AndrewStephens

When I look back on the really helpful blog posts I have read, they have all been really basic. Whether they described a programming technique or a recipe for a new meal, it was a clear description that was important - not how esoteric the knowledge was.

There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan.

I think what you are looking for is something like Mastodon or related activity-pub service. You can run your own instance and nobody can take that away from you. No need to drag a blockchain into it - just host whatever services you need.

What is the incentive for an individual to participate in a non-financial blockchain?

Bitcoin-style blockchains “work” because everyone gets the possibility of a little reward for all the hassle and non-negligible CPU time of being a node.

I'd probably skip WebP, and go straight to AVIF now.

That is my assessment as well. The compression ratios with AVIF are ridiculous compared to older formats.

This is pretty neat if all you need is to ping a local server but please use curl (or something equivalent) for contacting remote services. HTTP1.1 seems like such a simple protocol but in the real world you need to deal with proxies, different encodings, and redirects. Curl takes care of that (and a host of other annoying stuff) for you.

Exif is great but here is your obligatory reminder that if you are publishing images you should strip out some of the identifying information that cameras and image editing software likes to embed.

In particular, you probably don’t want the GPS coordinates of your house publicly available on your blog for everyone to see.

My static site generator strips out exif data from images and I would expect all sensible sites would do the same. There is a lot of personal information jammed in there - if you post a picture of your dog making a funny face to social media you don’t want the exact GPS coordinates of your house plastered over the internet.

You have to be selective though, some of the EXIF data specifies things like color spaces and orientation that is used by browsers for displaying the image properly.

These were some of the most influential books of my youth, teaching a generation of young kids quite advanced topics. I still picture cartoon robots putting numbers in boxes whenever I write code involving pointers.

But my favourite[0] was Write Your Own Adventure Programs, which taught data driven programming and text parsing.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2017/2/usborne_computer_books.html

PG remains one of the best things on the internet. The amount of fascinating material almost beggers belief.

IBM was legendarily over-managed. This is second-hand but a guy I used to work with told a story of when he interned for a summer at IBM in London during the mid-90s doing what would now be called a QA engineering. At that time everyone wore suits to work but the culture was changing so the interns put in a request to be allowed casual Fridays. Bear in mind that they were locked in a back room somewhere without any customer interaction so they didn't think it was a big deal.

Months later, just before the end of the internship, they received a reply. Their manager had forwarded their request up the chain of command and the email had the full quoted history. Their request had been bumped up 4 successive layers in the London office, then across to the US headquarters where it continued its upwards trajectory, finally alighting on the desk of a VP who, after thanking them for bring the issue to his attention, rendered an carefully considered opinion.

The whole process had taken weeks, presumably as each person in the hierarchy debated whether they had the authority to tackle such a weighty issue.

The email had then been inexplicably bounced back DOWN the chain one link at a time, back across the Atlantic Ocean, and through the local office, down to the suit-bound interns, again weeks later, who by this stage only had days left at the internship.

The answer was no.

gate fidelity and other parameters are above certain threshold

A threshold that might be beyond what the physical properties of our universe allow. It is still unclear.

Aaronson know his stuff but I am not sure he hasn’t considered the fact that, in this current hype cycle, the quantum researchers breathlessly reporting to him on a breakthrough just around the corner are just lying to him and themselves.

I have been hearing about one more technical hurdle to solve before quantum algorithms become feasible since before I graduated. That was in 1996.

A lot of the original 8bit games that pixel art tries to invoke have quite terrible art, even by the standards of the day.

Well, probably. And if not there is always good old fashioned email.

Almost nobody actually contacts me but it is technically possible.

I have been trying for years to get good at 3D modeling with Blender and have also failed. But I didn’t let that stop me using Blender to produce illustrations for my sci-if epic interactive fiction game that ended up being nominated for a minor award for graphics (it didn’t win).

Let me introduce you to the last resort of the struggling artist - extreme stylization. Really good pixel art is a very difficult discipline but terrible pixel art can be just as appealing if you push a style you can call your own.

Be bold.

I haven’t had comments on my blog for over a decade now and I don’t miss them. For every useful and informative comment I got several spammy or rude reply. Anyone who wants to let me know something about my blog can message me on social media.

I’ve seen blogs that do not host comments themselves but instead automatically surface social media (usually mastodon) comments which I think is a useful technique.

I love this (and submitted my blog) - people bemoan the death of the Old Web™ but in reality there is still heaps of great content being created.

A well written piece on a sad state of affairs.

You are not alone.

I got criticism on my blog for using a serif font but those people are just … wrong. Serif fonts are just better for reading at all font sizes.

I was put through the mill of getting higher level security clearances so I could be assigned to classified projects. Fortunately, I never was.

Sure was lucky you didn’t work on any of those classified projects - <wink>

As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content.

The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, with ads.” As soon as you post your well researched expensive to produce content, I will summarise it and offer 90% of the experience for free. That’s if Google doesn’t do it first with AI summaries.

There are plenty of crypto projects that tried to do micropayments. They failed mainly due to technical reasons but if they had worked they still would not have gained traction - nobody wants micropayments.

I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar for items - that is the smallest unit of money where putting up with fraud, complaints, and chargebacks becomes worthwhile.

Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off.

Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html

I just disable SSH passwords and force using a certificate, which should be immune to bots barring some horrible unknown flaw in the ssh daemon.

Running over a VPN service would have the much the same effect.

This is great. I run a server for my blog and can confirm idiotic bots continually hammer port 22. Sometimes I check my SSH logs just to see what is going on but I’ve never detected anything cleverer than trying common username/pw combinations.

It seems a little pointless, surely every server actually accepting SSH passwords has been 0wned year ago.

I find some parts of Liquid Glass to be an improvement over the previous flat style that lasted far too long. A lot of it seems really well thought out.

On mobile that is.

On larger screens with desktops and overlapping windows it looks kind of bad. Not unusable, just annoying. I am hoping this will change as more apps update their design.

Normally I am not a fan of gimmicky page formats but this series really hits it out of the park with well-considered presentation.

I can't wait until the next installment on error diffusion. I still think Atkinson dithering looks great, so much so that I made a web component to dither images.

Game design is filled with simple ideas that interact in fun ways. Every time I have tried to come up with complex AIs I ended up scrapping them in favor of "stupid" solutions that turned out to be more enjoyable and easier to tune.

Great question, I could answer with many stories but here are two:

The (deliberately) very limited analytics software I wrote for my personal website[0] could have used database but I didn't want to add a dependency to what was a very simple project so I hacked up an in-memory datastructure that periodically dumps itself to disk as a json file. This gives persistence across reboots and at a pinch I can just edit the file with a text editor.

Game design is filled with "stupid" ideas that work well. I wrote a text-based game[1] that includes Trek-style starship combat. I played around with a bunch of different ideas for enemy AI before just reverting to a simple action drawn off the top of a small deck. It's a very easy system to balance and expand, and just as fun for the player.

[0] https://sheep.horse/visitor_statistics.html

[1] https://sheep.horse/voyage_of_the_marigold/

https://sheep.horse/

The world needs more idiosyncratic and opinionated hand crafted websites like this.