Jason Lee, on JReleaser
A release to Maven Central used to cost more than the code being released. Jason Lee's JReleaser walkthrough shows what replaced that process: one Maven profile, one command.
Latest Dispatches
Am I better because of AI?
A recent discussion on how AI was used effectively made me wonder what "effective" or "better" meant, because there's no way to test the alternative any more to compare. I still don't know how to characterize my own results, but I think it makes me better because it gives me a chance to work out who I am and what I mean to say, but not really how to say it.
Because It's Not Fun Enough
Andrew Oram asked why programming languages rise and fall, and quoted the answer without noticing. Programming is a vocation, an art, and a job. Make any of those harder than they need to be, and your language survives exactly as long as it can't be replaced.
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The Floor and the Multiplier
Sean Goedecke argues that domain expertise is the real prompting skill. He's describing two quantities as one: a floor, available to anyone who can describe what acceptance looks like, and a gain that multiplies whatever you bring.
Xberg 1.0 released: document extraction for a world of tooling
Xberg 1.0 has been released. Xberg is a document extraction engine, describing itself as a "document intelligence framework." It's written in Rust, with fifteen generated language bindings, and a very descriptive data model that provides a *lot* of flexibility.
Identifying the Actors: What a Byline Actually Certifies
There's no standard for marking AI contribution, and there can't be, because contribution isn't a scalar. What readers actually want is attestation, and that's what a byline always was. The question was never whether a machine touched the text. It's whether anyone was behind the controls.
Bjarnason: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity
Baldur Bjarnason argues that development tools win by making developers replaceable. The JVM ran that experiment three times, against Visual Basic's precedent, through EJB's committee, and into Spring's reversal, and the results say his theory is exactly half of a whole.
Pong Wars on the Commodore 64
Imran Nazar recreated a JavaScript animation demo on 1982 hardware and wrote up every decision along the way: 6510 assembler, fixed-point math with no floating point available, a CPU bug turned into a cosine lookup. When he lands at 30fps, he can tell you exactly why without running it. It's very cool.
Primate.Run: Who Owns the Seams?
An essay from the creator of Primate argues that the JavaScript ecosystem traded cohesion for composition and has been paying for the seams ever since. The diagnosis reaches well past JavaScript: Java's own graveyard of JSF and GWT proves the seam problem is universal, and WebAssembly is about to make the question unavoidable for everyone.