In other adventures, I ran across a website In The Weights that checks how much a person's work is weighted by the LLMs... using my mikro2nd handle, I'm quite surprised to learn that I'm in the top 20% of Youtube Tech and Gaming influencers, at the same time that GPT-5.6 claims that, " no widely recognized public person or entity is confidently identified by this name " which comes as something of…
Many orgs have some sort of "standard" for writing commit messages. (It matters not whether you're using git , hg or something else for your version control.) The first line of the commit message is what will show up in most summaries of commit history, and additional lines (assuming your VCS supports this; most do) only show up when you drill a little deeper. I prefix the first line with a…
I'm becoming increasingly suspicious of the MarkDown school of thought that says that we need to use ordinary characters to mark up text with formatting information. I think it came about in the time when all we had was plain-text editing — WardsWiki , early email and similar — so actual richer-text was simply not even an option. But now? I mean, YES, we need to agree on serialisation of such bits…
A post on the socials about how the person's Dad helped make the neighbourhood by talking to everybody and anybody, at any opportunity. How he helped out where and when he could. And here's the point that chimes along with my own experience: Neighbouring is work . You have to work at it, and it's not always fun. It's an investment that might pay off sometime in the future, and a lot of people have…
Here's where news-media failed in their transition to the web: they failed utterly to embrace the nature of the web — links. Anytime a news article has links, they are, without fail, internal links to the site's own articles, writeups or descriptions. They use links solely to drive traffic to their own pages. So you'll never see a link out to the source site, or even to Wikipedia. An example: I'm…
Arthur C. Clarke taught us that Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Some wisecracker observed that Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. I think this is a useful guideline for assessing the advancedness of any technology — and advancedness comes mostly from usability . Habitability. The only sufficiently advanced technology that…
It's time to declare that Client-Server architected internet "applications" (i.e. applications of the underlying Internet protocols, mainly seen as websites) are dead. They've been killed by a combination of enclosure of the commons, feudal plantation ownership and everything-harvesting criminal botnets masquerading as "AI" model-building. It's basically impossible for anybody but the behemoth…
There's a thing I don't understand about all the raping and pillaging of government departments going on in the USA right now... Let's pretend you're the Chief Bureaucrat In Charge of some government department, sub-department, building, whatever, and bunch of juvenile delinquents show up in reception demanding access to sensitive records, networks and computers, and claiming to be from the…
Thinking about GenAI and the "putting artists out of work" thing... It certainly will put some "artists" out of work — those unfortunate enough to be working in places where some visual/auditory/written material is part of a product — ads, marketing prospectuses, elevator music and all other forms of "pretty looking bullshit"... But real art? No worries. Because as soon as an AI becomes capable of…
A thought, triggered by the several "Writers IDE" things I've seen (Manuskript, that other KWriter thing, whatever it's called, even including Obsidian and its ilk): Writers never — indeed almost nobody ever — wants to write using MarkDown. (Or any other markup. This is not a diatribe against Markdown.) There are reasons we turned away from WordStar in favour of WYSIWYG word editing as soon as we…
Most of the notebook tools out there are focused on the writing . They use the expression "note-taking" and that's... telling. And why I've taken to speaking/writing about "note-making" — I don't want to be always in the position of a consumer, always just writing down (summarising or recasting in my own words) someone else's thinking (though there are times I do !) — I really want my…
I'm wondering about the logic of those popups and permission-seekers we see everwhere, asking whether they can be invasively nosy about what we're doing and then offering us the choice between "OK" or "Maybe Later" . Do they think they're going to wear down our resistance if we don't want to play along with their bullshit, or are they simply hoping that sooner or later we'll click "OK" by…
We've been watching Emily In Paris, a lighthearted series about a young American woman sent to work in the newly-acquired Paris branch of a marketing firm. It's a light and easy, brain-in-neutral watch of an evening; we're up to ep9 or thereabouts, and I have am growing an ever stronger sense of unease with the series — things that bother me about the whole schtick. We can (though we shouldn't!)…
Who benefits from the "AI" bubble? As always: Follow The Money. As far as I can see, the only beneficiaries, the only "winners" in the current hype-vortex, are the datacentre companies. The companies that sell "cloud". Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Netlify, Alibaba, DO, IBM, Oracle... But mainly those first three. Oh, and Nvidia. That AI nose-candy takes a hell of a lot of compute to make and to run.…
Wiki Notebooks. Was dreaming a bit about what wikid might be/do in that space. There's a long, long way for it to go to get there... The really challenging thing about wiki notebooks, though, is not so much the writing part, as how to make mining the trove easier, more accessible, more rewarding. Here I am, now , with 6 years' of trove, and, more and more often, I find myself repeating stuff I…
2024-10-09 promoted to the garden: Programming by Composition
Seen on the socials: " Competition is the law of the jungle, but cooperation is the law of civilization. " - Peter Kropotkin Actually... cooperation is the law in jungles, too. In all ecosystems. Competition is the law only in the face of scarce and limited resources. So how did competition become the dominant feature of our economic systems when our reality is abundance? ...#greed ... But really?…
It used to be that Money was backed by valuables, often metal, frequently Gold. You could, in theory, go in to the local branch of the Central Bank, slap down a 10 Thaler note issued by them, and demand the equivalent value in gold from those reserves they hold. Held. No more since Nixon did his thing and unhitched the USD from its gold backing. So what backs money now? What ensures that the…
Did the AMA thing with some of our students yesterday. It was fun. It's usually fun, interacting with students, trying to answer their questions without ego running wild. But I was bothered by my answers to one woman's question: "How do you team effectively if you're a weaker programmer?" My answer was along lines of "pair with stronger programmers, ask for help early and as often as you need to"…
There's an interesting thread over in fedi on "Why is TDD hard to learn?" and, as ever in the internet, I Have A Take On That! There are a lot of responses along the lines of "It's difficult changing ingrained habits," and that's certainly true. But if an Old Fart like me can do it, then I don't see that as a fundamental obstacle. There are responses along the lines of "Well it requires you to…
Found out that Logseq is now available for Linux, so I tried it. Very briefly. It's an Electron app, so cue instant hate. It's slow as molasses. Typed in a link to a non-existant page, and it took several seconds before actually becoming a link. I dislike intensely the whole "writing in blocks" idea... hated it in XYWrite back in the '80s, hated it in Roam, still hate it in Logseq. It's very…
Wikid Exploration the First After a bit of downtime over the holiday season, it's back to work on the Wikid Project . Having got as far as making a working (albeit very bare bones) wiki platform, it's now time to start looking at some of the explorations I had in mind in starting the journey. My first use-case is this: I keep a mass/mess of personal notes in my own notebook ("2nd Brain" if you…
The Next Big Thing I decided on (see my previous project update was to implement backlinks. In my personal notebook (kept in Zim Desktop Wiki ) I find backlinks to be an indispensible affordance -- and about the only thing missing from the original wiki that I've come to regard as a vital component of networked-notemaking infrastructure. So we have to have a way to show all the links in to a page.…
Finally got around to a manual test of WikidProject and... it works! My god, it actually works! Well the tests in place should have instilled confidence that it would -- and they did -- but there's still always that little kick in the gut when you actually see a new page appear in the filesystem. Far from perfect... click on a Nonexistent-Page link and it takes you to the view of the new page, and…
Spent a while watching (listening, mostly — video of some group's Zoom call is not so fascinating) a meetup of the ToolsForThoughtRocks crowd in which they had Howard Rheingold as a guest. "Extending Tools for Thought" . Was well worth the time in that it triggered some Interesting Thoughts. In no particular order: note-taking v note-making seems a neglected distinction Howard would like to see a…
I'm writing a wiki system. Have I lost my mind? Why, when there are already so many wiki platforms languishing out there...? I have reasons , and they're set out in my web garden for your criticism and amusement.
StrangeLoop2023 talk: Supporting Data Journalism through Compilers for Visual Inputs . An awkward title, but Ziegler's opening point — that visualisations of data are currently read-only: dead pictures on the screen — and he wants them to be live, manipulable objects. And this, I think lies at the very heart of what we want for GoaTs (CATs, too, but most impactful in GoaTs — data, images, text,…
As an atheist, whenever someone near me exclaims, "Oh God!" or "Good God", I'm prone to asking "Which one?" Mostly I manage to keep my mockery under my breath as it's just unkind and ungenerous. I'm quite happy to support people believing whatever nonsense they want to believe, as long as they don't try to push it on to me. After all, look at some of the nonsense I believe... It amuses me to think…
Somewhat related to my own interests is this Stupidity Manifesto . Go; read it; it's about a 2 minute read, and likely not what you're expecting. How does it connect to what I think and do? Well, it's related, in my mind, to the Complexity Issue , mainly to the last kind of Complexity I described there -- Intentional Complexity: the kind of things that companies (a.k.a. OSAIs ) do to make us feel…
Wandering through my personal notes and collected RSS feeds, I find myself rereading Thesephist's Research Community post. In it he writes about some of his own thinking on the characteristics and activities of such a (hypothetical) research community. Lots of value there. Coincidentally (or not?) I near-simultaneously read in Turchin's EndTimesBook , " Science is a collective endeavour [...] For…