Pointers (March 2023)

The good stuff, March 2023 edition:

• If people see something of themselves in large language models (“i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u”), maybe it’s because our lives are overflowing with repetitive corporatized text.
• “Something Pretty Right,” a history of Visual Basic. To paraphrase Hoare’s famous assessment of Algol 60: when it comes to rapid development, Visual Basic was an improvement not only on its predecessors, but most of its successors.
• I’ve written HTML and CSS about as long as they’ve been a thing, but somehow never noticed Safari’s quirky monospace handling until it snagged me on this site’s CSS. This hack from Wikimedia’s own CSS — specifying font-family: monospace, sans-serif instead of just font-family: monospace to distract Safari — saved my ass.
• A case that homelessness is just a housing problem.
• Wind down from the above with a few minutes of bewildering skateboard tricks.