Damian’s notes

AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model. Editorial from 404 Media arguing that journalism not written by humans is not worth the e it is printed on.

Strunk & White’s classic style guide has changed its recommendations a little over the decades, including on the question of whether ‘junior’ used to differentiate two people with the same name is part of their name or is a parenthetical (William Strunk Jr versus WIlliam Strunk, jr).

As a programmer, I am often required to tell higher-ups that their suggestion of first-name, last-name fields is not a good way to store names of arbitrary humans. Patrick McKenzie (patio11) wrote a useful essay elaborating on this called Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, which I think is good and useful—though not to be taken without some interpretation.

Please do not title your own listicle Falsehoods Programmers Believe About X. Reserve that prefix for this essay and invent your own snappy title.

On July 13th 2005, Jacob Kaplan-Moss made the first commit to the public repository that would become Django. This is being celebrated at various events during the year. While awaiting an event near you, here is Simon Willison’s talk on Django’s origins from 2015.

Parsing MIDI messages in Rust (Nicole Tietz-Sokolskaya). The venerable MIDI protocol is a beautifully simple way to control muscial instruments. This article breaks down what MIDI is, why it’s cool, and how you might go about processing MIDI content in the programming language Rust.

The design process for the typeface Gosh by Kyle Benson

Soundslice make a scanner for sheet music. They found they had support calls for a feature they did not have—scanning ASCII tablature, a notation used to writing guitar and drum tablatures online. And it seems people were trying to use this nonexistent feature because ChatGPT was telling them to. So they implemented an ASCII tab importer and now owe ChatGPT for requirement discovery?

Speaking of dates and times, here is a superb example of overengineering turning in to something like an art project: the Precision Clock Mark IV shows an ISO timestamp with millisecond resolution and with sufficient frame rate to not flicker even when filmed at 10,000 fps. And because it is so long, it is designed to fold in half to make a 2-line display.

The long history of dates and times means programming involving timestamps, events, and especially schedules is fraught with complications that non-programmers will not be aware of. Zach Holman wrote a pretty comprehensive and surprisingly pretty introduction to the nightmare that is dates and times in code in 2018.