When I was a kid in the 1970s I was obsessed with three things: #Legos, @Marvel/@DC, and #Godzilla. To have lived long enough to see all three become pop culture juggernauts is an amazing thing.
If you feel the same join us at
Http://Info.MechaVsKaiju.com

http://mechavskaiju.com/2025/04/21/more-good-news/

Voting results are in! 📊 What's next for our 'The Office' Lego build? Cast your vote: https://bricksandbuilds.charleshartmann.com/poll-results-are-in-whats-next-for-the-office-lego-build/. #TheOfficeLego #BrickBuilds #Legos #FanFiction

The Weekly: Being Obviously Wrong

… also in this issue: life of legos and eggs, a brief crosspost, and a nagging question.

Being obviously wrong, i.e., in a manner that is obvious and clear, can be a strength for automated systems. Because when a machine breaks — digital or mechanical — with a lot of sound and drama, it becomes easy to know two things: (a) that the machine is broken, and (b) a clue on where the trouble is. This in turn makes it easy to intervene manually and fix up the automation. We do not realize this but these machines are not an end to themselves, but exist to support human beings, and if they are not helping people, or cannot be helped by people … what’s the point?

Detecting when things are wrong is harder than it seems. In fact, a century or two ago, it took years of medical training to accurately decipher if a person was indeed dead. But coming back to the land of the living, this century, and closer to my own area of rants and raves: tech.

The entire field of software testing has been obsessed with this basic problem of defining and checking correctness for the past fifty five years. Don’t get me wrong: we have made tremendous strides in testing complex code and ensuring that we ship code with high standards of quality. But if you asked anyone if we can automate away all that testing (or even a good chunk of it), they would spell out an inescapable reality: we rely on human software engineers and testers more than we want to admit when building robust and reliable software systems.

And a big part of driving reliability in software is knowing when it is wrong, i.e., when it breaks. Back in the good old days of 2022, doing this was relatively easy. Take a system served over the cloud, say Google Drive. If it stopped syncing your files, you would know, because you would not see the same file across your phone and laptop.

Fast forward to 2025, and we are befuddled with these large language models that are proliferating everywhere, while being wrong in ever so subtle ways. Using the output of a large language model, especially at work, without scrutinizing it … is recipe for disaster. I love thinking back to the lawyers who trusted ChatGPT’s generated citations in their legal filing, only to find that each citation was fabricated (i.e., fake) and invited fines from the judge in their case. ChatGPT was wrong. But it was wrong with so much subtlety that it fooled professional, educated, seasoned lawyers into believing in non-existent legal precedents.

I am not sure what we can do about this anymore given that these language-based AI systems are very much out of the bag. Nothing to do, except to expect these subtle mistakes, and be more mindful than ever. Manual work and error checking may never have mattered more, than they do today.

It is important to know how to work without a machine or algorithm, now more than ever.

Life is for Living: Eggs and Legos

Instead of rushing through life, I find myself standing still more than I used to. It has allowed me to notice life around me. And when not intensely private, I capture it with my camera.

Lego Locomotive

Kid is getting better with his legos, and with his appreciation of trains and locomotives. I continue to be a proud dad 🤩. The pictures below are his lego imaginations of train engines 🚂.

Eggs 🍳

I am not exactly proud of the omelets I make. But I am at a point where I can manage to fold a neat looking omelet on to a plate. Its not much to brag about, but the wife walks away impressed — she is probably being nice to me. 🤣 Regardless, I captured some closeups of a neatly folded omelet I made recently.

Crosspost 🚏

Soulless AI in software engineering. I wrote about some experiences recently around using AI when building software systems. It is in a different, nerdier blog I maintain that is focused on software engineering. Check it out if you are a nerd like me. Or check it out regardless. 🤓

https://sfnotes.page/2025/04/03/changes-notes-generated-by-ai-are-soulless/

Weighing on me: AI too big to fail?

This one has been on my mind for the last three months. No matter how I feel about it — and I feel a lot of things — it occurs to me that the changes in our lives, wrought about by advances in AI are for all practical purposes irreversible. AI certainly is poised to reshape how we work both in big ways and small. But regardless of how all of this shakes out in our day-to-day there is one inescapable reality about AI: its impact on the tech economy.

I like to think of myself as someone who cares about humanity, the primacy of refining our crafts, and generally everything that human beings have to offer. And even I cannot ignore the fact that the amount of money invested in AI (both research and tech) is so much that if this does not yield some form of return, then it might spell doom and gloom for a long time to come. I am frankly afraid that the global economy might break if nothing comes off the existing investments in AI. Yuck.

Very reluctantly, I am thinking about leaning in. It is probably a mistake. But this ship is sailing. And the best way to deal with this reality is to find the humanity in it all. Because for one thing — and I will write about this more in the weeks to come — I do not think that AI as it stands, or as it is being prophesied will amount to much without people involved. And for another thing (and this is more important) … what is all of this technology for if not for people?

#AI #Automation #Eggs #Food #GenAI #GPT #Legos #LLM #Wrong

We have 20% off all Legos and plants today. So come in and get something to do, on this rainy day. We are open until 7pm, so see you soon!

#fayettevillearkansas #smallbusiness #localbusiness #fayettevillear #nwarkansas #legos #sale #pets #plants #houseplants

Need something to do with all the rain? Today only, all Legos are 20% off. Come in today because they don't go on sale very often! Plus, select plants are 30% off!

#legos #sale #localbusiness #smallbusiness #nwarkansas #fayettevillearkansas #fayettevillear #plants #houseplants

The Weekly: The Web with no Apps

… also in this edition of The Weekly: cool looking legos and a Waymo spotted in the wild.

I have been thinking a lot about websites and web apps. What makes a website distinct from a web app? How do you define a web app, or a website? Are they necessarily different? I think these questions are important because they have to do with content, commerce and economies on the World Wide Web and the internet generally.

Thinking about such questions helps me understand why the news industry struggled when the internet took off. Or what happens to digital content creation and commerce when everything is funneled through instant messaging apps, with a chat-like interface and an AI-bot acting as your concierge. Moreover, it helps me think about the role that software developers play in all this.

But as I have been ruminating on web apps and websites, I stumbled onto an interesting thought exercise: what happens to the web if it stopped being a platform for distributing software apps?

I am specifically interested in a world where it no longer makes sense to open a browser tab to open an app, because you can otherwise access it as an iOS or Android app on your mobile phone. Imagine not needing to, or wanting to, open gmail.com or amazon.com to read your email, or to buy something online. And instead carrying out such activities on dedicated iOS or Android apps for any of those services.

To be clear, the internet — as a massive, globally distributed computer network that connects people, organizations and societies — would still exist. To tease out the difference between the web and the internet, consider that when you watch Youtube videos on the YouTube mobile app, you are not opening a web browser to type, “w”, “w”, “w”, “dot”, “y”, “o”, “u”, “t”, “u”, “b”, “e”, “dot”, “c”, “o”, “m”, “enter” … to get a list of videos to watch. Instead, you just open the mobile app, and YT makes those network requests for you — over the internet — to present a curated list of videos for you to watch. But on the web browser, the act of typing out those three Ws means that you are accessing Youtube over the World Wide Web.

What remains on the Web if software developers do not find it useful to distribute their apps over the World Wide Web? In such a world, why would we need the World Wide Web any longer? Why build a website anymore, if not for software app development? What remains?

Wikipedia would stick around. Personal websites and blogs will also remain, I think — I am not publishing an app on the App Store for Winter Rant. I would expect most news websites to remain, like the Times of India, The Guardian, The Verge, The BBC, or The Wired. Although, I am not entirely sure about news sites: the NYTimes arguably works better as an iPhone app with all of its games, and paywalls than it does as a website. Generally, anything on the Web that does not get distributed through any other means would probably remain.

I cannot think of anything else that will remain if we stopped using the Web for app distribution. I am sure I am missing something(s). In many ways, we will go back to a time when the Web was mostly a large collection of interconnected documents. It occurs to me that in such a world, websites might be a little less interactive and focus a lot more on the content that they host. We might still have search engines on the Web, or websites like craigslist.org that might offer an index into those pages and documents — to enable website discovery.

Would the content in such websites be any better or worse than what they are today? Unclear. Would the websites be more connected to each other, or would they live in silos? Unclear. I do think we would still have a variety of media formats … so websites would be able to host images and videos. But would livestreams make sense? Perhaps not? Would we see more podcasts, or recorded audio on the Web? Unclear — consider that podcasts as we know/understand them today as a category of content, have appeared and evolved more within the confines of non-web podcast apps. I am hard pressed to think of a time when I listened to a podcast in my web browser.

In the coming weeks, I will probably list all the different reasons why the open web might cease to exist as a meaningful way to distribute apps, at least in a way that makes economic and financial sense. But even if such a world does not come to pass, I think it remains fascinating to think about it — partly because it exposes how warped the Web has become in its role as a software app distributor.

Life is for Living: Lego Edition

My toddler is getting increasingly creative with his legos. It has gotten to the point where he takes both my wife and I by surprise. So I figured that I would share some of his lego builds. I am happy to concede that they might be no more ordinary than any other lego creation; but I guess I am just a proud dad 😁

Fascinating me: Waymo

I recently spotted a couple of Waymo driverless cabs ferrying passengers around, on real streets with real traffic. Also, a colleague at work, who recently hailed and rode in one such driverless Waymo, was describing their experience to me.

On the one hand, Waymo makes me realize that we are truly living in the future. The progress in the space of driverless cars has been years in the making, even decades. It takes real feats of technical skill and business discipline to pull off what Waymo is pulling off.

But on the other hand, it makes me wonder how scalable driverless tech is outside the urban or suburban parts of North America and Europe. Can such cars really navigate the organic and chaotic roadways of India or the rugged outback of Australia?

Here is a better question: what problems are driverless cars solving? Who is asking for this technology aside from a few billionaire CEOs in Silicon Valley? A few weeks ago, I argued that driverless cars are a solution to the problem of labor shortages, which may not apply outside a limited set of economies in the world. Regardless, it will interesting to see how this tech stack plays out over the next decade.

#Apps #driverlessCars #Legos #SoftwareDevelopment #Waymo #Web #Websites #WWW

Apparently, someone thought it was a good idea to write a tech novella on #GitHub about connecting #Legos (Xilinx FPGAs) to a Game Boy printer via PCIe voodoo. 🤖🔌 Because who doesn't love mixing hardware jargon with GitHub's endless menu of features nobody asked for? 🙄
https://github.com/regymm/pcie_7x #technovella #FPGA #GameBoy #HackerNews #ngated

Re last boost: #Pokemon is only getting #legos NOW?! I would have expected that years ago…

The kids recently got into #Legos. One of the lego people's arms cracked and the hand continues to fall out. I said we could fix it using the Kragle.

Boy did i say the wrong thing.

The horrifying #stopmotion #film that proves #Legos can be #scary

https://boingboing.net/2025/02/27/the-horrifying-stop-motion-film-that-proves-legos-can-be-scary.html
https://youtu.be/SItnnVVF-3k

If you’re looking for a timeline cleanse / distraction from the news, here is my #LEGO fish market (an original creation by yours truly and my 4-year-old).

I mentioned last week how I was struggling with my self-hosted Ghost installation and the fact I was frequently interrupted by my child to play with #LEGOs. I never got around to sharing the pic, so here it is.

Tomorrow we go back to France and I’m a little sad I cannot take this with us. But it’s in good company with the gorgeous modern house and the Santa’s Visit set (behind it).

Time for me to step away from the keyboard and build more stuff.

Hope you’re having a lovely day ❤️

5Below forced me to buy and assemble this #wants #lego #legos #nerdcore

Wasted All Our Money ON THE COOLEST STUFF EVER!

#bipolarawareness #bipolar #bipolartype1 #bipolarmania #bipolarmanic #mentalhealth #mentalhealthawareness #lego #legos #starwars #starwarslego