Technology Commentary

Trends in synthetic data that I'm watching closely in the leading open and closed models.

No.316 — Books for understanding degrowth ⊗ Eyes on the Future ⊗ Can Artificial Intelligence rethink art?

I don’t think it does. Not for everything. We already have personal AI for autocomplete. Do we need Big Compute for a personal AI to tell us which pieces within our Amazon orders are in which…

Join us for the world’s first local-first conference. Connect with a rapidly-growing community in an intimate setting. Berlin 30th May 2024.

We explore how to build local-first sync on top of simple file storage

Does your team’s software give you warm fuzzies, or does it leave you filled with fear? On this episode of Maintainable, Scott Hanselman, VP of Developer Community at Microsoft, shares his take on the emotional and human side of well-maintained code, how teams can overcome the fear that leads to technical debt, and the importance of finding balance between prep work and shipping.

Mugshot was a social networking website created by Red Hat. Unlike most other social networking websites, which are concerned with advertising, Mugshot offered a desktop client and web widgets.

The hugely ambitious 'Symbolic Processing Using RISC' project from UC Berkeley

Until the early 2000s, the computer processors available on the market were essentially all single-core chips. There were some niche layouts that used multiple processors on the same board for impr…

“Oh, why did the endpoint return a user object without the dateOfBirth field?”  —  Me, during my last project

TL;DR: how I fixed my RSS feed by installing mailcap so I don't get tormented by mimes

Perplexity AI claims it sends a user agent and respects robots.txt but it absolutely does not

Foundational innovation in cloud technology and artificial intelligence will require more energy than ever before—shattering any illusion that we will restrict supplies.

Sorry, your browser doesn't support embedded videos. But that doesn’t mean you can’t watch it! You can download the video and watch it with your favourite video player. Recording1 of the live stream of a computer science colloquium on the Small Web I presented at the University of Groningen on June 11th, 2024. (Transcript) Two weeks ago, I presented a computer science colloquium on the Small Web at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands to post grad students and professors.

Carbon cost of bad handling of revived stalwart... #frugal #greenSoftware #RSS

Red Hat has created its own open source social networking system, with …

Great programmers are not born; they are made - says Daniel Terhorst-North, the author of the viral Twitter thread on the best programmer he knows.

If you're anything like Ivan (oof, sorry), you've heard of Pygmalion but never caught more than the gist. Some sort of project from the early 70s, similar to Sketchpad or Smalltalk or something, yet another promising prototype from the early history of our field that failed to take the world by storm. Our stock-in-trade on this show. But you've probably heard of Programming by Demonstration. And you've certainly heard of icons — you know, those little pictures that have become indelibly part of computing as we know it. Pygmalion is the originator of these concepts… and more! The best introduction to Pygmalion is Mariano Guerra's No-code History: Pygmalion, which includes a clearly articulated summary of the big ideas, motivation, and design, with a video demonstration of the programming interface, key terminology, and links. The most introduction to Pygmalion — or Pig Million, The Millionth Pig, as it'll surely come to be known — is the subject of today's episode: the original paper by David Canfield Smith. Links $ We don't run ads on this show anymore. Sometimes Ivan makes a fake ad for a nonsense product like CarrotGrid or Hest, but those don't pay for the dirt & vapor we grow them in. But what if they could? Gonna just get this one out of the way: Quotation — and I quote, "A crucial semantic distinction between direct and indirect speech is that direct speech purports to report the exact words that were said or written EXACTLY AS THEY WERE SAID OR WRITTEN, LU, whereas indirect speech is a representation of speech in one's own words WHICH IS ALSO TOTALLY FINE, BUT JUST BE COOL ABOUT IT HEY?" @TodePond@mas.to: but wouldn't it be funny... if i quoted those statements on a podcast... and the podcast editor thought... "that doesn't sound right, bret can't have said that"... (he can do no wrong after all)... and so they thought i was just paraphrasing him wrong... and they didn't mark them as quotes like all the other quotes in the show... wouldn't that be funny DrawDeadFish.com Shout out to Brian Hempel who sent us (among other treats) this concise summary of Pig Million from the seminal book Watch What I Do: Programming by Demonstration. Recent FoC Patreon bonus episodes were about the game Baba is You and, on our first ever video episode, the design of a visual representation for machine code. Leda and the Swan. Lenna, a sexist test image that was and to some extent still is widely used in computer graphics. Living Computation Lu: Biscuit Jimmy: Biscuit Ivan: Limp Bizkit Fine, I might as well link to Frege and analogy. Aaron Sloman's INTERACTIONS BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: The Role of Intuition and Non-Logical Reasoning in Intelligence Ivan: Platonism Jimmy: Neoplatonism Lu: Neuplatonism I would never Derrida Nosey words History of the alphabet TodeTode Lu: Conlang Ivan: Conlon Nancarrow, beloved (by Ivan, at least) composer of music for the Player Piano. Here's a baby-faced Adam Neely with the scoop if you're new to Nancarrow. Welcome. Jimmy: Conway Twitty Autological words Heterological words School for Poetic Computation Programming by Demonstration Player vs Environment For the video demonstrating the programming model, check Mariano's post Open Canvas Working Group Lu's project CellPond, and their SPLASH talk StageCast Creator Marcel Goethals makes a lot of cool weird stuff and is a choice follow. Why does it say "Put all the metal back in the ground" at the bottom of the show notes? Music featured in this episode: Various old stuff by Ivan. The music for StageCast Creator is called Between Two Tigers. Conlon Nancarrow's Study No. 47 Wagner, the new Witness haunting every episode. ! Send us email, share your ideas in the Slack, and catch us at these normal places: Ivan: Mastodon • Website Jimmy: Mastodon • Website Lu: Mastodon • Website See you in the future! https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/072

As someone who has worked in software since 2001, and in the Cloud Native (containerisation and Kubernetes) space since 2013, I’m getting old enough to have seen trends come and go a few time…

Will this wave of mundane intelligence change our app model? And other news, events to visit.

I unearthed a catalogue that I'd picked up in around 1983 of Acorn Computer Systems . This catalogue overlaps the BBC Micro era (which was r...

Edsger Dijkstra had this to say about Beginner's All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code: It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC; as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. I'm sure he was exaggerating here for effect;

In 1994, multimedia discs—from encyclopedias to magazines—flooded the market, and felt like the future. It was fun while it lasted.

The search added AI overviews on top of older extras, but you can get rid of all that

The speedier computing cake is a lie... so we got software bloat instead

In the mid-2000s, Google engineer Orkut Büyükkökten’s self-titled social network briefly took the world by storm before disappearing. Now he’s back, with a plan for a happier social media.

A push for interoperability is accelerating, but maybe not fast enough to stop biometrics taking over