sporritt
Joined 15 years ago
Karma
15
Submissions
21
Member since
Jun 30
Recent submissions
Comment · 18 hours ago
Does anyone know how much work has to go into making one of these products? Are they a very thin veneer over a model? Is there actually a moat here?
Comment · 26 days ago
A friend and I drove from Canberra to Brisbane in a day once - about 1200km. It took maybe 13 hours of driving, with a quick stop in Grafton for dinner. But I'll never forget as we were arriving on the outskirts of Brisbane seeing a sign on the highway listing "Cairns: 1695km". Further again by a third than we had just driven! And not even anywhere near the top of Australia itself. Yes Australia is pretty big.
Comment · 28 days ago
Am I mistaken in thinking that events like the Hugging Face attack are not actually relevant in the context of what he's speaking about in that video? The video is about methods of putting guard rails on agentic development without having to inspect every single line of code. But Hugging Face/Medicare/etc were intrusions: they had nothing to do with writing code. Perhaps I have missed something here though.
Perhaps also I have missed something when I say that although this capability concept seems kind of cool on paper, who's writing the contracts to which the agents must adhere? Will they not just end up writing the contracts for themselves, in the most permissive way, slapping themselves on the back and continuing? It feels like turtles all the way up/down.
Comment · 2 months ago
That article decidedly does _not_ say that the Australian government is going to chart course away from the American war machine. It says there are some members of the labor party (the less right wing of the two main parties) who have finally brought the subject up. Then it says that the foreign minister responded with the standard rhetoric and that nothing will change.
Comment · 4 months ago
That's a real shame. Personally I thought it was a great article and the concept of the stem struck a chord.
The trick with posting this sort of stuff (or finding out someone else posted your stuff) to forums, particularly this one, is to never read the comments. Ignorance really is bliss.
Comment · 1 year ago
It is true that web components can have properties and accessors like any object. But what you cant do is pass anything other than a string to a web component's attributes in the markup. I wrote a short article about this when I was investigating web components with JsPlumb a while ago:
https://jsplumbtoolkit.com/blog/2024/07/18/wrapping-data-in-...
TL;DR I ended up creating a context object and a BaseComponent that can access the context. Subclasses of the base component prefix their attributes with a colon to instruct the code to look in the context:
<date-label :value="now"></date-label>
Comment · 1 year ago
I love to read W.G. Sebald. For several years I'd been on the lookout for a book called The Emigrants by the Swedish author Moberg, but the author's surname had never really stuck in my mind, I just knew about the book.
One day in a bookstore my son pointed out The Emigrants to me, which seemed serendipitous, so I bought it and took it home. Only after getting home did I realise The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald was not the book I'd had on my list all those years.
It turns out that the situation was very serendipitous indeed. Sebald was an amazing writer with a voice all his own, dreamlike and meditative, full of insight. The Emigrants is a story of loss and exile and yet somehow optimistic, or perhaps not; with Sebald it's enjoyably unclear.
I went on to read The Rings of Saturn, which I also enjoyed. The setup for the book is that a man is going to walk around Suffolk for a few days, basically. But it's not about that at all - as the man wanders so does his mind, and the book is basically an endless stream of digressions about any topic that enters his head. He might round a corner and see a church spire, for instance, and then before you know it he's talking about the colonial history of the Congo, which perhaps makes him think of Conrad, and suddenly we're onto the history of the church in Poland, etc etc. He never loses the thread, though. All of the digressions are interesting and insightful and together they all add up to something. Really great author.
Comment · 2 years ago
I've poked at web components on and off over the years and never been satisfied with them, but it was only recently that I took the time to put my finger on what exactly my fundamental problem with them was - I never saw any examples where data was being injected in the way you do when working with React/Vue/etc.
https://jsplumbtoolkit.com/blog/2024/07/18/wrapping-data-in-...
Once I introduced a basic mechanism for injecting data it all seemed to be a lot more useful.
Comment · 3 years ago
>I am awake and aware of this status.
I really enjoy this state, but I find it hard to keep it going for very long. Pretty soon I think about how great it is that I'm not thinking, and it's all over.
Comment · 3 years ago
The point of this article is to steer people away from GoJS. It reads as a dupe of a prior article of theirs:
https://www.jointjs.com/blog/jointjs-vs-gojs
but without any direct references to GoJS.
The emphasis on the foreign object tag in this most recent article ties in with their latest release, in which one of the selling points is the ability to embed HTML elements inside SVG elements. What they fail to mention is that an even more flexible approach, not supported by JointJS, is to render HTML elements as the vertices and embed SVG inside the HTML.
The article does make some valid points but on the whole comes over as slightly disingenuous. "A painful amount of code" has to be written to support a `:hover` class with canvas may be a true statement, but done properly it only has to be written once, and most likely not by the customer of a diagramming library vendor but by the vendor themselves. It's true also that a basic canvas setup "doesn’t preserve clarity when resized" but I've read a few things written by the author of GoJS in which a clear strategy is presented to mitigate the issue. There are many other small points like these peppered throughout.
Regarding accessibility, I have also wondered about this since seeing Google switch over to canvas for docs. It seemed extremely unlikely that they would have done so and abandoned accessibility, and a cursory search shows that they're currently using a 'side DOM', ie. maintaining a DOM that contains only accessibility stuff. This is again not something that a user of a library should expect to have to maintain themselves. You'd expect to add a vertex to some library and for that library to handle the side DOM, using accessibility information that you've provided, and that you would have needed to provide had you used a library that renders to SVG instead.
Comment · 4 years ago
That's a good idea, because no, currently only the node's border color indicates rank, not their position. I could get an even denser data-ink ratio with this...
Comment · 4 years ago
Yahoo Pipes was the direct inspiration for jsPlumb, name and all, back in 2009. We were surprised they hadn't open sourced the UI and decided that somebody should make something like that available. Big fan of Pipes.