Links
Punch Yourself in the Face with Reality
I know you want to use AI as an escape. It is so tempting. You get to sit in your bubble and imagine everything and see it come to life and your agent buddy will keep cheering you on while you get nothing done with your life. And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.
The Tower Keeps Rising
There is the appealing idea that AI-assisted programming means better tools which lets us build more ambitious software. That is certainly true at the level of the individual and without doubt a developer with an agent will be dramatically more capable of changing a codebase. But large software projects have never been limited only by how quickly an individual can produce code. They are limited by how well people can coordinate their understanding of the system they are changing.
Local AI Needs to be the Norm
Local AI shines when the model’s job is transforming user-owned data, not acting as a search engine for the universe.
Creating a Color Palette from an Image
Spectrimage takes a photograph, visualizes the color information pixel-by-pixel, and builds a palette.
Great writeup of techniques to extract a good set of colors from any image.
OKpalette – Best in Class Color Extraction
A lovely web app to extract color palettes from images. Simple, but really impressive set of features.Modern CSS Code Snippets
Modern CSS code snippets, side by side with the old hacks they replace. Every technique you still Google has a clean, native replacement now.
There are really useful new CSS features that I’m embarrassed to say I knew nothing about.
Anchorhead
This looks like a pretty neat interactive fiction game, by Michael Gentry. Excited to give it a shot.
This is a pretty enormous game. There are lots of rooms to explore and lots things to mess with, and they don’t all necessarily contribute directly to solving the game. Don’t be daunted. Don’t spend too much time banging your head against a locked door – many of the keys only come to you in the course of time, as the story develops. If you’re at a loss for what to do next, wander around to the places you’ve already been – they may have changed since the last time you visited. Don’t forget to look ‘under’ and ‘behind’ things, as well as ‘in’ and ‘at’ them. And hang on to your umbrella.
Provector
Provector is a really useful web app for making simple SVG graphics. I find it really handy for throwing together simple logo ideas.The importance of stupidity in scientific research
From Martin A. Schwartz:
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time.
There seems to be a constant pressure to be “right”, but there are definitely situations where that’s impossible. Sometimes, being wrong is correct. It’s getting harder and harder to allow ourselves to enjoy bumbling and exploring, but it is so important.
Internet in a Box
Internet-in-a-Box “learning hotspots” are used in dozens of countries, to give everyone a chance, e.g. in remote mountain villages in India.
It works without internet — like a community fountain, but for the mind — wirelessly serving anyone nearby with a smartphone, tablet or laptop.I love everything about this project. It acts as a Wi-Fi hotspot with preloaded data that can serve the community. Wikipedia, eBooks, online courses, medical reference material, the possibilities are endless.
Will it also let people connect with each other through this central hub? Assuming you could supply people with devices, how would a digital messaging utility transform a community? (There is a cynic in me that announces, “Bringing the Worst Parts of Nextdoor to the World!” but I choose to be optimistic today.)