Link tags: logic

Why aren’t logical properties taking over everything? - Chris Coyier

Good question.

I think it’s mostly inertia.

A long-term plan for logical properties? | Miriam Eric Suzanne

Well, now I’m really glad I wrote that post about logical properties!

We’re not there yet. So how do we get there?

Well, I don’t know for sure – but articles like this are very helpful as we try to work it out!

Operator Lookup - Search JavaScript operators · Josh W Comeau

Operators in JavaScript—handy! I didn’t know about most of these.

Global CSS options with custom properties | @mdo

This is clever—using custom properties to enable if/else logic in CSS.

Living in Alan Turing’s Future | The New Yorker

Portrait of the genius as a young man.

It is fortifying to remember that the very idea of artificial intelligence was conceived by one of the more unquantifiably original minds of the twentieth century. It is hard to imagine a computer being able to do what Alan Turing did.

Turing Tumble - Build Marble-Powered Computers

Boolean logic manifested in a Turing-complete game

Is CSS Turing Complete? | Lara Schenck

This starts as a good bit of computer science nerdery, that kind of answers the question in the title:

Alone, CSS is not Turing complete. CSS plus HTML plus user input is Turing complete!

And so the takeaway here is bigger than just speculation about Turing completeness:

Given that CSS is a domain-specific language for styling user interface, this makes a lot of sense! CSS + HTML + Human = Turing complete.

At the end of that day, as CSS developers that is the language we really write. CSS is incomplete without HTML, and a styled interface is incomplete without a human to use it.

Stuffing the Front End

53% of mobile visits leave a page that takes longer than 3 seconds to load. That means that a large number of visitors probably abandoned these sites because they were staring at a blank screen for 3 seconds, said “fuck it,” and left approximately half way before the page showed up. The fact that the next page interaction would have been quicker—assuming all the JS files even downloaded correctly in the first attempt—doesn’t amount to much if they didn’t stick around for the first page to load. What was gained by putting the business logic in the front end in this scenario?

CSS-only multiple choice quizzing - Matthew Somerville

In which Matthew disects a multiple choice quiz that uses CSS to do some clever logic, using the :checked pseudo-class and counter-increment.

Oh, and this is how he realised it wasn’t using JavaScript:

I have JavaScript disabled on my phone because a) it cuts out most of the ads, b) it cuts out lots of bandwidth and I have a limited data plan, and c) my battery lasts longer because it’s not processing tons of code to show me some text (cough, Medium).

Stacking the Bricks: How the Blog Broke the Web

The title is quite clickbaity, but this is a rather wonderful retelling of web history on how Content Management Systems may have stifled a lot of the web’s early creativity.

Also, there’s this provocation: we like to rail against algorithmic sorting …but what if the reverse-chronological feed was itself the first algorithm?

Swimming in Complexity – James Box at UX Brighton 2017 - YouTube

Boxman’s talk about complexity, reasoning, philosophy, and design is soooo good!

Developer Fallacies | HeydonWorks

Some of the explanations get a little ranty, but Heydon’s collection of observed fallacies rings true:

• The gospel fallacy
• The Luddite fallacy
• The scale fallacy
• The chocolate fireguard fallacy
• The pull request fallacy
• The ‘made at Facebook’ fallacy
• The Bob the Builder fallacy
• The real world fallacy
• The Daphne and Celeste fallacy

I’ve definitely had the Luddite fallacy and the scale fallacy thrown in my face as QEDs.

The ‘made at Facebook’ fallacy is pretty much identical to what I’ve been calling the fallacy of assumed competency: copying something that large corporation X is doing just because large corporation X is doing it.

Meet Walter Pitts, the Homeless Genius Who Revolutionized Artificial Intelligence

The fascinating story of logic, learning, and the origins of electronic computing. Russell, Shannon, Turing, Wiener, Von Neumann …they’re all in there, woven around the tragic figure of Walter Pitts.

It is a sad and beautiful world.

Thanks to their work, there was a moment in history when neuroscience, psychiatry, computer science, mathematical logic, and artificial intelligence were all one thing, following an idea first glimpsed by Leibniz—that man, machine, number, and mind all use information as a universal currency. What appeared on the surface to be very different ingredients of the world—hunks of metal, lumps of gray matter, scratches of ink on a page—were profoundly interchangeable.

Tapeworm logic by Charles Stross

The Fermi paradox as applied to tapeworms.

‘Sfunny; just yesterday I was revisiting this classic tapeworm tale on Fray.

How Not To Sort By Average Rating

I don’t understand the maths, but the logic is fascinating.

Venn Diagrams as UI Tools « optional.is/required

A very in-depth article on visually representing Boolean logic in an interface. Stick with it; it's worth it.

Microformats Bookmarklet › Left Logic

Have I told you lately how much I love this microformats bookmarklet? Yes? Well, I'm telling you again.

Sillyness Spelled Wrong Intentionally » Lifestream, ala WordPress

Chris J. Davis has turned my life stream thingy into a plug-in for Wordpress. Nice!

Cork'd

From Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin: a lovely looking piece of social software all about wine. I've been trying it in pre-release and it's really, really nice. This is my kind of website.