I don't think we're held back by hardware: it's usually insufficient imagination.
Devices like smart lights (Hue) or smart speakers (Alexa) didn't use new hardware, and could have been invented a little earlier.
miniblog.
I have a theory that developers are more willing to sit and stare at a progress bar than an average person. It's probably conditioning.
On treating email as an infinite scroll rather than a buffer to be emptied: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/01/case-inbox-infinity/579673/
I've found Inbox Zero to be a really effective approach, but it comes at a cost. The article seems to mix 'must respond' with 'must read' in email tasks.
"Most iPhone users could not tell you where the most-used apps on their phone live."
Changing culture of device usage: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/01/how-death-itunes-explains-2010s/604291/
It's weird how email addresses have become a useful way of uniquely identifying people in usernames. This isn't something email was originally intended for.
It makes sense: I imagine postal addresses and even names change more often than email.
AI predictions are difficult, especially about the future: https://rodneybrooks.com/the-seven-deadly-sins-of-predicting-the-future-of-ai/
Automation does not seem to have much of an impact: people are rarely forced to change industry, companies are not investing heavily in AI, and productivity growth is slow: https://www.wired.com/2017/08/robots-will-not-take-your-job/
Waymo has been testing fully driverless cars (i.e. without a human ready to intervene) since 2017! https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/12/driverless-cars-became-a-reality-in-2017-and-hardly-anyone-noticed/
Switching from xz to zstd package compression in Arch Linux gives a ~13x improvement in decompression time with only a ~1% increase in file size!
https://www.archlinux.org/news/now-using-zstandard-instead-of-xz-for-package-compression/
Cute glitch app that lets you look at old accounts you've followed to see if they're still relevant. Has a Marie Kondo theme too!
https://tokimeki-unfollow.glitch.me/
Increasing use of YouTube for training doctors in surgery procedures! https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/24/doctors-are-watching-surgical-procedures-on-youtube.html
Amazing project that trained the GPT-2 language model on text adventure games, producing a game that allows arbitrary prompts!
Game: https://aidungeon.io/
About: https://pcc.cs.byu.edu/2019/11/21/ai-dungeon-2-creating-infinitely-generated-text-adventures-with-deep-learning-language-models/
(Ironic that a text game has large GPU requirements to run too.)
I'm surprised there are so few programming languages with a built-in database that you can query for facts about definitions.
For example, list all the functions that take three arguments.
We have self-hosting compilers, why not self-host code exploration APIs?
A search engine devoted to finding misspelled items on eBay! https://typohound.com/
I have sympathy for the Amazon model where pages are organised around specific products (i.e. aggregate by SKU). It saves every seller having to carefully write a generic product description.
I've read good criticisms of ORMs: objects aren't exactly like DB rows, and they make some queries hard.
I keep coming back to having *some* layer between me and SQL though. ORMs have nicer APIs and I really value automatic schema migration.
On using Semantic Web technologies in a way that solves problems and delivers value:
https://bibwild.wordpress.com/2014/10/28/is-the-semantic-web-still-a-thing/
Asking candidates to spot issues in a piece of work is a great hiring technique: it's open ended, shows expertise, and both interviewer and interviewee can learn things!
https://cushychicken.github.io/bad-schematic-interviews/
Many excellent Hubot packages haven't been touched in five years. Is there a newer alternative?
My experience is that group chats, especially in a work context, are hugely enriched with customised bots.
If you have to choose between a text tutorial and a video for your library, prefer text, but video is often preferred for new concepts:
https://programming-journal.org/2017/1/17/
The road to Scala 3, including "TASTy", an expanded and desugared typed syntax tree to enable source level compatibility:
https://www.scala-lang.org/2019/12/18/road-to-scala-3.html
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