bemusedthrow75

I'm going to tack onto your comment because my instinct was just to write "oh for pity's sake! :-o"

You've hit the nail on the head. There is IMO some distance between eating your own dog food and NIH, and they have happily traversed that distance without a thought.

I have physical copies of some of these on my desk. They are lovely, approachable and also really well thought-out.

There’s a lot to learn from these about how to teach.

We literally have editors that colour bracket pairs to make this stuff easier to deal with, though.

Oh I didn't say I was well-paid doing it :-/

Haha OK this is a good answer. :-)

> So the pyramids are visible out to 3000 light years away if the aliens have extremely powerful optical telescopes.

Is such a telescope (resolving power etc.) actually possible? At the level of basic physics, could anyone build it, hypothetically?

I don't know, because I am an idiot who has spent 30 years building websites of various complexity and pretending that is advanced knowledge.

Please no. At least let us get 2024 over with first. Then maybe we can hold our heads up.

Orcas kill other creatures and discard them without eating them.

They are highly capable, intelligent and enjoy violence for the sake of it.

Give them limbs and opposable thumbs and they would be just like us.

There's absolutely no reason to project any kind of higher, more connected, more honest natural wisdom onto them.

Oh yeah. Orcas. The other highly intelligent, highly social apex predators that haven't graduated from sexual violence for domination and torturing lesser creatures for fun.

I guess this may be true. But my lack of knowledge of these things is on a different plane to the "knows well-enough" vs "expert in" distinction that might be useful for gatekeeping.

My grasp of trig has relapsed to 13-year-old level. It's an embarrassment!

> But it's really a scourge on this world that the top tier pay in the industry is to shove ads in front of people.

This cannot be said enough, IMO. The web software world's endless quest for the shallow and lucrative is exhausting.

Indeed. But I think I would like to be oriented better, and not feel completely outside it.

My calculus is strongest; I can deal with that basically. My geometry is so poor that I am surprised I passed my maths A level.

These books excite me because they give back that, er, constructivist thing that has always appealed to me -- Piaget, Papert, Minsky.

I enjoyed your article, thank you for writing it.

It was exciting thirty, twenty-five, even twenty years ago. I loved it.

But the pay/perks situation is dependent on putting up with a lot of corporate BS; if you're a solo developer, or the only developer in a small team, web stuff is hard, the task shrinks over time as things commoditise and you become more dependent on hosted offerings, and pays relatively poorly. I am tired and seeking a direction change before it is too late.

Literally the only topic on which I agree with Elon Musk is that more developers need to be persuaded to do something more interesting than getting dragged into web dev BS. And I wish I'd paid a lot, lot more attention in maths lessons away on topics that didn't have to do with logic.

(It is, nevertheless, amusing that it is web dev BS where Musk is getting his posterior handed to him)

This is very interesting.

But quite a lot of CS people -- well at least I hope it is not just me -- end up on the web development trajectory despite or because of having less than good enough understanding of e.g. trigonometry, geometry and calculus... all of which start to matter a lot when you are starting to make things; especially things that move and consume electricity.

I am a good programmer but a weak mathematician. I have a 3D printer now, and I'm starting to learn FreeCAD and microcontroller stuff actively rather than just reading about it, and run up against my maths weakness all the time.

I have recently discovered the three books Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron wrote:

https://www.makershed.com/products/make-trigonometry-print

https://www.makershed.com/products/make-calculus-print

https://www.makershed.com/products/make-geometry

It's worth observing that some of the things he points at are new-ish in terms of stable support.

:has() for example, is a gamechanger once you can confidently not care about IE11.

Before :is(), :has(), :where(), and before the forgiving selectors were added, things were not so much fun.

> That is, if `<Tag1><Tag2></Tag1></Tag2>` is always considered malformed, then why isn't the syntax simply `<Tag1><Tag2></></>`?

XML isn't just a structured data format where close tags always run up against each other and whitespace is insignificant. It's also a descriptive document format which is often hand-authored.

I think the argument is that the close tags being named makes those documents easier for a human author to understand. It certainly is my experience.

A physical post-it note on your monitor that you don't take off until you've used it three times.

Or some other similar reminder -- perhaps just a list of things you're going to install when you need them, so you don't install them until you have a use.

(I have this problem too)

This looks super. Like the late lamented CamTwist but more focused on presentations.

OMG of course there's a wikipedia page for it!

Thank you :-)

Not an American.

I read a lot but I can't think of a book I read last year.

I don't think "didn't read a book" is that useful for inference about imagination, literacy, education etc., unless it's also matched by watching an enormous amount of linear or episodic television.

"Didn't read a book" might, however, be a meaningful proxy for shorter attention spans. I think it could be in my case, even though I read voraciously.

Are our heads actually unusually big, for a mammal scaled to our size? I've often wondered about this.

Especially for a mammal with front-facing eyes.

If combatting the enshittification of the internet keeps making things turn back 23 years like this, I'm all for it.

I'd like:

- my 2001 hairline

- my 2001 waistline

- plenty of notice not to fuck up an opportunity like I did in 2007

Thanks, magic time loop of rediscovery!

I don't think it was necessarily implied, actually. Depends how you parse that sentence. For example it goes on to say "and lots of things can go wrong". But that is very much about the birth, not the observation.

Either way, I am not sure that watching a couple of births qualifies anyone to say whether birth being "traumatic" is a question of cultural assumption :-)

> I certainly did not think so.

Were you the one giving birth?

Yeah that wouldn't be great.

But:

This feels to me like it might be a really useful tool to do systems-integration work around an app that is built in Node.js. For example, to integrate with incrond or cron, or get a supervisor task into JS. The smallest sensible "shell-ish" wrapper that gets you access to your codebase in JS and stops the coding effort being divided so much between technologies.

Optimising for sales at the beginning is just not worth the time.

You have to start with word of mouth to test out whether your offering is really going to work, with kindly/friendly people who already know you as a person and aren't going to panic and get demanding in a way that a customer can do with someone they don't know from Eve.

And you'll need to be earning enough to at least partly offset the raid on your savings to give you time to think through sales strategies.

Freelance devops is often _not_ fun though; your biggest challenge will be controlling the seemingly unbillable work that you end up doing where people really only want to phone you up and get advice. Goodwill kills, so set boundaries with your early clients.

So if you are wise you will have a consultancy package that you can use to control that. And you'll have some sort of pre-paid token/bucket/time allocation system that encourages your clients to use your time wisely for the small stuff, so you can concentrate on the bigger stuff.

(When I say “if you are wise” I don’t mean to patronise. I mean “don’t just pretend it’ll be OK like I did”.)

Further thoughts (learned the hard way)

Consider how your off-ramps are going to work. Clients who are dependent on you but always make the cheap/expedient choices can become a millstone: they have to take your advice or you will end up resentful.

And consider how you are going to manage price rises.

> So I doubt there's any market for teaching these basics...

While working through the idea, the most challenging aspect for me has been how to describe the value of it, even though I know what the value of it is.

I think there are parallels, like no longer knowing what is going on under the hood of your car, which has its own anxieties.

Paradoxically I think it is non-programmers who are more interested in the kind of "history lessons" of it -- like, how did we end up here, 10,000 feet view stuff. And perhaps just a small amount of that would stop people being bamboozled by copy-and-paste nonsense in proposals, quotes, project plans etc.

It strikes me as interesting to think about, that if you were to go back in time and ask someone twenty years ago if they knew much about the web, those people, who might be from diverse non-technical fields, might be able to tell you quite a lot they'd gleaned about how it actually works. Because the books on the web then taught you how it worked. Surprising people used to know about domain names and FTP servers.

But nowadays, the knowledge is much higher-level, and in a way that leads people into believing things only have complex dependencies, like React or serverless designs or Cloudflare.

It's like the web needs its own Raspberry Pi movement.

"Parents" and "center" maybe? Weird.

I am only here to infect you with an excellent earworm:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o41A91X5pns

No, I don't think so.

It's possible to write a whole load of very clever things in vanilla JS, but it's not always a good use of time to do so, and it is not a very easy way to develop things in large teams, without building up an abstraction layer with getters and setters that is not appreciably better than a minimal reactive framework.

The one-way data flow in reactive frameworks is the bit worth fighting for (and fighting over).