Subversion Aversion

There once was an app called Subversion
Who's working was utter perversion;
Whether a check in or check out, I'm always in doubt
If it's preserving my coding excursion.

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Writing a Minimal PSR-0 Autoloader

An excellent overview of autoloading in PHP and the PSR-0 standard was written by Hari K T over at PHPMaster.com , and it's definitely worth the read. But maybe you don't like some of the bloated, heavier autoloader offerings provided by various PHP frameworks, or maybe you just like to roll your own solutions. Is it possible to roll your own minimal loader and still be compliant? First, let's look at what PSR-0 mandates, taken directly from the standards document on GitHub : A fully-qualified namespace and class must have the following structure \<Vendor Name>\(<Namespace>\)*<Class Name> Each namespace must have a top-level namespace ("Vendor Name"). Each namespace can have as many sub-namespaces as it wishes. Each namespace separator is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR when loading from the file system. Each "_" character in the CLASS NAME is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . The "_" character has no special ...

Composing Music with PHP

I’m not an expert on probability theory, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. And even my Music 201 class from years ago has been long forgotten. But if you’ll indulge me for the next 10 minutes, I think you’ll find that even just a little knowledge can yield impressive results if creatively woven together. I’d like to share with you how to teach PHP to compose music. Here’s an example: You’re looking at a melody generated by PHP. It’s not the most memorable, but it’s not unpleasant either. And surprisingly, the code to generate such sequences is rather brief. So what’s going on? The script calculates a probability map of melodic intervals and applies a Markov process to generate a new sequence. In friendlier terms, musical data is analyzed by a script to learn which intervals make up pleasing melodies. It then creates a new composition by selecting pitches based on the possibilities it’s observed. . Standing on Shoulders Composition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Bach wa...

Rent-free Thoughts

Some thoughts that have been living rent-free recently in my head about AI... We should be more precise when we talk about it. We’ve had "AI" for decades. Google Translate, Alexa and Siri, computer vision in video games, OCR in mail sorting, protein folding models all fall under artificial intelligence, but there’s no mass panic over these. The current progress is in generative AI, and that's where most of the public concern is. I’m guilty of the shorthand myself, saying "AI" when I mean "generative AI". People are afraid of generative AI, but the real problem is concentrated power and corporate greed. Someone wanting to sow disinformation could do so without generative AI models, and deep-pocket organizations of state could finance extreme actors if they wanted to. The tools evolved, but the risks aren’t new. The bigger problem that few are talking about is corporations who are aligning the technology for their own goals; they increasingly dicta...

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