Thought Bricks

An article in The New Yorker about feeling a little sad about the inevitable replacement of coding with AI really hit home for me. I’ve not used AI for coding yet professionally, but I’ve done a couple of experiments that indicate how useful it might be in replacing not only the boilerplate and drudgery but also some of the thinking that goes into it. I don’t think it will eliminate the role of people in creating software, but it will change it dramatically by potentially devaluing all of the deep techy things it was really fun to learn (e.

WaPo had a article about tall wood buildings that was quite interesting. I love the look of The Wood Hotel. The clean lines and the color and warmth of wood really works well. The article points out that using wood as a construction material is good at reducing the carbon footprint of big buildings which typically rely on very carbon intensive concrete and steel. The fire risks to wood construction are dealt with by sprinklers, fire retardant treatments and the sheer mass of the wood which tends to char rather that be consumed by flame.

I’m usually in the habit of keeping my Linux desktop up to date. Normally, it’s pretty uneventful to run the Ubuntu updater or do it on the command line. However, today something interesting happened. I ran the update, noted that there was a kernel update from 6.2.0-34 to 6.2.0-36 and let it run. The fun started when I rebooted my computer. On reboot, the WiFi network was gone. I’m using a pretty crappy USB network adapter that required some special drivers and apparently the update borked the driver.

I’ve been working my way through Seneca’s “Letters from a Stoic”. It’s a slower go for me than “Meditations”. It’s a little more academic than “Meditations” with a good amount of discussion of abstract “virtue” and the like. The style in “Letters” isn’t as approachable as the personal dialog in “Meditations”. Now that I’m two-thirds of the way through, I’m starting to get into it more. I quite enjoyed Letter XCII On the Happy Life.

Amanda Mull has a nice piece in The Atlantic about retail self-checkout. Self-checkout is horrible. For the most part, it doesn’t make things faster and in some cases (like you want to buy a beer), it makes things much slower. The only use case that it works well is if you are picking up a very few items that have big and obvious bar codes and don’t require a bag. Even then, there is a chance things will go awry.

I really enjoyed this article in Men’s Journal about a ride by Erick Cedeño to retrace a route ridden by 20 Black soldiers in 1897. I didn’t know that the U.S. Army had ever experimented with a bicycle troop, but apparently they did and assigned a very tough task to some soldiers stationed at Fort Missoula, MT. Mr. Cedeño’s ride sounds very difficult but nothing compared to what those soldiers must have experienced.

In the same vein as my post yesterday, I was very impressed by this description of how small you can make a simple ELF binary. Starting with the generic output of compiling one of the simplest possible C programs from gcc at 3998 bytes, the article outlines how you can slim it down. The first steps are using the features in gcc to optimize the size. That gets it down to 2616 bytes.

The title is generally true, but in this case, I’m talking about an interesting article about the steps that happen when you run python3 hello.py. It’s a really nice breakdown of all the steps from figuring out the path to the python executable to mapping that file on the disk to creating a new process to finding the ELF file to linking to libraries to printing out “Hello World!”. The detail is nice.

This rant about scrollbars is hilarious and on point. Scrollbars are very handy. Most of the time, I’ll use arrow keys, the scroll wheel or swipe the two finger swipe to move around, but it is nice to jump around by clicking on an area of the scroll bar when you are skimming a long document. Unfortunately, as the post points out, in many cases the scroll bars are tiny or even invisible.

It’s really nice living about a mile away from the bike trails at O-hill. I can easily get on Ruby and go for a nice 45 minute mountain bike ride that covers about 7 miles and 800 feet of climbing. I’ve been trying to get out at least a couple times a week while the weather is nice. Since the trails up there dry really well (with a few exceptions), I should be able to keep it going in the winter.