Notices by Ward Cunningham (k9ox@mastodon.radio)

@baldur

"Everybody uses AI"

The gold-rush explanation didn't seem sufficient. One must truly believe there is something there to become so devoted.

It's the Psychic's Con:
https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

I am normally inclined to use the parts of javascript that I know work. Today is different. I have been studying idiomatic usage by many authors as represented in abstract syntax trees. I find roughly 35 of the possible 80 node types present meaning that in twelve years we have collectively only touched half of the language.

@woodpunk
What? Does this company not have stakeholders?

@evan

Federated Wiki exists because Evan came and talked about the inevitability of federation at an event in Portland, Oregon. Thank you Evan.

@me_
Wirth makes a convincing argument. But then I get to wondering, in his environment would there ever have been a Wikipedia designed and written by its users in 300 languages? The universally bloated text layout and font rendering appears to have bought us something.

@cwebber @wingo

I should explain how WebAssembly "barks" for me.

Every day my curiosity leads me to fetch some data, thank you Promise.all.

I crunch this through a couple of functional pipelines ending up with dot, thank you .map and .reduce.

I run this through Graphviz which is still awesome after all these years, thank you WebAssembly.

Now 200 msec later I have this on my screen and am interacting with it using querySelectorAll, thank you SVG.

WebAssembly connects past and future. Woof.

@aredridel

As a rule of thumb, if your pastor says you can't be friends with anyone outside his particular church, it is time to find a new church.

I've recorded the coming and going of FT-8 ham radio operators over a recent 24 hours. This stand-alone interactive map viewer is pretty interesting when playing back at 10x to 100x normal speed. 100x turns the history into a 15 minute movie. You can pan and zoom the map while it plays or click a marker for details on any station. I've turned geometry into geography by placing markers at the largest city in a grid square rather than the geometric center.

http://ft8.ward.asia.wiki.org/assets/pages/watch-bands-open-and-close/viewer.html?speed=100&file=1702363154193.txt

Help me find a diagram from a paper I wrote years ago.

It was published in Pattern Languages of Program Design, Volume 2. The diagram of interest was labeled Chart 1. It appeared in Episodes: A Pattern Language of Competitive Development.

I have the text, but the diagram was created with a long forgotten editor. This is from deep in the history of Agile software development. http://episodes.fed.wiki.org/

Dan Dennett suggests that presenting a chatbot as a human is an offense similar to counterfeiting money. As such, he suggests mechanisms that should be in place immediately. This is a subject that can be explored without answering the most speculative questions of general intelligence. As a purveyor of collaborator software I feel some obligation to take Dan's suggestions seriously. I request my colleagues here to help me reason this out. Thank you.
http://found.ward.fed.wiki/counterfeit-people.html

You may find this revival of hypothetical network routing from my college days interesting. This was a throw-away experiment from a couple of months ago. I wondered if I could "feel" what my routing algorithm had to do by exploring the decisions it made in the lineup.

http://simnet.ward.asia.wiki.org/view/node-browser