You're Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary An Essay by James Somers jsomers.net As if a word were no more than coordinatesAnother mind as alive as yoursA soft and fitful lusterPathosAn affection for words Webster's Dictionary, 1913 Edition languagewriting
A brief foray into vectorial semantics An Article by James Somers jsomers.net One of the best (and easiest) ways to start making sense of a document is to highlight its “important” words, or the words that appear within that document more often than chance would predict. That’s the idea behind Amazon.com’s “Statistically Improbable Phrases”: Amazon.com’s Statistically Improbable Phrases, or “SIPs”, are the most distinctive phrases in the text of books in the Search Inside!™ program. To identify SIPs, our computers scan the text of all books in the Search Inside! program. If they find a phrase that occurs a large number of times in a particular book relative to all Search Inside! books, that phrase is a SIP in that book. mathmeaningwordsnotetakingsearchchance
Learning About Work Ethic From My High School Driving Instructor An Essay by James Somers www.theatlantic.com Should we really demand that the guy who checks ticket stubs at the movie theater hones his craft? Well, yes. No job is too low to not warrant care, because no job exists in isolation. Carelessness ripples. It adds friction to the working of the world. To phone it in or run out the clock, regardless of how alone and impotent you might feel in your work, is to commit an especially tragic—for being so preventable—brand of public sin. Bob [the driving instructor] oozes concern; he wants to infect the state of New Jersey with good driving habits. He respects his public role, the fact that the minute he's done with these kids they head straight for their parents' car keys and out onto the roads we share. When I asked him what he likes to do outside of work, he laughed: "This is my life." His reward is the pleasure of depth itself. craftworkethics
The small web is beautiful An Essay by Ben Hoyt benhoyt.com I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Why aim small?Features and complexitySolving the problem of software bloatRaw size isn't enough Rediscovering the Small Web wwwmicrosites
Why aim small? Why aim small in this era of fast computers with plenty of RAM? A number of reasons, but the ones that are most important to me are: Fewer moving parts. It’s easier to create more robust systems and to fix things when they do go wrong. Small software is faster. Fewer bits to download and clog your computer’s memory. Reduced power consumption. This is important on a “save the planet” scale, but also on the very local scale of increasing the battery life of your phone and laptop. The light, frugal aesthetic. That’s personal, I know, but as you’ll see, I’m not alone. performancesystemsconservation
Features and complexity Niklaus Wirth of Pascal fame wrote a famous paper in 1995 called A Plea for Lean Software. His take is that “a primary cause for the complexity is that software vendors uncritically adopt almost any feature that users want”, and “when a system’s power is measured by the number of its features, quantity becomes more important than quality”. A Plea for Lean SoftwareSpeed is a featureRequirements proliferation featurescomplexity
Solving the problem of software bloat But instead of just complaining, how do we actually solve this problem? Concretely, I think we need to start doing the following: Care about size: this sounds obvious, but things only change when people think they’re important. Measure: both your executable’s size, and your program’s memory usage. You may want to measure over time, and make it a blocking issue if the measurements grow more than x% in a release. Or you could hold a memory-reduction sprint every so often. Language: choose a language that has a chance. Remove: cut down your feature set. Aim for a small number of high-quality features. My car can’t fly or float, and that’s okay – it drives well. Say no to new features: unless they really fit your philosophy, or add more than they cost over the lifetime of your project. Dependencies: understand the size and complexity of each dependency you pull in. Use only built-in libraries if you can.
Raw size isn't enough A few months ago there was a sequence of posts to Hacker News about various “clubs” you could post your small website on: the 1MB Club, 512KB Club, 250KB Club, and even the 10KB Club. I think those are a fun indicator of renewed interested in minimalism, but I will say that raw size isn’t enough – a 2KB site with no real content isn’t much good, and a page with 512KB of very slow JavaScript is worse than a snappy site with 4MB of well-chosen images. ...[Instead, it's about] an “ethos of small”. It’s caring about the users of your site: that your pages download fast, are easy to read, have interesting content, and don’t load scads of JavaScript for Google or Facebook’s trackers. minimalismcontentsize