Undergrads

An excellent documentary on the genesis of BASIC (with just a touch of chest-thumping on the part of Dartmouth College).

Is anyone reading the literature?

Joseph Weizenbaum didn't expect his secretary to take ELIZA so seriously, either. Sheesh. "The new Bing & Edge – Learning from our first week."

One area where we are learning a new use-case for chat is how people are using it as a tool for more general discovery of the world, and for social entertainment. This is a great example of where new technology is finding product-market-fit for something we didn’t fully envision.

Arena.js

Oh, dear sweet Fox, yes (see JavaScript file browser, below).

End of the sprint

Friday I retired, after eight great years at NPR. According to Matt Welsh, not a moment too soon. I hope I haven't left any howlers like this one behind, although the clunky JavaScript-only file browser that I built as my first project for NPR has resisted refactoring for 14 years.

Mini-rant

Looking forward to the day when I no longer hear, without definition, the phrase "on prem." Ugly, jargony, and unecessarily obscure.