2023.12.11 - Simplicity

Title: 2023.12.11 – Simplicity

Gemini & Web of Things 1.1 & 孩子要管 & 治病养生心得

This Week’s Highlights

Simplicity https://commandcenter.blogspot.com/2023/12/simplicity.html
In May 2009, Google hosted an internal “Design Wizardry” panel, with talks by Jeff Dean, Mike Burrows, Paul Haahr, Alfred Spector, Bill Coughran, and myself. Here is a lightly edited transcript of my talk. Some of the details have aged out, but the themes live on, now perhaps more than ever. Simplicity is better than complexity.

Three Decades of HTML https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2023/12/06/three-decades-of-html/
A few days ago marked the 30th anniversary of the first time I wrote an HTML document. Back in 1993, I took a Usenet posting of the “Incomplete Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode Guide” and marked it up. You can see the archived copy here on Meyerweb. At some point the markup was updated for reasons I don’t remember, but I can guarantee the original had uppercase tag names and I didn’t close any paragraphs.

Rethinking Serverless with FLAME https://fly.io/blog/rethinking-serverless-with-flame/
The pursuit of elastic, auto‑scaling applications has taken us to silly places. Serverless/FaaS had a couple of things going for it. Elastic Scale™ is hard. It’s even harder when you need to manage those pesky servers. It also promised pay‑what‑you‑use costs to avoid idle usage. Good stuff, right?

Upgrading GitHub.com to MySQL 8.0 https://github.blog/2023-12-07-upgrading-github-com-to-mysql-8-0/
GitHub uses MySQL to store vast amounts of relational data. This is the story of how we seamlessly upgraded our production fleet to MySQL 8.0.

Welcome to the Gemini era: Unlocking new ways to help you build and scale with AI https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini/#introduction https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-gemini-ai/
Now we’re taking the next step on our journey with Gemini, our most capable and general model yet, with state‑of‑the‑art performance across many leading benchmarks. Our first version, Gemini 1.0, is optimized for three sizes: Ultra, Pro, and Nano. These are the first models of the Gemini era and the first realization of the vision we had when we formed Google DeepMind earlier this year. This new era of models represents one of the biggest science and engineering efforts we’ve undertaken as a company. I’m genuinely excited for what’s ahead, and for the opportunities Gemini will unlock for people everywhere. Related:

• Are LLMs the end of computer programming (as we know it)?
• LLM Visualization
• Announcing Purple Llama: Towards open trust and safety in the new world of generative AI
• From Image to UML: First Results of Image‑Based Class Diagram Generation Using LLMs
• 最新上线的 AI 助手网站 —— 鱼聪明 AI
• How we’re experimenting with LLMs to evolve GitHub Copilot

In‑Depth Reading

Getting Started with React Native Skia https://shopify.engineering/getting-started-with-react-native-skia
Skia is a cross‑platform 2D graphics library that provides a set of drawing primitives which run on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux, and the browser. Over the past two years, Shopify Engineering has sponsored development of the @shopify/react-native-skia library that exposes Skia functionality to React Native.

You are never taught how to build quality software https://www.florianbellmann.com/blog/never-taught-qa
Have you ever been on a software project that is missing vital quality‑assurance measures? You are not alone. This happens to a mind‑blowing number of companies and projects. Even if they know there’s this thing called QA and that they should do it, all effort typically collapses into a big QA sprint right before release—stressful times that only make the software barely work. Of course the same chaos repeats in the next release cycle. No improvements.

Building end‑to‑end security for Messenger https://engineering.fb.com/2023/12/06/security/building-end-to-end-security-for-messenger/
Today we’re announcing that we’ve begun to upgrade people’s personal conversations on Messenger to use E2EE by default. Our aim is to ensure that everyone’s personal messages on Messenger can only be accessed by the sender and the intended recipients, and that everyone can be sure the messages they receive are from an authentic sender.

DiffDebugging https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DiffDebugging.html
Regression bugs are newly appeared bugs in features of software that have been around for a while. When hunting them, it’s usually valuable to figure out which change caused them to appear. Looking at that change can give invaluable clues about where the bug is and how to squash it. There isn’t a well‑known term for this form of investigation, but I call it Diff Debugging.

Self‑hosted, not self‑managed https://medium.com/gitpod/self-hosted-not-self-managed-fe384ca7a9ee
In December 2022 we discontinued our self‑managed offering. After three years of trying to make it work we realized that CDE platforms benefit from not being self‑managed. While they can be self‑hosted, self‑management makes them less effective and more costly. In this article I’ll explain why self‑managed CDEs do not offer the experience we wanted to provide to our customers—and what an alternative can look like.

Big Ideas in Tech for 2024 https://a16z.com/big-ideas-in-tech-2024/
Smart energy grids. Voice‑first companion apps. Programmable medicines. AI tools for kids. We asked over 40 partners across a16z to preview one big idea they believe will drive innovation in 2024.

Fresh Finds

• W3C Web of Things 1.1 specifications are W3C Recommendations
• React Native 0.73 – Debugging Improvements, Stable Symlink Support, and more
• Baseline’s evolution on MDN
• Maglev – V8’s Fastest Optimizing JIT
• Astro 4.0: The web framework for content‑driven websites
• Design2Code: Convert any web design screenshot to clean HTML/CSS code
• Introducing StyleX
• Redux Toolkit v2.0
• Simulate 3D plants in the browser
• rqlite 8.0 – Large Dataset Support and Core Feature Upgrades

Products & Others

2024 Instagram Trend Talk https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/instagram-trend-talk

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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.