Links, July 2023

AI

• SDXL – A settings guide by Replicate - most important AI link this month, how to generate cats real good
• Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon
• AI Research Blog - The Transformer Blueprint: A Holistic Guide to the Transformer Neural Network Architecture
• How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide
• The Next Token of Progress: 4 Unlocks on the Generative AI Horizon | Andreessen Horowitz
• So you want to build your own open source ChatGPT-style chatbot… - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog

Front-End

• Creating a flexible design token taxonomy for Intuit’s Design System | by Nate Baldwin | Jun, 2023 | Medium
• Writing CSS In 2023: Is It Any Different Than A Few Years Ago? — Smashing Magazine - There really has been a watershed moment in the past few years, and CSS features have been popping up left and right.
• New Viewport Units
• Position Driven Styles
• TypeScript and the dawn of gradual types
• ffmprovisr and Activities and Exercises - ffmpeg-artschool - once upon a time I dreamed of doing things with film and video. In retrospect it was a brief couple of years, but one of the things that I did not learn in film school was how to manipulate digital video outside of editing software. Luckily, I got to work on a project in the early days of Quick Left that touched ffmpeg, and I’ve been a casual user of it ever since. Both of these links are interesting. The first is what you always want to have when using a dauntingly complex CLI like ffmpeg. The second link is mad science.

Cozy Web

• Programmable Notes
• Work with the garage door up
• How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
• Multi-layered calendars « julian.digital
• Sierra Creative Interpreter – Scripts
• Joins 13 Ways
• The feeling of something waiting there for you and;
  • Lit up like a sparkler - This is the first time that a tab is intentionally leaking from one month to the next. This set of links is just too good.

Books

• How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City | The New Yorker - I caved and upgraded my Apple account to bundle several separate accounts into a single bill, with the added benefit of Apple News+. I didn’t realize that came with a large selections of free magazines like The New Yorker. I was a subscriber for several years but the print issues pile up quickly. This is a profile of a new-to-me author, Samuel R. Delany. I picked up Dhalgren and am reading it now.
• ‘The Overflowing Brain’ by Torkel Klingberg
• Digression 1 - PRECISION: How America Made Machines Make Machines - First Draft | Books in Progress

Tech Misc.

• Building personal and organizational prestige | Irrational Exuberance
• Sentry Engineering
• Framework-defined infrastructure
• How Snowflake builds product - by Lenny Rachitsky
• Team Topologies
• Regex engine internals as a library - Andrew Gallant’s Blog
• Fast · Patrick Collison
• Welcome to The Net: every webpage from the 1995 movie The Net - Trivia Happy
• The Internet Tidal Wave