WhiteFox (True Fox layout) with Kaihua Brown switches. I use AHK to rebind Caps Lock to Esc if pressed and Ctrl if held. It is programmable, but I haven’t yet done anything terribly special with it on the firmware side (waiting for Kiibohd to support dual-role keys so I can move that AHK script to my keyboard’s firmware).

AMP is frankly one of the most hostile attempts to control the web that I’ve ever seen. Does faster loading really justify the degree of control that Google exercises over the web as a result?

1. Google hosts AMP pages on their servers, removing control from the website owner and centralizing the web to a ludicrous degree (why not, indeed, host the whole of the web on google.com?)
2. If you’re not willing to play ball, they demote your search rankings
3. Everyone uses Google, so you have to conform to their whims or you lose the predominant driver of traffic on the web.
4. Everyone has to use AMP, so Google owns an even larger fraction of the web.

Users treat Google search as a utility of the internet, not a business. But it is a business, and a near-monopolistic one at that.

This looks awesome! I’m definitely going to try to start using this.

A big workflow problem I’ve noticed when talking to management and designers at my day job is that the mocks/specs that I’m handed are often under-specified. This looks like a great way to collaboratively reason about edge cases in the design and also break down the wall between how the designer sees an interface (as well-defined happy case workflows) and how I end up implementing it (having to make judgment calls about what should happen if something goes awry).

Is there any video recording for any talk on this conf?

I was also at Deconstruct! It was a fantastic conference with speakers from a really diverse range of perspectives and experiences. A few that stood out to me:

Sandi Metz gave what I thought was a really solid analysis of what a lot of teams get wrong in OOP. It definitely had some immediately actionable takeaways for me and the code base that I work on in my day job. I really like the idea that conditionals -> complexity and that you should try as best as possible to remove them from the procedural-style code that orchestrates objects and move it into deciding which types of objects to create in the first place. It mostly consisted of her most recent two blog posts: Breaking up the Behemoth and What does OO Afford?

Nabil Hassein’s talk was really powerful. I don’t really know what to write about it here but it was a pretty sobering look at how we in the business of creating technology affect the world around us, and how we in the “Global North” consume resources far in excess of those in the “Global South”. The talk seemed to really resonate with the crowd and he received a standing ovation afterwards. When the video comes out I’ll definitely be sharing it with people.

Allison Parrish’s talk seemed to be a big hit with a lot of people. As far as I can tell it expanded on some work she has previously talked about with applying algorithms to the case of poetic manipulation of English text. She’s previously talked about it in terms of apply JPEG-like compression to text to see what happens. She talked about her recent efforts to apply machine learning techniques to this end via semantic analysis, as well as some playful text transformations via searches/random walks in semantic space as well as pronunciation space. The resulting poetry was very impressive!

Tom 7’s talk was pure fun, technical weirdness. Halfway through, he gave us the punch line which was that his slides were being run through a video output of a NES. He stuck a Raspberry Pi inside of a NES cartridge, emulated a SNES, and played it back through the NES! There was some meta-analysis of his own humor and of the presentation itself (as it was happening!) in there too, which I thought was both funny and interesting.

Pablo Meier talked about distributed systems and what we might desire in a programming language that treats distribution of work as a first-class operation (spoiler alert: he ended up talking about golang). He expanded on how a lot of these ideas come from Erlang and the interesting, perhaps underappreciated/underutilized innovations also present in Erlang, relating back to its supervisor process model and how.

Elle Vargas’ talk surrounded the history and investigation of the 2016 election interference, focusing especially on DEFCON 25’s “Voting Village” and the frankly disturbing findings (voting machines compromised within minutes, and even some real voter data found on one of the test machines which were procured from previous state elections). She had a great call to action at the end in terms of how technically-proficient people can be civically engaged.

Anjana Vakil, who has a background in linguistics, talked about the relationships between human languages and programming languages, especially with respect to how a language can shape your thinking. Her thesis was that programming languages are fundamentally human languages intended for human consumption, and that we should examine how those languages inform our reasoning and how they can affect or be affected by our cultural contexts.

I use Dashlane. I started using it way back when it was in beta, and when they released 1.0 I had an option to pay a one-time fee to get premium features for life. I like the browser integration, mobile app, and “security center. It tracks incidents and let you know if a password you have is potentially compromised. It also has an automatic password changer, although it only works on a limited set of websites.

this post only links to https://www.reddit.com/r/serverless/ not to an article.

I’m curious to see what the general consensus on Bitwarden is. I can’t find many articles about it outside of its own announcements. It looks like they have a bug bounty program? I’m a bit dubious of the fact that there’s just one developer.

I don’t know if it’s intentional, but the title and content is pretty similar to the sort of thing found in Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. If you enjoyed these puzzles and the faint awareness of the lack of control you have over your own thinking that they may have inspired, the book is full of them.

That was a fun read. I went looking for the second part and found it on Jonathan Blow’s blog along with more posts about his Braid code cleanup.

Video of the site For all of you who can’t see it. Chrome 56 on Windows 10.

The presentation of the Overwatch logo is disingenuous. It completely omits the circle logo

And while we’re looking at Blizzard games:

• Heroes of the Storm

• Starcraft 2 Wings of Liberty

• Hearthstone

And it’s not just Blizzard.

• Guild Wars 2 has an incredibly iconic logo

• Blade & Soul

• Star Citizen

• Civilization 5

• League of Legends

• DOTA 2 - now of course, if you take the text part in isolation, it’s another boring text logo, according to the author.

There’s clearly more than a few modern games out there that have colorful, eye-catching, iconic logos.

Being able to go back in the past is basically everything I’ve ever wanted from OllyDbg. And it has IDA integration! This is exciting.