиболее близок к тому, зачем придумали…
Изначально HTML создавался как markdown или разметка wiki. Как сейчас нет markdown-верстальщика, word-писателя, так и изначально не было HTML—верстальщика. Это было еще один формат разметки текста. Почти сразу HTML стали использовать не для создания документов с гиперссылками, а чего-угодно с гиперссылками. Так появились веб-сайты: интерактивные документы, с одной стороны пытающие предоставить…