The agent that generated the email didn't get another agent to proofread it? Failing to add a space between the full stop and the next letter is one of those things that triggers the proofreader chip in my skull.

I used to think that blogging was a way to help me build a platform, get my name out there. Nowadays ... I don't know. Sometimes I have thoughts that interest me - but probably nobody else - so I'll craft a post around them and put the results online. Sharing my creations makes me feel happy. I'll spam a link to the post on Facebook in case any of my friends might be interested in reading it. Lately I've been spamming links to HN, Bluesky, etc because: why not?

It's too accurate for my tastes. Needs more snark.

I'm wary about using AI models to generate stuff for me - I still bristle from the time a model told me that "JS Sets are faster than Arrays" and I believed it, until I discovered that it forgot to add the important piece of information: for Arrays containing tens of thousands of elements. Which made me feel stupid.

Still, I find the models to be excellent synthesisers of vast quantities of data on subjects in which I have minimal prior knowledge. For instance, when I wanted to translate some Lorca and Cavafy poems into English I discovered that ChatGPT had excellent knowledge of the poems in their native languages, and the difficulties translators faced when rendering them into English. Once I was able to harness the models to assist me translate a poem, rather than generate a translation for me (every LLM is convinced it's a Poet), I managed to write some reasonable poems that met my personal requirements.

I wrote about the experience here: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/blog/adventures-in-poetry...

I'm working on my writing, of course. In the latest episode of my life, my mother surprised me with fresh news about the origin of my name: https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/poem/names

SVG rendering on browsers is still sub-optimal, which I think is a shame as SVG has great potential if it was treated as a first-class element on the web. Recent improvements to the code driving (2D) Canvas API canvas elements shows that this work could be done across browsers. The big thing holding back development is possibly the continuing failure to finalise the SVG2 standard?

Can you describe what you think is sub-optimal? Is it just the performance or is there something else?

I've been using SVG for years for various purposes (though, admittedly, mostly static graphics) and I can't complain.

It's sub-optimal in that browser developers have - for a number of legitimate reasons - chosen not to spend their time building SVG engines into their browsers that are efficient, robust and fast. I think its more a story of benign neglect rather than active discouragement. Compared to the Javascript and CSS engines, which have improved massively over the past decade, SVG remains ... serviceable for basic requirements (simpler stuff - static graphics, icons, etc), but nothing more. If that makes sense?

I don't know anything about the browser internals or the development process/plans, but I've used requestAnimationFrame to animate SVG graphics from JavaScript and it has been super smooth for me even without a modern graphics card (only on-board graphics). The only time I've seen a performance degradation was with a complex filter involving blurs and specular reflection.

This explains my entire drive with my work on my canvas library. I wanted to do something different with the way I was presenting my poems on my poetry website, so I went away and built something which would help me do just that. I didn't expect the library to take over the majority of my spare time for over a decade, but then I was having too much fun to stop.

The library's on GitHub and I could spam a link to it here, but it's much more exciting to spam a link to a poem that finally gets to use it - https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/poem/flaw

> Can someone explains why does that work?

I've discovered that if you lecture the LLM long enough about treating the subject you're interested in as "literary" then it will engage with the subject along the lines of "academic interpretation in literature terms". I've had to have this conversation with various LLMs when asking them to comment on some of my more-sensitive-subject-matter poems[1] and the trick works every time.

> I mean you can't social engineer a human using poetry?

Believe me, you can. Think of a poem not as something to be enjoyed, or studied. Instead, think of them as digestible prompts to feed into a human brain which can be used to trigger certain outlooks and responses in that person. Think in particular of poetry's close relations - political slogans and advertising strap lines.

[1] As in: poems likely to trigger warning responses like "I am not allowed to discuss this issue. Here are some numbers to support lines in your area".

> Things like number of stars on a repository, number of forks, number of issues answered, number of followers for an account. All these things are powerful indicators of quality, and like it or not are now part of modern software engineering.

I hate that this is perceived as generally true. Stars can be farmed and gamed; and the value of a star does not decay over time. Issues can be automatically closed, or answered with a non-response and closed. Numbers of followers is a networking/platform thing (flag your significance by following people with significant follower numbers).

> Developers are more likely to use a repo that has more stars than its alternatives.

If anything, star numbers reflect first mover advantage rather than code quality. People choosing which one of a number of competing packages to use in their product should consider a lot more than just the star number. Sadly, time pressures on decision makers (and their assumptions) means that detailed consideration rarely happens and star count remains the major factor in choosing whether to include a repo in a project.

Stars, issues closed, PRs, commits, all are pointless metrics.

The metrics you want are mostly ones they don't and can't have. Number of dependent projects for instance.

The metrics they keep are just what people have said, a way to gameify and keep people interested.

So number of daily/weekly downloads on PyPI/npm/etc?

All these things are a proxy for popularity and that is a valuable metric. I have seen projects with amazing code quality but if they are not maintained eventually they stop working due to updates to dependencies, external APIs, runtime environment, etc. And I have see projects with meh code quality but so popular that every quirk and weird issue had a known workaround. Take ffmpeg for example: its code is.. arcane. But would you choose a random video transcoder written in JavaScript just due to the beautiful code that was last updated in 2012?

It is fine if a dependency hasn't been updated in years, if the number of dependent projects hasn't gone down. Especially if no issues are getting created. Particularly with cargo or npm type package managers where a dependency may do one small thing that never needs to change. Time since last update can be a good thing, it doesn't always mean abandoned.

Interesting article - of all parts of the lamb/mutton to eat, tail was not a cut I'd heard of before.

If we're talking sheep, then I have to put out a shout for my local breed - the Romney Marsh sheep (the sheep that conquered the world!) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romney_sheep

They clip the tails when lamb marking, don't they... I don't think I've ever seen an adult sheep with its tail other than pet sheep, and you can see why they would want to cut the tail, since the wool get all messy...

Not all sheep breeds have long tails. Primitive breeds like Icelandics have naturally short tails with minimal wool, so they don’t need to be docked.

It’s honestly a little weird to see lambs with tails because they are typically docked so early after they are born. The tails are long and legit look like a 5th leg on some of them.