From thoughts to text

The thoughts and text on this blog is mine, and mine alone.

  • M-series Macs are Amazing

    I am blown away by this Apple M-series. And by blown away, I mean the complete opposite, because there are no fans. Nothing blows!

    And it seems like I bought it just at the right time. The new prices Apple announced today has made my MacBook Air 3000 NOK (around $300) more expensive in Norway.

    The price change did not come as a surprise. Tim Cook did give a warning last week that prices would have to increase due to high cost on memory and storage chips. The same chips AI eats for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

    I have not yet put the Mac through its paces. But in my experience, most laptops get a heatstroke just by playing a YouTube video these days.

  • (A)I made a WordPress Widget

    What I made is not important — it’s a list of kayak courses and available spots.

    I already had created the logic — no AI needed for logical thinking1. So I already had the authentication, the API calls, the custom filtering and the presentation layer.

    But since I didn’t have any experience with WordPress plugins/widgets, I hosted it on a separate domain and embedded it onto the web site. This has worked for years.

    However, there were a few drawbacks. Mainly that it was dependent on my private website to be up in order to work. On the positive side; when things broke, I could easily debug it on my own server. Like the time the API stopped working, and it turned out I had been using an internal API endpoint, and not the one in the documentation. Whoops.

    So, with AI being all over the place, and Microsoft pushing CoPilot on everything that can be displayed on a screen, I decided it could not hurt to ask it to make a simple Widget that I could plug my logic into.

    I asked CoPilot to create a basic Widget. I asked it to display a placeholder text for now, but that I needed a settings interface to enter username and password for the API authentication.

    When I tried this crude plugin, nothing worked. I wrote to CoPilot: “it doesn’t work”, to which it basically replied “Your code is wrong”, and then continued to present the right way to do it.

    And this is what surprised me the most. Several times, CoPilot presented some code, just to lament me about it later.

    Yes, I know there are other models2 out there that are a lot better for programming. But I only needed to make a simple template for a WordPress widget, not make an E-commerce system from scratch.

    But part of me wonder; do these models behave this way just to make people spend as many tokens as possible?

    Credit where credit is due

    But I have to give CoPilot some credit as well. First, it did eventually present a workable Widget that I could put my logic into. Secondly, it created new token manager for me. My previous solution was to use Curl to get the API token bearer and store in a file. Hardly best practice.

    I also learned a little bit more about WordPress.

    1. I know some people automatically thinks text with em dash is written by an AI, but everything I publish I write myself. ↩︎
    2. I am not a programmer. I do this for fun. If I have used the wrong tool for the job, so be it. ↩︎

  • Where did UX go wrong?

    Warning: If you click on any of the links below, you will be amused — then you will be annoyed to discover that the UI you use every day is shit.

    I wanted to complain about how bad User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) has become the last decade, or two. Then I found out that people already to this — so I don’t have to.

    But I still want to complain. Because UX,for the most part, is horribly broken. But again, most examples are already covered by the mentioned website, so go there, see for yourself.

    Like, what happened to borders and contrast? I can’t see where one window ends and another begin. There is no border, and the titlebar — the one with the text “File Explorer” in it — is white, just like the background of the window behind it.

    Where does one window end and another begin?

    Contrast used to be a thing. But at least it is “on brand” for Windows.

    And while we are on the topic, what about some dark patterns? It’s when developers actively try to mislead you into something. Like this: Ryanair dark UX patterns.

  • Hello (again) MacBook Air

    After fifteen years, I have finally realized that my old MacBook Air from 2011 is not up to the task of being a travel companion anymore.

    To be honest, it hasn’t been for a long, long time. And the age shows. No updates, including browsers, which means that some webpages won’t render properly in either Safari or Chrome. Including Apple.com.

    So, this week, I thought it might be time to get a new laptop. I’ve heard much praise of Apples new MacBook Neo. A quality built laptop on a budget. Good enough for most tasks. Certainly good enough for me.

    What I want — what I need — is a silent machine. Quiet. Over the years I have become more and more sensitive to noise. And Apple has these computers now. No fans. No noise.

    And let’s be honest; a computer with Windows isn’t an option anymore. It hasn’t been for years. I use one at work, and I have reached a limit on how much pain I can endure in front of a screen.

    So, back to the Apple Neo: Looked good on paper. Looked good in reviews. Looked darn good in the shop.

    Then I remembered that I’m not a student on a budget. And that I wanted something I could use for years to come. If not fifteen years, like my previous MacBook, then at least ten.

    So I ended up with a MacBook Air, again. This time the 13 inch with the new M5 processor. Quiet, peaceful, and from what I’m told: powerful.

  • Part 2: How many people does it take to operate a data center?

    Less then a week after I wrote about data centers, wondering how many people really were needed to operate one, news broke that atNorth will build a data center (almost) right in my back yard (norwegian, paywall).

    In my previous post, I noted that Nscale was promissing 200 jobs working in Europes biggest data center for AI. Well, atNorth just promissed the very same number, excluding maintenance, canteen, security and transportation.

    Translated:

    “When fully developed, we will have invested up to 40 billion and have 200 permanent employees in a local limited company, he says.

    In addition, there will be canteen services, caretaker functions, security, security and transport, he adds.”

    Note: The translation includes the word “security” twice, that is not an error.

    In my first post, I assumed that these jobs were included in the numbers from Nscale (and others).

    To be fair, atNorth does not promise 200 jobs from day one. They will build the data center in two stages, and the first will provide 70 jobs, pluss the mentioned canteen services, maintenance and security.

    On their own webpage, atNorth calls this new data center a “mega site”. The first of their data centers in Norway.

    It will be interesting to see how many jobs this actually will provide locally.