busybee fluffy rambles

Seeing this post made me think I should also list my computers and their purposes/vague specs. Because I’m that kind of a nerd.

What counts as a “computer” for this list is subjective. I’m not including pure video game consoles (I’d be here all day if I did) or phones (big same) but I am including things like tablets, but only ones which feel computer-y, if that makes any sense (like, no Android tablets, and I’m leaving off an ancient iPad named fluffysaurus).

Sadly I don’t have any proper vintage computing stuff anymore (unless you count a couple of neat old PDAs, anyway).

November 4, 2024: Updated some things

November 29, 2024: Updated more things

The tech world is abuzz with the announcement of the Rabbit R1, a little handheld AI assistant thing that has an interesting goal.

The tl;dr is that it’s a ChatGPT model that will run little AI agents (called “rabbits”) on your behalf to make complex API requests for you. I actually think it’s a pretty cool idea and one of the few things that I don’t hate about the modern AI push (ethics of ChatGPT aside, of course).

At $200 for the hardware it’s obvious that the LLM is running in the cloud somewhere, and it’s not like the other stuff wouldn’t also require cloud to operate anyway, though, and that raises the one big question I have about it: who foots the bill for the actual backend services? Because at $200 it’s probably being sold at-cost or for a small profit, and operating the necessary cloud services ain’t free.

“Are you frontend, backend, or full-stack?”

I really hate this question, for so many reasons.

First of all, it presupposes that there’s only two sorts of things that are done in software anymore: either you’re making websites (frontend) or services called by them (backend), or you’re someone who does both, but still using the frontend/backend dichotomy.

There are so many other kinds of software out there. Not all the world is Building Websites. Just off the top of my head there’s the extremely broad categories of graphics, platform, audio, gameplay, automation, embedded, infrastructure, distributed systems, and so much more.

Even in today’s dystopian push towards blockchain and machine learning, what kinds of engineer works on the underlying systems there? It’s neither backend nor frontend.

Two days ago, Google breathlessly announced this amazing new revolution for websites:

🎉 🥳 amp-script, a component enabling custom JavaScript on AMP pages, is now available for general use!

We can’t wait to see what you do with it!🤯https://t.co/aXxvHfNfX3

— AMP Project (@AMPhtml) August 21, 2019

Or in other words:

Let’s make a limited subset of the web that guarantees performance! No JavaScript, to keep it lean!

(Two weeks later)

So about that JavaScript thing…