Weeknotes 2023.48

The Sam Altman and OpenAI drama came to an undramatic conclusion. Still it leaves us with questions, mainly what the heck triggered the whole thing. So far, I have only seen speculation. I think it would be in the best interest of OpenAI and their partners to be a little more transparent about it. Until then, we have rumours and predictions of the upcoming doomsday.

I’ve seen enough C++ code recently that I decided to have a general refresher just to be able to contribute code patches. It’s been a while.

Also, it’s nice to see conferences again, even if the “To watch” queue is bursting. We’ve lost some great conferences, quite a few held their last ever this year, which is a shame, but also understandable.

Finally, I noticed how soothing branding and design work is to me. I hope it will be noticeable in the result.

Changelog

• OK Colour (working title): some prior art research. There is so much good work out there by people much more knowledgable than myself that I’m often asking myself “Why am I doing this?”, but then I’m still left with missing pieces to the puzzle.

Links

AI

• An AI did shady things. If you know how those GPT models learn, you’re not surprised at all. Some of the worst outcomes so far are perfect mirrors on humanity 😄

Design

November seems to be typography month. I’m not complaining, I see it as a belated birthday present.

• My favourite typeface Inter has had a major new release v4.0 and it’s amazing. The changes are so vast that I didn’t dare switching them out for websites just yet. I’m currently exploring all the awesomeness in Figma. The true italic is both amazing and controversial (judging by the discussions on GitHub and the initial reaction I had). Now it has even more options to give it a more personal character. You can customise it to basically every geometric neo-grotesque you like. I use a DIN1451-ish configuration for my site, except for headlines and special text where I use a few different OpenType variants, but it’s still the same typeface.
• During the start of a small branding project, I came across another great typeface, released in 2019, by pure chance. Lexend is designed with reading comprehension in mind. It has finally reached the wider educational space that techniques to counter dyslexia have a positive impact on nearly everyone’s reading comprehension. Bonus points if it yields an elegant typeface that Quadillaq¹, sorry Cadillac, could use for their branded material. (No my branding project has nothing to do with Cadillac)
• Bento Boxes are the new design trend and you see tutorials and tools left right and center to create them as images and even website layouts Especially in the latter case, they are sometimes called Bento Grids or Bento UI. The backlash from the design world has already started as well. I think it’s a functional and pleasing way to show grouped information. Since it’s often used to showcase headlining features, I fear some people will see a “prioritisation via Bento” in their projects.

Programming

• DuckDB seems to get more and more traction with articles urging people to try it. I once was one of those who dismissed SQL in favour of more idiomatic wrappers native to the language I was using. I have yet to see non-trivial projects that do not fall back to raw SQL queries at some point, mostly because of optimisation purposes. Back to DuckDB, I can only reiterate all those recommendations. Between DuckDB, SQLite, PostgreSQL and FoundationDB, to name but a few, the future looks bright for data nerds and I ❤️ it.
• Most will probably never get exposed to MLIR, but everyone interested in programming languages and compiler infrastructure will find it highly interesting. It’s an IR layer on top of LLVM-IR that allows for optimisations on a higher level, closer to language constructs, i.e. it could replace SIL and MIR, the IRs specific to Swift and Rust respectively, which in turn would allow those communities to improve their tooling together. Apparently it’s also the mojo behind Mojo. Yizhou Shan has written an excellent primer.

Blockchain

Binance is the next high profile cryptocurrency-related company with criminal senior management. Financial Times has a nice summary of who has been convicted, who is in the cross-hairs and who is still standing. Friendly reminder that fraud will find a way, if it is motivated enough. Yes, I’m sceptical about cryptocurrencies, because neither their protocols (or more generally, their technical implementation), nor their communities have been successful in the regulation and oversight that apparently is needed for every currency. Whether you like central authorities or not, they are a good last measure and easier to monitor.