Linkblog/2025/02/04
Textmode, Oracle v. Deno, Dev philosophy, Retake the Browser, More billions being spent on AI, creative shaders.
Textmode is a general term for tile art which is:
- Created from a fixed two colour tileset (usually a 1bit font)
- On a uniform grid
- With at most a single foreground colour per character
- With at most a single background colour per character
Very pretty.
Many great links to ways to go about this / people doing this sort of art on the interwebs.
Deno v. Oracle - Oracle responded - […], Ill write up my thoughts and share tomorrow
Oracle wants to dismiss Deno’s attempt to free the JavaScript trademark.
A lot of Oracle’s claim is made simply based on them having an active page on their website with a trademark sign for their JavaScript Extension Toolkit.
Larry, focus more on that $500 billion you’re part of with the US government for some reason than getting your gaggle of lawyer cronies defending usage of a term you clearly have not made proper use of.
Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive It’s generally pretty well-understood that the ground-up rewrite can be an attractive and extremely dangerous prospect. The standard advice when it comes to ground-up rewrites is “Don’t, ever”. But I want to take a step back from that. By the time the ground-up rewrite starts to seem like a good idea, avoidable mistakes have already been made. This is a scenario which you can see coming from a long way out and you can, and must, actively steer away from. Warning signs to watch for: compounding technical debt. Increasing difficulty in making seemingly simple changes to code. Difficulty in documenting/commenting code. Difficulty in onboarding new developers. Dwindling numbers of people who know how particular areas of the codebase actually work. Bugs nobody understands.
I like this viewpoint quite a bit, the idea that you don’t even want to end up in a state a rewrite will be a consideration.
I’ve worked at companies in which technical debt is something that has occurred (who in software hasn’t?), usually gained when we’ve had to move fast / bend in a direction a customer willing to throw us enough money has asked for.
Having stuff like this to bring up is good, since those companies as well have all been companies that have had v1 of their API, and a clear v2, if you do not want to have a v3, maybe not pile on the tech debt now?.
Retaking The Web Browser, One Small Step At A Time
Great article, bringing up this specific point though:
I’m a huge fan of RSS feeds and am making my own blog reading app. While my own app is not usable, I’m still using other apps such as NetNewsWire and Rad Reader. I miss the days that Firefox would surface feeds by adding a RSS icon to the search bar. They made the web worse when removed that feature in my opinion; so I added it back with an add-on I made.
I installed this Google Chrome extension to get this functionality in Chrome.
Google expects to spend $75 billion this year on the AI race
The amount of money being thrown into this space is mind boggling.
Maybe it will finally be enough to make Gemini Voice Assistant or whatever its called, the replacement for the somewhat perfectly fine Google Assistant on my Pixel, actually good.
Does anyone at Google even use the voice assistant? I was in my car the other week, had a cool idea, wanted to write it down into my notes app, and the LLM lectured me on how it can’t do that because its a LLM.
I asked it if it had access to my device, to which it explained to me, no, it does not, its a cloud based software with no access to my device.
5 minutes later, I used the same Gemini assistant to call a friend I was driving to, and the same voice that told me it could not touch my phone, just went, sure, and low and behold this app can use (certain?) features on my phone!
Once I parked, I figured out how to switch to the previous legacy assistant, and asked it the same request to put something into my notes, and it just did it, did not gaslight me into saying that it could touch my phone, it did the thing I asked it to.
I find my only time I’m using the voice assistant myself is during a time I require a truly hands-free experience.
I actually have had multiple times I’m in my car, while trying to do something basic, and I get the stupid AI voice to start yapping back to me, to the point I’m just shouting in my car at the idea that this is what all those billions are being poured into.
</endrant>, just build a freaking assistant that works, please.
Post-Processing Shaders as a Creative Medium
Beautiful article, whenever I see something like this which has examples of the code / concepts in question with sliders to view it under different conditions, I know proper love has been put into it.
I’d like to get more shader-pilled.