A few months ago I was thinking again about Pavel Panchenka’s (LLM-assisted) “We’d be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes”, which posits that standardizing on nine-bit bytes would have saved us from a number of encodings running out of space while not having much of a downside. They’re even historically plausible given the PDP machines from DEC with 18-bit and 36-bit words. But what would the impact have been on small systems, those that got the most out of every byte, if not necessarily every bit?
YAML is (not) my preferred configuration format
Sometimes you have configuration files or simple data files that you want to maintain by hand, in a text editor. There are dozen of reusable formats for this, but only a few of them really support hierarchical entries. You can argue that configuration files should stay relatively flat, but if you eventually run into a situation where you need hierarchy, you’ll be unhappy not to have it.
What's in a Button?
A while back I posted this spicily-phrased take:
I appreciate that someone else understands that being a GUI has some basic requirements and “draws to the screen” is not the interesting one. The bar is about 20cm off the floor but everyone forgets to jump.
Despite mostly not working on GUIs in my career, I have strong opinions about consistency and about affordances for beginners and power users alike. So today, let’s take a simple case study: a button.
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