Link blog

Inside the German state trying to break free from Microsoft ↗

Laura Pitel, reporting for the FT (paywalled):

Many European countries are now pursuing various forms of “decoupling” from US tech. Austria’s armed forces have abandoned Microsoft Office, Denmark has announced similar plans and France has ordered officials to quit Zoom while launching its own secure messaging app to replace WhatsApp or Signal.

But the effort under way in Kiel, the Schleswig-Holstein state capital best known for its annual regatta, is one of the most ambitious — and advanced — in Europe.

Rooting for them.

XPER on the Commodore 64 ↗

Christopher Drum, writing at Stone Tools, a blog ‘[e]xploring retro productivity software from the 8/16-bit era’:

In a supreme act of hubris, I use 80s "expert system" AI technology to turn a C64 into a rain predictor. Will it fair better than a coin flip?

Via Unsung. Also, check out The Computer Chronicles episode ‘Artificial Intelligence’ from 1985. The demo of the natural language search in the Q&A software package at 17:43 is quite cool (for the time).

And Gary Kildall’s comment during the episode that “AI is one of those things that people are pinning to their products now to make them fancier, add the frosting, and make them sell better” prompts a knowing chuckle 40+ years later!

HTML’s best kept secret: the <output> tag ↗

I prefer using built-in, semantic HTML whenever possible. Here’s Den Odell with a tag I didn’t realise existed:

Every developer knows <input>. It’s the workhorse of the web.

But <output>? Most have never touched it. Some don’t even know it exists.

That’s a shame, because it solves something we’ve been cobbling together with <div>s and ARIA for years: dynamic results that are announced to screen readers by default.

It’s been in the spec for years. Yet it’s hiding in plain sight.

[…]

Usage is straightforward:

<output>Your dynamic value goes here</output>

Check out Den’s post for nuance and real-world examples. There is also a Hacker News discussion.

Against The Grain: Hugh Morris has had enough ‘jazzy’ ↗

Hugh Morris, editor of VAN magazine, writing for The Wire (originally published in issue 495):

What does it mean to be jazzy, exactly? On a fundamental level, jazzy implies something being held at arm’s length. To be jazzy is to not be jazz, but, rather, be like jazz, and, crucially, be distant from jazz. […]

The jazzy thing is a British thing, and, I reckon, a male thing, a relic from the age of the multi-talented TV showman. Roy Castle was a jazzy man, as was Bruce Forsyth. Richard Stilgoe, as Peter Capaldi’s Thick Of It character reminded us, was “a jazzy bastard”. Jools Holland, with his ubiquitous boogie-woogie and interminable chat show rambling, is today’s exemplar jazzy man.

For the younger generation, Jacob Collier is the digital version of the jazzy archetype. […]

My own musical education came via the true protectors of the jazzy flame: brass bands. Yet you know exactly what the sudden entrance of jazzy music sounds like: overly deliberate swing; tsk-tsking cymbals played by a drum kit struggling to sound surreptitious; a sudden, overwhelming feeling of noteyness; a handbrake turn from seriousness into frivolity; and the awkward introduction of embodied concepts like feel and groove into spaces which have traditionally expelled them.

‘The Hidden Lives of Pigs’ (short documentary) ↗

Pigs are highly intelligent, emotional and social animals. The conditions and treatment they endure in the food system are truly awful and shameful. This new 10-minute documentary from film-maker Tom Pickering (I Could Never Go Vegan) profiles these amazing animals. It does contain some short clips which are graphic, but if you eat bacon or other food products made from pig flesh, you have an obligation to understand the suffering that is behind what you eat.

Even if you don’t eat pigs, please still watch it, as these wonderful sentient beings need human allies to advocate for them, and this short film will surely galvanise you.

The film’s website includes some facts about pigs.

Semicolons bring the drama; that’s why I love them ↗

Anjana Ahuja, writing for the FT:

Forget the haters and doubters; this under-appreciated punctuation mark is a writer’s friend, beloved of Charles Dickens, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. The semicolon — a comma with a full stop for a hat, and sometimes called a super-comma — can sashay into prose and transform it in a way that a full stop, comma or even a dash cannot.

I often see people use a comma where I would have used a semicolon (or indeed a full stop). They create a run-on sentence in the process (apparently called a ‘comma splice’).

As per a commenter below the FT article: ‘A rule to keep in mind: use a comma to separate a dependent clause; if you use a semi colon, the phrase on either side of the semicolon should work as a standalone sentence.’

My own favourite punctuation mark is the colon. Orwell makes interesting use of it. The fact that I don’t totally understand the thinking behind how it’s deployed in, say, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is why I find it interesting. (See also this brief essay on Orwell’s punctuation.)

Framework or no framework? →

justfuckingusereact.com vs justfuckingusehtml.com.

20 years of Git: ‘Never a big thing for me,’ says inventor Linus Torvalds ↗

Today I learned that Linus Torvalds also invented Git (via DevClass):

Git, the dominant version control system for code, is 20 years old this month, but inventor Linus Torvalds said that it “was never a big thing for me” since it was only made to support the work on the Linux kernel.

It’s good to know his use of Git is as limited as mine:

Torvalds described himself as a casual user of Git who mainly uses just five commands: git merge, git blame, git log, git commit and git pull – though he adds later in the interview that he also uses git status “fairly regularly.”

50 years of The Köln Concert ↗

BBC Radio 4:

Fifty years after Keith Jarrett performed the [Köln] Concert to a sellout crowd, Kevin le Gendre explores the enduring appeal of the biggest selling solo piano record of all time, and unpicks a new musical language born out of adversity.

That night in January 1975 is full of stories — of Keith Jarrett's long journey, no food, poor sleep and arriving at the Cologne Opera House to find a broken piano. The concert was almost cancelled and the legendary recording beloved by millions nearly never happened. Yet could these problems be at the heart of the album's bewitching new sound world?

I love Keith Jarrett improvised solo recordings. There are many of them, and virtually all were recorded live with an audience. Köln is the most famous. There is a (non-documentary) movie about it, Köln 75, premiering at the Berlin International Film Festival next month (February).

I’ve listened to Köln — parts I and II C, anyway — many times, though generally I’m more familiar with his post-2000 output. Of those the best may be The Carnegie Hall Concert (2005;06) Rio (2011) and La Fenice (2006;18).

Tragically, Jarrett suffered two strokes in 2018 and can now only play with his right hand. His final concert was another improvised solo performance at Carnegie Hall on 17 February 2017. I hope ECM releases it some day.

Update, 12 February: added a still from the now-available trailer.

Update 17 February: further coverage of the concert and the film at The Guardian, Jazzwise, Variety (includes a two-minute clip from the film), and The Spectator. Movie reviews: Screen Daily, Cineuropa, and The Hollywood Reporter. There’s also a documentary in the works. And the BBC produced a couple of other shows about the concert in 2011.

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 ↗

Simon Willison:

A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments.

Includes: ‘Prompt driven app generation is a commodity already’, ‘Synthetic training data works great’, the environmental impact got better and much worse, and ‘LLMs somehow got even harder to use’.

What PWA Can Do Today ↗

whatpwacando.today, by Dutch developer Danny Moerkerke, is a comprehensive showcase of the capabilities of ‘Progressive Web Apps’ (PWAs). PWAs are websites which you can add to your home screen and which have some of the functionality of native apps. iOS doesn’t support all of the APIs by any stretch, but implements enough of them to make for a decent-enough end product, depending on your app’s use case. (For a detailed list of what is supported and what isn’t, see Maximiliano Firtman’s iOS PWA Compatibility page.)

Features that work on both iOS and Android, and which you can use in your PWA, include push notifications, offline support via Service Workers, biometric authentication (which allows for login with Face ID and Touch ID), web share (where you can use the OS’s native share mechanism), audio recording and geolocation. The Payment Request API allows you to offer payment with Apple Pay or Google Pay. Most of these features can also be employed in websites running within a normal browser session. (An exception is push notifications on iOS, which only work if your website is installed on the home screen.)

Most of my websites function as PWAs, with the exception of working offline, which in past attempts I’ve never got to work well enough. (I could never make fetching updated assets reliable, and didn’t want users to get stuck on an old cached version of the site.) Maybe I’ll give Danny’s Basic Service Worker a shot to try and solve this problem.

(h/t JavaScript Jabber.)