code

Reviving UserLand Frontier (and friends) – Jake Savin

Reviving UserLand Frontier (and friends) – Jake Savin:

Frontier’s modernization might be one of the largest open source C-language projects in the world that’s 100% managed with AI by a single person. Research I did in April suggests this is the case, but that won’t be true forever since these models and agentic harnesses are advancing very fast, and I’m sure there will be more similarly large and complex one-person efforts soon if not already.

[Facinating work. I look forward to seeing where this goes.]

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors:

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

It’s been well over a year since I started serving 429s to clients which are hitting the feed too often. Since then, much has happened, and most of it is generally good news.

I’ve heard from users and authors alike of feed software. Sometimes the users have filed bug reports and/or feature requests and have gotten positive results from the project (or vendor). Other times, the authors of such software have gotten in touch, did some digging, found a few nuances of how their libraries work, and improved the situation.

Some of them are trying but are still not quite making it right.

Here’s some of what’s been going on.

[Facinating how we keep looping around…]

Introducing The Tech Stack File | StackShare

Introducing The Tech Stack File | StackShare:

Today we’re excited to launch a new open source file format – The Tech Stack File (techstack.yml). With input from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) leadership and project maintainers, our goal with this new file format is to create the universal standard for tech stack data to make it easier for teams everywhere to access, share, and gain insights from the full range of their technology data. To help the StackShare community leverage this new file format, we’re also announcing two new products: StackShare AI and StackShare Connect.

[Could be helpful… I guess we’ll see.]

Google and HTTP

Google and HTTP:

The web is a miracle

Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.

Its simplicity is what made the web work. It created an explosion of new applications. It may be hard to believe that there was a time when Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter etc didn’t exist. That was because the networking standards prior to the web were complicated and not well documented. The explosion happened because the web is simple. Where earlier protocols were hard to build on, the web is easy.

I don’t think the explosion is over. I want to make it easier and easier for people to run their own web servers. Google is doing what the programming priesthood always does, building the barrier to entry higher, making things more complicated, giving themselves an exclusive. This means only super nerds will be able to put up sites. And we will lose a lot of sites that were quickly posted on a whim, over the 25 years the web has existed, by people that didn’t fully understand what they were doing. That’s also the glory of the web. Fumbling around in the dark actually gets you somewhere. In worlds created by corporate programmers, it’s often impossible to find your way around, by design.

The web is a social agreement not to break things. It’s served us for 25 years. I don’t want to give it up because a bunch of nerds at Google think they know best.

The web is like the Grand Canyon. It’s a big natural thing, a resource, an inspiration, and like the canyon it deserves our protection. It’s a place of experimentation and learning. It’s also useful for big corporate websites like Google. All views of the web are important, especially ones that big companies don’t understand or respect. It’s how progress happens in technology.

Keeping the web running simple is as important as net neutrality.

[Anything open is inherently better than anything closed. I tell you 3X.]

Microsoft’s New OpenAI-Powered Bing — Pixel Envy

Microsoft’s New OpenAI-Powered Bing — Pixel Envy:

Microsoft announced today’s event unveiling these developments midday yesterday, hours after Google announced its efforts in the space, as it has done before. I am not sure whether to read this as panic or excitement, though Meta’s caution is notable.

Late last night, I assembled a series of links with commentary about this nascent field. I think it holds up. While Microsoft may be the first to play its cards, I cannot imagine Google will not quickly respond.

[🍿]

Abstraction is Expensive – Speculative Branches

Abstraction is Expensive – Speculative Branches:

Ideally, you would like all of the abstractions you use to have aligned goals with your system. If you can buy a dependency that aligns with your goals, that’s great. If not, you will likely have to “massage” your dependencies to be able to do what you want. This is the first time an abstraction costs you. If you use the wrong database schema (or the wrong technology), you may find yourself scanning database tables when a different schema would do a single lookup. For a non-database example, if you make an electron-based computer game, it will likely be unplayably slow (but you will be able to build it in record time!).

[Abstractions can be a complete drag…]

A Keyboard Maestro Plugin for Apple Shortcuts | ThoughtAsylum

A Keyboard Maestro Plugin for Apple Shortcuts | ThoughtAsylum:

With the public release of macOS Monterey, I have been trying out a few ways of interacting with Shortcuts from a number of automation tools. Shortcuts can be triggered on macOS using AppleScript or shell script, both of which are relatively easy to do with the Swiss Army knife of Mac automation, Keyboard Maestro. However, I thought it would be fun to create a convenience plugin to make it even easier to integrate Keyboard Maestro with Shortcuts.

[Great stuff!]

How to bring back multi-touch gestures after it crashes without reboot?

macos – How to bring back multi-touch gestures after it crashes without reboot?:

By my experience, multi-touch crashes on a per-app basis. I could quit the app and relaunch it, and gestures would be back.

Apparently, sleeping the display and then waking up the system again will bring back crippled gesture. You can click button to do that, or just close the lid, or use terminal:

pmset displaysleepnow; sleep 5; caffeinate -u -t 1

After one second of black screen, gestures are back.

[Worked for me, although I have a screen sleep corner, so easy enough. I hope Apple fixes this, it’s become a little too routine.]

Why Daytona is a game-changer

Why Daytona is a game-changer:

I laughed out loud when the result came back. Yes, that’s exactly what I was looking for. It wasn’t in a place a user would have looked, and Google never would have found it.

The point is this — it’s past time to take responsibility for finding the stuff we write, and if we do it well, and Daytona does, all of a sudden blogging works so much better, and the incentive to write stuff, to document, to narrate our work, to index everything you can, makes total sense.

[I’ve built a number of apps that integrated search. Each time I had the same thought. Relying on the Big Search Engines is *so* much worse than doing it yourself. Kudos to Dave for making this happen for his stuff.]

Source: Scripting News