Link tags: entropy

Blogging and the heat death of the universe • Robin Rendle

A cautionary tale on why you should keep your dependencies to a minimum and simplify your build process (if you even need one):

If it’s not link rot that gets you then it’s this heat death of the universe problem with entropy setting in slowly over time. And the only way to really defend against it is to build things progressively, to make sure that you’re not tied to one dependency or another. That complex build process? That’s a dependency. Your third party link to some third party font service that depends on their servers running forever? Another dependency.

How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine

Shannon is not exactly a household name. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he wasn’t a celebrity like Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman, either before or after his death in 2001. But more than 70 years ago, in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.

Boring by default

More on battling entropy:

Ever needed to change “just a small thing” on an old page you build years ago? I recently had the pleasure and the simple task of changing some colors in CSS lead to a whole day of me wrangling with old deprecated Grunt tasks and trying to get the build task running.

The solution:

That’s why starting with HTML, CSS and JavaScript without the need to ever compile anything on your local machine is a good idea. Changing some colors on such a page would indeed only take minutes and not a whole day.

I like this mindset:

Be boring by default and enhance on the way.

Cheating Entropy with Native Web Technologies - Jim Nielsen’s Weblog

This post really highlights one of the biggest issues with the convoluted build tools used for “modern” web development. If you return to a project after any length of time, this is what awaits:

I find entropy staring me back in the face: library updates, breaking API changes, refactored mental models, and possible downright obsolescence. An incredible amount of effort will be required to make a simple change, test it, and get it live.

Always bet on HTML:

Take a moment and think about this super power: if you write vanilla HTML, CSS, and JS, all you have to do is put that code in a web browser and it runs. Edit a file, refresh the page, you’ve got a feedback cycle. As soon as you introduce tooling, as soon as you introduce an abstraction not native to the browser, you may have to invent the universe for a feedback cycle.

Maintainability matters—if not for you, then for future you.

The more I author code as it will be run by the browser the easier it will be to maintain that code over time, despite its perceived inferior developer ergonomics (remember, developer experience encompasses both the present and the future, i.e. “how simple are the ergonomics to build this now and maintain it into the future?) I don’t mind typing some extra characters now if it means I don’t have to learn/relearn, setup, configure, integrate, update, maintain, and inevitably troubleshoot a build tool or framework later.

This Video Has {{ viewcount }} Views - YouTube

Tom’s videos are so good! Did you see his excellent in-depth piece on copyright?

This one is all about APIs and the golden age of Web 2.0 when we were free to create mashups.

It pairs nicely with a piece by another Tom from a couple of years back on the joy of Twitterbots.

Is the universe pro-life? The Fermi paradox can help explain — Quartz

Living things are just a better way for nature to dissipate energy and increase the universe’s entropy.

No anthropocentric exceptionalism here; just the laws of thermodynamics.

According to the inevitable life theory, biological systems spontaneously emerge because they more efficiently disperse, or “dissipate” energy, thereby increasing the entropy of the surroundings. In other words, life is thermodynamically favorable.

As a consequence of this fact, something that seems almost magical happens, but there is nothing supernatural about it. When an inanimate system of particles, like a group of atoms, is bombarded with flowing energy (such as concentrated currents of electricity or heat), that system will often self-organize into a more complex configuration—specifically an arrangement that allows the system to more efficiently dissipate the incoming energy, converting it into entropy.

The Elements of UI Engineering - Overreacted

These are good challenges to think about. Almost all of them are user-focused, and there’s a refreshing focus away from reaching for a library:

It’s tempting to read about these problems with a particular view library or a data fetching library in mind as a solution. But I encourage you to pretend that these libraries don’t exist, and read again from that perspective. How would you approach solving these issues?

Twenty Eighteen Preparation: Becoming an Endless Newbie - Airbag Industries

In the past, when I brushed off new advances or updates to technology and processes I preferred to stick with a simple path of “it still works fine,” but in doing so I realize now that I have l lost a lot beginning with the ability to function with current best practices in certain areas of my skill sets and the degradation a few projects, especially Airbag.

A Man in a Hurry: Claude Shannon’s New York Years - IEEE Spectrum

Of course, information existed before Shannon, just as objects had inertia before Newton. But before Shannon, there was precious little sense of information as an idea, a measurable quantity, an object fitted out for hard science. Before Shannon, information was a telegram, a photograph, a paragraph, a song. After Shannon, information was entirely abstracted into bits. The sender no longer mattered, the intent no longer mattered, the medium no longer mattered, not even the meaning mattered: A phone conversation, a snatch of Morse telegraphy, a page from a detective novel were all brought under a common code. Just as geometers subjected a circle in the sand and the disk of the sun to the same laws, and as physicists subjected the sway of a pendulum and the orbits of the planets to the same laws, Claude Shannon made our world possible by getting at the essence of information.

DiceWARE

This is a wonderful service! Handcrafted artisanal passwords made with a tried and trusted technique:

You roll a die 5 times and write down each number. Then you look up the resulting five-digit number in the Diceware dictionary, which contains a numbered list of short words.

That’s the description from the site’s creator, Mira:

Please keep in mind when ordering that I am a full-time sixth grade student with a lot of homework.

She’s the daughter of Julia Angwin, author of Dragnet Nation.

Is Dark Matter Hiding Aliens?

Here’s a fun cosmic hypothesis on the scale of an Olaf Stapeldon story. There are even implications for data storage:

By storing its essential data in photons, life could give itself a distributed backup system. And it could go further, manipulating new photons emitted by stars to dictate how they interact with matter. Fronts of electromagnetic radiation could be reaching across the cosmos to set in motion chains of interstellar or planetary chemistry with exquisite timing, exploiting wave interference and excitation energies in atoms and molecules.

Dark Archives in Contents Magazine

A really lovely piece on the repositories of information that aren’t catalogued—a fourth quadrant in the Rumsfeldian taxonomy, these dark archives are the unknown knowns.