The plant disease identification/management handbook by Balaji Aglave is excellent for popular plants. A lot of modern handbooks are fluffy with information (maybe that’s popular) but this one gets straight to the point — I was very lucky to come across this book a while back.

One aspect of blogging that I don’t like is the unpredictability of an audience’s impressionability. Many people out there read/watch jokes/spam/falsities/uncertainties with utmost confidence — seen it countless times.

Presenting info in a way that prioritizes “critical thinking/reasoning” over an “oracle of truth” is actually hard. I’m almost out of my 20’s and seeing irl reactions to stuff online makes it seem like I’m still in high school — moreso now than ever before. The money gets made somehow :-)

Messing around with a statically generated site can easily lead into a web/browser spec rabbit hole. And… that’s when I remember exactly why everything ends up written outside the browser’s framework into a js framework. I think Firefox is still the only browser that allows easily setting image fallback styling completely with just CSS?

Hyperscript Tagged Markup (htm) is pretty good. It uses tagged templates.

This AI stuff is kinda exciting.. in a “watching danger from afar” kind of way. What kind of feedback loop does it have? Does it finish off the Internet content–wise? The data has to be huge and ultra fuzzy — so someone has to add semantics/structure right or is it automatic? The Internet is already gamified to an extent… but can it completely auto–generate videos? What kind of exploits will be used against the input? So many questions. It’s like the ultimate frankenstein pandora’s box thought experiment of the most bizarre outcomes :-)

In the end my blog here ended up as a public note taking system — oh well. It’s kinda prickly though because I’m linking out in most posts and don’t have a workflow for auto–archiving the destinations yet. Chances are that when I return to older posts links inside will be dead. Archive.org isn’t infallible – ya better locally archive anything remotely interesting. Y2Z/monolith is good at creating self–contained web pages.

I’ve got a few repositories on Codeberg and following their blog is pretty fun. The recent post on scaling tickles my risk–averse sensibilities. It’s relatively easy to make/stand–up anything but scaling is mostly uncharted territory. The scale at which the biggest companies operate essentially guarantees HUGE and unique interconnected systems that are mind–bogglingly convoluted and complex.

The threat of AI to search says more about search than it does about AI.

My static micro blog experiment is going better than expected. Generation is still around 25 seconds hot on my old laptop as like the last time. Well.. sneakily it’s closer to a semi–constant 5~10 seconds by tricking hugo into outputting empty base templates which “can” result in mostly reads by writing files that have changed (might make a blog post about this).

$ hugo
                   |  EN   
-------------------+-------
  Pages            | 1728  
  Paginator pages  |  662  
  Non-page files   |   13  
  Static files     |  430  
  Processed images |  572  
  Aliases          |   76  
  Sitemaps         |    1  
  Cleaned          |    0  

Total in 26010 ms

The Enhance Framework looks compelling. Personally, web components and more particularly the shadow DOM are not very appealing but… the template structure looks clean for drawing up components/layouts super fast while still being primitive enough to not lose transposability between different environments.

It seems like there’s an uptick in discussions online around web components but maybe that’s just the typical developer marketing/advocating. Web components have been around for a bit.