2023.10.02 - The purpose of education is to transmit the breath of life to people

Title: 2023.10.02 – The Purpose of Education Is to Transmit the Breath of Life to People

Photoshop & Why TypeScript Won & Belt and Road & Soul Needle Technique

This Week's Highlights

Photoshop is now on the web! https://medium.com/@addyosmani/photoshop-is-now-on-the-web-38d70954365a Enabled by WebAssembly + Emscripten, Web Components + Lit, Service Workers + Workbox & new Web APIs. Chrome & Adobe enjoyed collaborating on it.

The Saga of the Closure Compiler, and Why TypeScript Won https://effectivetypescript.com/2023/09/27/closure-compiler/ Here's something that makes me feel old: in just six months, Gmail will celebrate its 20th anniversary. If you weren't actively developing web sites at the time, it's hard to capture just how revolutionary it was. This was a time when JavaScript was held in almost universally low regard. The idea that you could build a sophisticated web app using it was mind‑boggling. But it clearly worked and it heralded the dawn of the single‑page web app (SPA).

Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem – Polyfills gone rogue https://marvinh.dev/blog/speeding-up-javascript-ecosystem-part-6/ Many popular npm packages depend on 6–8× more packages than they need to. Most of these are unnecessary polyfills and it's one of the key reasons node_modules folders are so large. The ESLint ecosystem seems to be most affected by this.

Questions to Help Your Software Team Create Clarity, Reduce Stress https://spin.atomicobject.com/2023/09/30/questions-create-clarity/ As software consultants, we work with widely varying degrees of direction. Sometimes we pick up well‑defined tasks, like the best, clearest stories in our development backlog or direct requests for information from our clients. Other times, we have to work harder to create the clarity we need to succeed. And it can feel stressful if you’re expecting a high degree of clarity and receive the opposite. I’ve found a few simple questions invaluable in helping my teams work through situations where a high degree of unexpected uncertainty is blocking a task.

Why embracing complexity is the real challenge in software today https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/29/1080282/why-embracing-complexity-is-the-real-challenge-in-software-today/ In the midst of industry discussions about productivity and automation, it’s all too easy to overlook the importance of properly reckoning with complexity.

Deep Reading

Meet Angular’s New Control Flow https://blog.angular.io/meet-angulars-new-control-flow-a02c6eee7843 This November, we’ll release Angular version 17 with a number of new template features, including a new built‑in syntax for control flow and deferrable views. The new declarative control flow brings the functionality of NgIf, NgFor, and NgSwitch into the framework itself, and deferrable views allow templates to load dependencies lazily, in response to one or more configurable trigger conditions.

Why HTTP/3 is eating the world https://blog.apnic.net/2023/09/25/why-http-3-is-eating-the-world/ Last year a new version of the protocol, HTTP/3, was standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the organization in charge of defining Internet technologies. Since then, HTTP/3 and the related QUIC protocol have seen a rapid uptake on the public web. The exact numbers depend on the source and measurement methodology, with HTTP/3 support ranging from 19 % to over 50 % of web servers and networks worldwide.

Why multi‑page apps? https://gomakethings.com/why-multi-page-apps/ There are absolutely use‑cases for SPAs (media sites, primarily). Most of the other things we use them for make the user experience notably worse or band‑aids over the real underlying issues without addressing them.

Best Practices for Developing Complex Form‑Based Apps with React Hook Form and TypeScript Support https://orizens.com/blog/best_practices_for_developing_complex_form-based_apps_with_react_hook_form_and_typescript_support/ In this follow‑up exploration, I’m excited to share the culmination of my experiences and discoveries. We’ll dive into a set of best practices that have proven invaluable when dealing with the challenges of developing extensive form‑based apps using React Hook Form, and we’ll emphasize the added benefits of incorporating TypeScript for enhanced type safety and developer productivity.

My thoughts on Svelte 5 as a full‑time Svelte Developer for 3+ years https://poxi.substack.com/p/my-thoughts-on-svelte-5-as-a-full As a full‑time Svelte user for three years, I've built a real‑time collaborative website builder with 10 000+ users. My solo success wouldn't have been possible without Svelte, and here's my take on the latest sneak peek of Svelte 5.

How GitHub uses GitHub Actions and larger runners to build and test GitHub.com https://github.blog/2023-09-26-how-github-uses-github-actions-and-actions-larger-runners-to-build-and-test-github-com/ Recently, we’ve been working to make our CI experience better by leveraging the newly released GitHub feature, Actions larger runners, to run our CI.

Welcome to the low‑modeling revolution https://modeling-languages.com/welcome-to-the-low-modeling-revolution/ This forces us to define new types of models and languages to be able to express all these requirements and features and new low‑code platforms to be able to transform those models into running code. But this comes with a price: the software models themselves keep growing both in terms of size and in terms of the number of perspectives they need to cover. It is not just static and behavioral aspects. It’s also machine‑learning components, natural‑language interfaces, energy consumption,… and all the relationships among all these models. In what follows, I propose low‑modeling as a solution.

ChatGPT, Bard, or Bing Chat? Differences Among 3 Generative‑AI Bots https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ai-bot-comparison/ Participants rated Bing Chat as less helpful and trustworthy than ChatGPT or Bard. These results can be attributed to Bing’s richer yet imperfect UI and to its poorer information aggregation. Related:

• Mistral 7B: The best 7B model to date, Apache 2.0
• RealFill: Reference‑Driven Generation for Authentic Image Completion
• New Google.org grants to introduce 300,000 students to robotics and AI
• Like Python++ for AI developers

Fresh Picks

Google at 25: By the numbers https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/google-fun-facts-25th-birthday/ https://www.google.com/doodles/googles-25th-birthday These 25 numbers have us excited

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Originally written by Ping Xia (平侠) and published in Chinese on Web技术周刊 (Web Tech Weekly). Translated and adapted for DriftSeas with permission.