I’ve found myself referencing this a couple times recently. Both of those conversations were in the context of React, but the principle applies to every over-adopted technology.

What can art historians and computer scientists learn from one another? Actually, a lot! Amanda Wasielewski joins us to talk about how she discovered that computer scientists working on computer vision were actually acting like rogue art historians and how art historians have found machine learning to be a valuable tool for research, fraud detection, and cataloguing. We also discuss the rise of generative AI and how we this technology might cause us to ask new questions like: “What makes a photograph a photograph?”

TIL that four corporate publishers have sued the Internet Archive for copyright infringement.

When Julius Caesar burned the Library of Alexandria, it was hard to imagine a greater destruction of scholarship. Now, 2,000 years later, some petty, litigious schmucks are ready to deal an even bigger blow to the literary canon.

If you thought floppy disks were a relic of the past, think again. A surprising number of industries, from embroidery to aviation, still use floppies. Jacopo Prisco tells the story in Wired:

The floppy disk may never truly die out. “There are people in the world who are still busy finding and fixing up and maintaining phonograph players from 1910, so it’s really hard for me to believe that the floppy disk is just going to utterly disappear,”…

How will large language models (LLMs) change the world?

No one knows. With such uncertainty, a good exercise is to look for historical analogies—to think about other technologies and ask what would happen if LLMs played out the same way.

I like to keep things concrete, so I’ll discuss the impact of LLMs on writing. But most of this would also apply to the impact of LLMs on other fields, as well as other AI technologies like AI art/music/video/code.

What follows are 13 examples of technological innovations that changed the world and description of how they affected they way people work. Here’s an example analogy of Feet and Segways:

First, there was walking. Then the Segway came to CHANGE THE NATURE OF HUMAN TRANSPORT. Twenty years later, there is still walking, plus occasionally low-key alternatives like electric scooters.

In this analogy, LLMs work fine but just aren’t worth the trouble in most cases and society doesn’t evolve to integrate them. Domain-specific LLMs are used for some applications, but we start to associate “general” LLMs with tourists and mall cops. George W. Bush falls off an LLM on vacation and everyone loses their minds.

Amazon CTO, Werner Vogels:

Today, I am publishing the Distributed Computing Manifesto, a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the architecture of Amazon’s ecommerce platform. It highlights the challenges we were facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where we were headed.

25 years later. This is super cool!

I’m here for any story that begins with an errant rm -r -f *, especially when the stakes are super-high, like you could lose an entire movie of Toy Story 2’s magnitude…

Woody’s hat disappeared. And then his boots disappeared. And then as we kept checking, he disappeared entirely. Woody’s gone.

Can you guess what happens next?

We realized that the backups we had were actually bad.

Remember: nobody wants backups, everyone wants restore. Like Pixar’s movies, this tale ends happily, but I won’t spoil for you how the day was saved.

Tim Holman wants to take the web back to the wonderful days where knowing how to get your little mouse arrow to dance and sway was the most of your worries. That does sound nice, doesn’t it? “Emoji Rain” and the classic “Clock” are my favorites…

whytheluckystiff.net is back online and now hosts links and mirrors to everything the man published on the internet during his illustrious career.

It works sort of like a museum that sells maps.

If you’ve never heard of why the lucky stiff, click through to get acquainted. If you were fortunate enough (like myself) to be around when he was actively creating things, click through for some top notch nostalgia.

Tom Wright:

This year marks 15 years since FizzBuzz was popularised as an interview tool for developers. I’m a big fan and have watched over 100 candidates try their hand at my version of the task. In today’s blog post I’d like to take a moment to celebrate what makes FizzBuzz so helpful, discuss some common patterns I’ve observed in the many attempts I’ve witnessed, and finally explore some tweaks that can be deployed to keep the challenge fresh.

Tom’s version of FizzBuzz is a pair programming task that follows strict TDD:

In proper pair programming style, the candidate is encouraged to discuss their approach with the interviewer. Likewise, they are free to use any online reference materials if they forget a method name or some syntax.

In this post he shares 3 common variants of the challenge including one that requires a pair of Azure Functions?!

Gather round while Jim Grey tells a (long) tale.

My 33rd anniversary in the software industry was the Sunday that just passed, July 3. I remember the date because my second day on the job was a paid holiday!

I want to show you just how far our industry has come and how much we’ve learned.

The more things change:

Lots of things we all take for granted didn’t exist. The Internet existed but not the Web. Software was delivered to customers on tapes or floppy disks. The CD burner was still a few years in the future. Java didn’t exist, JavaScript didn’t exist, .NET didn’t exist.

The more they stay the same:

There was a holy war over text editors. IDEs weren’t a thing yet, so we all coded in a text editor. I was firmly in the Emacs camp, but most of my co-workers loved vi.

There’s a lot going on in that picture. Let’s take a closer look at exactly what computers and gear they were using to do the 3D animation for this game.

Why? Because, Final Fantasy 7 is a true classic. When the game was first released in early 1997, for the Sony PlayStation, it took the RPG gaming world by storm. To this day, many consider it the greatest entry in the franchise.

I remember getting this game for Christmas and playing it nearly non-stop until school started again after the new year. Greatest entry in the franchise? Easily!

Today we have a special treat. A conversation with Brian Kernighan! Brian’s been in the software game since the beginning of Unix. Yes, he was there at Bell Labs when it all began. And he is still at it today, writing books and teaching the next generation at Princeton.

This is an epic and wide ranging conversation. You’ll hear about the birth of Unix, Ken Thompson’s unique skillset, why Brian thinks C has stood the test of time, his thoughts on modern languages like Go and Rust, what’s changed in 50 years of software, what makes platforms like Unix and the web so powerful, his take as a professor on the trend of programmers skipping the university track, and so much more.

Seriously, this is a must-listen.

CSS co-designer Steven Pemberton, on Twitter:

!important was added for one reason only: laws in the US that require certain text to be in a given font-size. !important stops the cascade from changing it.

Anything else is probably misuse, and a sign you may not understand the cascade properly.

The New Stack overviews a recently published 2017 (3-hours long) interview with the living legend, who rarely speaks publicly about herself:

Hamilton remembered being the only woman in her college physics class — “And at the time, I think the professor thought women should not be taking physics because he … well, you have to know the times.”

She added, “That was the only time somebody in college questioned that that might not be something I would be able to make use of.”

But Hamilton remained undeterred: “I just said, ‘Because I want to take it,’ you know.”

Ars Technica takes an epic stroll down memory lane:

In their moment, minicomputers were used in a variety of applications. They served as communications controllers, instrument controllers, large system pre-processors, desk calculators, and real-time data acquisition handlers. But they also laid the foundation for significant hardware architecture advances and contributed greatly to modern operating systems, programming languages, and interactive computing as we know them today.

We were just discussing this machine on our upcoming episode with Brian Kernighan.

Darrien Glasser goes super deep on the gif file format: its history, its anatomy, its weirdness:

Gifs can take user input to advance to the next frame. This poor guy built a whole site around recreating this feature with pngs. A shame he didn’t read the gif spec after being stuck inside for 2 years like me.

Knut Melvær with a thoughtful attack on one of my all-time favorite tools:

Markdown is a signifier for the developer and text-tinkerer culture. But since its introduction, the world of digital content has also changed. While Markdown is still fine for some things, I don’t believe it’s should be the go-to for content anymore.

There are two main reasons for this:

1. Markdown wasn’t designed to meet today’s needs of content.
2. Markdown holds editorial experience back.

Now, I did say it’s a thoughtful atttack and it’s also a long one (30 minute read). Knut does the work, diving deep into Markdown’s history and John Gruber’s desires for it:

I want to build my advice against Markdown by looking back on why it was introduced in the first place, and by going through some of the major developments of content on the web. For many of us, I suspect Markdown is something we just take for granted as a “thing that exists.” But all technology has a history and is a product of human interaction. This is important to remember when you, the reader, develop technology for others to use.

A brief (6 minutes to read) history of MS-DOS:

First released on August 12, 1981, MS-DOS became the foundation for business computing for almost two decades. MS-DOS stood for Microsoft Disk Operating System and was often referred to simply as “DOS”. It is the software that helped build Microsoft, becoming the foundation Microsoft built the Windows operating system on. It went through 8 (and a half-ish) major revisions, with the final version being shipped with Windows ME in September, 2000.

Chris McCord gives a deep history on Phoenix LiveView, going all the way back to the state of Ruby on Rails in 2013 up to the present. A 30-minute read! (LiveView-based uploads looks particularly interesting to me, since I’m rewriting how our uploads work at the moment.)

On The Changelog #451, I spouted off a very brief history of Unix, Linux, and related things. Thanks to our handy/dandy transcripts, that history has been transmogrified into a blog and accompanying audiogram. The podcaster’s version of Don’t Repeat Yourself!

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive:

As a young man, I wanted to help make a new medium that would be a step forward from Gutenberg’s invention hundreds of years before.

By building a Library of Everything in the digital age, I thought the opportunity was not just to make it available to everybody in the world, but to make it better–smarter than paper. By using computers, we could make the Library not just searchable, but organizable; make it so that you could navigate your way through millions, and maybe eventually billions of web pages.

See also the website they made to virtually celebrate their 25th anniversary. I love the tagline: From Wayback to way forward

Buzz Anderson lays out the history of one of the most beloved/hated tools in every developer’s tool belt:

The concept of a regular expression has a surprisingly interesting history that dates back to the optimistic, mid-20th Century heyday of artificial intelligence research.

The term itself originated with mathematician Stephen Kleene. In 1943, neuroscientist Warren McCulloch and logician Walter Pitts had just described the first mathematical model of an artificial neuron, and Kleene, who specialized in theories of computation, wanted to investigate what networks of these artificial neurons could, well, theoretically compute.

This talk by Brittany Storoz from JSConf EU 2018 is sooo good! If you’ve ever wondered why we call bugs bugs, why we throw and catch exceptions, or why we use foo and bar as placeholder variables, give it a 👀

Matthew Gerstman:

I’ve been tasked with leading frontend. As a result, I’ve been teaching a whole lot of people about the web.

Knowing where we came from can help us figure out where we should go. It’s also a mountain of technical debt, and we’re collectively building on top of it.

Forgive me if I skip the wonderful stories of Macromedia Flash, Java in the browser, or whatever other detour you can think of. While those were important to development of the web, most of us will never run into them again.

The first Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) spec was released in 1993 as a way to represent web pages, then documents….

A sweeping history (replete with screen shots) that ends with a peek into the potential future.