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IT systems within large enterprises have done wonders to improve the efficiencies, resulting in great cost-savings, yet with unquestioned social effects. In his book Rhodes & His Banker, Richard Steyn narrates the founding and the early years of the bank we now know as Standard Bank. In the mid-1800s, with capital raised in London, theContinue reading "Technology & The Hollowing Middle Class"
The writing site, Substack, has taken the world by storm. At a time when everyone thought blogging and online writing was dead, superseded by YouTube, Substack came along and solved the problems of discovery and monetisation. Their feed and recommendations have allowed many to discover interesting writers that they wouldn’t have ordinarily found out about.Continue reading "Substack vs Africa"
I had an interesting software development problem the other day. I was working on a NodeJS application, doing general maintenance work, which led me down an interesting rabbit hole. I could’ve used an online knowledge tool such as the various LLM-based tools available now. But the grunt of the search was much more useful. ItContinue reading "The Fruitfulness of Grunt Work"
At the time of writing this, the perceived potential for AI based tools for software development is at an all time high. Devin, claims to offer a “fully autonomous AI software engineer”. Other tools like Marblism have less ambitious claims but can still create a working web application that fulfils natural language requirements, giving aContinue reading "What Are Software Developers For"
It’s hard to pinpoint where the cocktail Phakamani’s love, and fear of high places came from. The love may have come from the views he found solace in during his years of sojourn in Cape Town. From the upper campus of UCT, he would take lunch walks to Rhodes Memorial to escape what he consideredContinue reading "Of Mountains and Hills"
More in programming
Exploring diagram.website, I came across The Computer is a Feeling by Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan: the modern internet exerts a tyranny over our imagination. The internet and its commercial power has sculpted the computer-device. It's become the terrain of flat, uniform, common platforms and protocols, not eccentric, local, idiosyncratic ones. Before computers were connected together, they were primarily personal. Once connected, they became primarily social. The purpose of the computer shifted to become social over personal. The triumph of the internet has also impoverished our sense of computers as a tool for private exploration rather than public expression. The pre-network computer has no utility except as a kind of personal notebook, the post-network computer demotes this to a secondary purpose. Smartphones are indisputably the personal computer. And yet, while being so intimately personal, they’re also the largest distribution of behavior-modification devices the world has ever seen. We all willing carry around in our pockets a device whose content is largely designed to modify our behavior and extract our time and money. Making “computer” mean computer-feelings and not computer-devices shifts the boundaries of what is captured by the word. It removes a great many things – smartphones, language models, “social” “media” – from the domain of the computational. It also welcomes a great many things – notebooks, papercraft, diary, kitchen – back into the domain of the computational. I love the feeling of a personal computer, one whose purpose primarily resides in the domain of the individual and secondarily supports the social. It’s part of what I love about the some of the ideas embedded in local-first, which start from the principle of owning and prioritizing what you do on your computer first and foremost, and then secondarily syncing that to other computers for the use of others. Email · Mastodon · Bluesky
I started working on Edna several months ago and I’ve implemented lots of functionality. Edna is a note taking application with super powers. I figured I’ll make a series of posts about all the features I’ve added in last few months. The first is multiple notes. By default we start with 3 notes: scratch inbox daily journal Here’s a note switcher (Ctrl + K): From note switcher you can: quickly find a note by partial name open selected note with Enter or mouse click create new note: enter fully unique note name and Enter or Ctrl + Enter if it partially matches existing note. I learned this trick from Notational Velocity delete note with Ctrl + Delete archive notes with icon on the right star / un-star (add to favorites, remove from favorites) by clicking star icon on the left assign quick access shortcut Alt + <n> You can also rename notes: context menu (right click mouse) and This note / Rename Rename current note in command palette (Ctrl + Shift + K) Use context menu This note sub-menu for note-related commands. Note: I use Windows keyboard bindings. For Mac equivalent, visit https://edna.arslexis.io/help#keyboard-shortcuts
I’ve never published an essay quite like this. I’ve written about my life before, reams of stuff actually, because that’s how I process what I think, but never for public consumption. I’ve been pushing myself to write more lately because my co-authors and I have a whole fucking book to write between now and October. […]
As search gets worse and “working code” gets cheaper, apps get easier to make from scratch than to find.
