Saturday 11th June, 2022 - Due diligence

Another week of great javascript, tech and web development links

Jun 11

Hello and welcome to my newsletter!

Another season 2 instalment…

The Substack web UI isn’t allowing me to create links for some reason. The popup window never appears on the screen after clicking the add link button. So unfortunately I’ve had to include the full link each time. Hopefully that will get resolved by the next issue.

I wrote a few new blog posts yesterday evening, trying to shake some narly writers block so bear with me:

The Big Tech Sandwich https://blog.markjgsmith.com/2022/06/10/the-big-tech-sandwich.html
OS Progressive Enhancement https://blog.markjgsmith.com/2022/06/10/os-progressive-enhancement.html
The HTML5 Phone https://blog.markjgsmith.com/2022/06/10/the-html5-phone.html

There haven’t been any major new topics that have arisen this past week. Though there was Apple’s world wide developer conference (WWDC), and there’s a bunch of new developments in that space which look interesting, nothing Earth shattering, but it feels like solid progress.

I’ve noticed a bit of a backlash against Elon Musk around how he’s handling the Twitter purchase. It’s noticeable across different online circles, but I’m not convinced by any of it. Lots of mentions (and misuse) of the term “due diligence”, some clear conflicts of interest lurking in the shadows in many cases, hello lawyers and consultants. I think people are just sort of bored of it and want to see the acquisition done already. Me too, but I don’t think you can fault Elon for not wanting to buy a house with 90% termites, when they said it was 5% termites. An example of the world’s favourite pastime: slow down, but also, hurry up!

I’ve seen quantum computing mentioned a few more times than usual. I don’t completely grasp how this new paradigm is in any way useful for calculations. However I was wondering why they don’t use entanglement to transmit data faster. According to science, the entangled parts can be separated by large distances, yet the disturbance of one part causes a near instantaneous disturbance in the entangled counter part. Well why not just setup 8 entangled qubits, separate them, then play them like a piano, very quickly, that’s basically wireless computer networking. I guess there’s probably some reason they don’t do that. Anyway the UK government bought a quantum computer this week. I guess it doesn’t run NodeJS yet.

Prince William selling Big Issue in London, only days after the Jubilee. It’s good to see the future monarch draw attention to the difficulties homeless people face, hopefully this will have a positive effect on how young people view homelessness. In many parts of the world the homeless are systematically disenfranchised, abused, exploited and blocked, and it’s not clear to me that technology will make this any better. Yet it’s a situation that could happen to anybody. All it takes is a relationship that goes bad, a change in the economy, an unexpected pandemic…

I’m going to keep this week’s intro short, feels nice to have this week’s issue done early for once.

Podcasts

What is Platform Democracy? (Techdirt Podcast) - Interesting discussion in this era of content moderation, web3, DOAs and re-designing of governance

The Humble Heroics of Four of WWII’s Most Decorated Heroes (Art of Manliness Podcast) - Why treating war heroes (from any country), and perhaps any person, as superhuman is really a shitty thing to do https://the-art-of-manliness.simplecast.com/episodes/the-humble-heroics-of-four-of-wwiis-most-decorated-soldiers-_SvDBTcj
WWDC 2022 - Mon 06/06 (Techmeme Ride Home Podcast) - Covers most of the announcements from this years event, a lot of interesting new apple things https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9yc3MuYXJ0MTkuY29tL3RlY2htZW1lLXJpZGVob21l/episode/Z2lkOi8vYXJ0MTktZXBpc29kZS1sb2NhdG9yL1YwL3U3V0FFdDYzZm1XYm83cTNELTMwVFc1Z3Z2QkFPQTl5NGQxNTJucmprVU0?sa=X&ved=0CAUQkfYCahcKEwjoja3H_6H4AhUAAAAAHQAAAAAQBQ
Building MPAs that are as Fast as SPAs Ep #86 (Vanilla Javascript Podcast) - Some great multi-page-app tips including rendering static files, inlining JS & CSS, optimising dependency size to match HTTP packet size, and leaning on service workers for caching files locally https://vanillajspodcast.com/building-mpas-that-are-as-fast-as-spas
How Freedom of the Press Works (Stuff You Should Know Podcast) - They do a great job of looking at the topic, the core ideas and especially for pointing out many of the reasons the US is currently only ranking at #44 (geez what a number), in the modern world, where everyone can publish, there is a contradiction that people will have to deal with somehow, freedom and not freedom at the same time, when people use their freedom to silence others https://omny.fm/shows/stuff-you-should-know-1/2022-06-07-sysk-freedom-of-press-final

Links

util.parseArgs - New arg parsing module in node core, way better than just interacting directly with process.argv https://nodejs.org/api/util.html#utilparseargsconfig
Researchers Achieve ‘Absurdly Fast’ Algorithm for Network Flow https://www.quantamagazine.org/researchers-achieve-absurdly-fast-algorithm-for-network-flow-20220608
New WebKit features in Safari 16 Beta https://webkit.org/blog/12824/news-from-wwdc-webkit-features-in-safari-16-beta
Meet Web Push - Hoping it doesn’t take too long to get this feature into iOS Safari, also hoping Github will implement push notifications that get delivered on workflow action completion, that would be awesome https://webkit.org/blog/12945/meet-web-push
Synchronize audio and video playback on the web https://web.dev/audio-output-latency
Inlining literally everything for better performance (Chris Ferdinandi) - A must read! https://gomakethings.com/inlining-literally-everything-for-better-performance
James Webb Space Telescope hit by tiny meteoroid https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61744257
Ministry of Defence (UK) acquires government's first quantum computer https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-61647134
What We Train Our Brains For - Because of the nature of web development, we have a tendency to concentrate on the negative, trying to anticipate all the possible failure modes, worth being aware of, and worth taking the time to actively be more positive and optimistic