I've written high-quality technical how-tos for many years, starting with PC World magazine articles (supported by ads), a book that helped people learn Ruby on Rails (sales via Amazon), and more recently a website that's good for queries like "uninstall Homebrew" or "xcode command line tools" (sponsored by a carefully chosen advertiser). With both a (small) financial incentive and the intrinsic satisfaction of doing good work that people appreciate, I know I've helped a LOT of people over four decades.
A year ago my ad-supported website had 100,000 monthly active users. Now, like the article says, traffic is down 40% thanks to Google AI Overview zero clicks. There's loss of revenue, yes, but apart from that, I'm wondering how people can find my work, if I produce more? They seldom click through on the "source" attributes, if any.
I wonder, am I standing at the gates of hell in a line that includes Tower Records and Blockbuster? Arguably because I'm among those that built this dystopia with ever-so-helpful technical content.
Happy to see there's a way to get browser automation for AI without building infrastructure to support it. Yet I don't see examples of connecting an LLM to drive a web session, just examples of using Puppeteer or Playwright or Selenium to drive a web session. Presumably your user base knows how to write custom code for an interface between Claude or OpenAI API and Puppeteer/Playwright/Selenium. Sadly, I don't know how to do that. Would it be fair to expect your documentation to help? What would you suggest to get started?
Is the interface between Steel, or Puppeteer/Playwright/Selenium, something that might be implemented in the new Anthropic Model Context Protocol, so there's less custom code required?
I wrote this guide for configuring the Dock, Finder, and System Settings for macOS Sequoia. I'm posting it here for feedback and further suggestions, if you'd be so kind.
I'm sure experienced Python developers will continue to use the familiar pyenv/venv/pip toolset, or its many variations. However, Rye is better for beginners and developers coming from other languages. First, Rye is an all-in-one tool, written in Rust for speed, with a unified set of commands for setting a Python version and installing packages, with environments created automatically. Second, the tool uses a folder/project approach to development like languages such as JavaScript and Ruby, where a developer sets up a project in a folder and then specifies a language version and dependencies, rather than the old Python approach where packages get installed into a Python version that is shared among projects (unless a virtual environment is created with venv). The Rye documentation is good, still I thought it's good to offer a tutorial for beginners, so I wrote "How to install Python on Mac" [0] and "How to use Rye for Python" [1]. I don't know if Rye will catch on, but it's a breath of fresh air.
Reddit is blocked in Indonesia because of its reputation for porn. I've lived in Indonesia for four years. It's mildly annoying to do a Google search, see anything from Reddit, and have to fire up a VPN to read it.
Many ordinary people in Indonesia browse porn on Twitter because porn sites are blocked by ISPs. Most people who browse Twitter porn on cellphones in Indonesia can't afford to sign up for a fee-required VPN.
A few years ago I might have felt upset that blocking access to Twitter limits awareness of controversies around human rights, corruption, or over-development. Now I see activists and opinions on Instagram so maybe Twitter is no longer so useful as a public forum. And any forum can now be polluted and manipulated.
Last month Elon Musk was on stage with various government ministers at the World Water Forum in Bali announcing government authorization of StarLink for Internet access in Indonesia. I wonder if the license requires StarLink to limit access to banned sites including Elon's own X. How are they handling that?
I think John Gilmore's statement that "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" is becoming more wishful than factual.
There are a lot of people coming to Python now, even among us who already code in other languages. The first thing I noticed was a confusing variety of ways to install Python, plus a lot of necessary-but-confusing tools for version management, package management, and environment management. I wrote a guide for my mac.install.guide website about installing Python [0] and then condensed it for freeCodeCamp [1].
In a nutshell, I recommend installing Python with Rye [2], an all-in-one project management tool for Python, written in Rust (for speed) and inspired by Cargo, borrowing a folder-based approach to development from other languages such as JavaScript and Ruby. Other people like Pyenv/Venv/Pip but I think it's easier to use a single all-in-one tool.
I looked at that approach and it’s solid and well-supported. Comes down to a choice of multiple tools versus Rye as a single tool. Though you can say multiple tools are more Unix-like.
Yes, it's a good idea to install Python tools or standalone applications with Pipx for isolation, persistence, and simplicity. See "Install Pipx" (https://mac.install.guide/python/pipx).
I'd like to hear viewpoints on using `~/.zprofile` versus `~/.zshrc` for setting `$PATH` on macOS. I was bothered for years that I didn't know the difference so I dived down the rabbit hole and wrote a guide [1]. In the end, I concluded:
- Use `~/.zprofile` to set the PATH and EDITOR environment variables.
- Use `~/.zshrc` for aliases and a custom prompt, or anything tweaking the appearance and behavior of the terminal.
It seems the advantage of the `~/.zprofile` file versus `~/.zshenv` is that it sets environment variables such as `$PATH` without override from macOS. It seems the `~/.zshrc` file could be used for `$PATH` but, by convention and design, is intended for customizing the look and feel of the interactive terminal.
Frankly, saying `~/.zprofile` is better than `~/.zshrc` for setting `$PATH` only "by convention and design" feels like a cop-out. Wondering if anyone knows better.
I'm delighted to see further advocacy for code reviews in a hiring process. As a software engineering manager, dir of eng, and CTO in 3 companies I replaced take-home tests with one hour code reviews. The process gave me everything I needed to evaluate and hire great people and everyone was happier. I explained to candidates (and my team) that I see software engineering as primarily a social practice. If I hire engineers for excellence in code reviews it means they are technically skilled and also a good fit for a collaborative team.
I created a GitHub organization just for the hiring process with a template repo that was published as a code review repo for each candidate. I feel there's benefit in using GitHub for the code review exercise because it's what we use on the job. But I'd like to try this dedicated tool as well. It's a worthwhile project. Thanks!
Ah, mobsters were part of the fabric of life in 1970s Milwaukee. Joseph P. Balistrieri, alleged Underboss of the Milwaukee crime family, owned a stately home on the same block as my parents, a few blocks from the lakefront. An old lady (his mother?) answered the door when I went door-to-door offering snow shoveling services. She said no and was not very nice about it. An unmarked surveillance sedan was parked, idling all winter long, across the street from Atty. Balistrieri's home. The agents (presumably FBI) never smiled to the kids who waved. My parents joked to neighbors that we lived on the safest block in the city. It was all very normal.
I ran a music newspaper in Milwaukee in the early 80s (the Express, still in business after all these years as the Shepherd Express). Our advertisers were bars and clubs. One club that wasn't very popular underwent extensive renovation frequently, changing themes from urban cowboy to disco to hard rock, and other club owners said it was a scheme to launder Las Vegas syndicate money. I went to sell advertising to the club owner and he memorably greeted me by saying, "You may be the apple of your mother's eye but you are nothing but a tiny speck of shit to me." After I established that my business partner was best friends in law school with the fiancee of his nephew the dentist and audaciously pitched a full-page ad, he amicably agreed to run a 1/8 page ad every month as long as I never bothered him again.
> because of advances in textual analysis, judges are highly exposed to AI, but they are also highly shielded from displacement because society is currently unlikely to delegate judicial rulings to unsupervised AI.
Unlike judges, software engineers are less likely to be shielded from displacement by AI.
Looks good. There's a new IRB, the interactive Ruby interpreter, with better autocompletion and debugging. Most of the Ruby 3.3 changes will lead to improved developer tooling. The language API is largely unchanged and consistent with previous releases. I wrote a guide [1] for the update to Ruby 3.3, with notes for each of the various version managers.
- differential equations? nah, the solar system is a resonant clock, calculate using hyperdimensionality
- there's a lava lake on Io that vibrates to the precise resonance he predicted
- that pesky pertubation in Mercury's orbit gets resolved with a General Relativity correction
- and pen and paper not needed! though you'll need a microcontroller chip