Alcides Fonseca

Because I’ve always seen reading time as such an incredibly personal thing, I’ve never once paid any heed to these widgets. In fact, I’ve been slightly perturbed a service would presume to know how quickly I could read an article.

I’ve always viewed any service that sticks a “reading time” widget on its articles as the literary equivalent of fast-food: you’re not here for quality, but for expediency.

Personally, I think they devalue a text more than they add to it.

Estimated Reading Time Widgets — Jim Nielsen

I’m with Nielsen on this one. It makes no sense to suggest an (average) estimated reading time, unless you are trying to convince your audience that this is not a long piece, and you can read it in a minute or two. For personal blogs like this one, I really don’t care if people read it or not. But if you are writing one of those linked-in-self-promotion-bullshit-crypto-AI-latest-fad types of posts, then your goal is to get the reader to take its time. And in those cases, you can bluntly lie and always say it’s one minute.

My guess is that this trend comes in response to instagram/reels/shorts/tiktoks where people do not want to spend any more time on a particular content than they need. Long-form reading is dying, especially on the internet.

Other than teaching how debilitating this is to the younger generation, I hold a very pessimistic view for the next generation.

Starting with this build, we are introducing the Power Grid Forecast API. This API empowers app developers to optimize app behavior, minimizing environmental impact by shifting background tasks to times when more renewable energy is available in the local electrical grid.
— Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26052 (via Terence Eden)

Guilherme, Paulo and I submitted a proposal of a similar service (but for server workloads, where it makes more sense) back in 2020 for an EDP competition. It was not fancy enough as it was mostly transparent (the API was a job queue).

Our team is working on making energy usage first-class in programming languages, so developers have a better understanding of their impact when making design decisions.

I remember the dark old times where IE6 was the default browser everywhere. Because of that dominance, developers focused solely on the IE substandard of JS/ActiveX/JavaApplet, leaving Linux and Mac users behind. Not long ago, you were required IE to submit your taxes. That has changed: Now you are required Chrome or Edge. As a Safari user, I find myself having to have an installed Chrome to access unsupported websites.

This week, MS announced they would be dropping their own rendered (EdgeHTML, a fork of Trident) on their current browser Edge and they will be using Chrome’s Blink (itself a fork of Webkit). So now the major browsers are:

• Edge (Webkit/Blink)
• Chrome (Webkit/Blink)
• Firefox (Quantum Render, replacing Gecko)
• Safari (Webkit)

Except for the tiny differences between vanilla Webkit and Blink, almost all the web uses the same renderer. This is the same monopoly Trident (IE5/6) had more than 10 years ago! And the sole fighter for a diverse web is the same browser and team that fought then: Mozilla Firefox! And this is not by chance: Mozilla’s Foundation is all about diversity and open standards. Just check their funded research projects to see that they put their money where their mouth is.

If it weren’t for Firefox, I believe Chrome would never had the success it had. Now Chrome’s the one that’s monopolising the web, and we need Firefox to be an alternative that will allow the NextBrowser™ to replace Chrome in 10 years.

I’ve been using Firefox as my main browser for a while now, and I can heartily recommend it. You should try it (and maybe talk to your relatives about it at Christmas). At this point, which browser you use no longer feels like it’s just about personal choice—it feels part of something bigger; it’s about the shape of the web we want.

— Jeremy Keith

If you aren’t aware of pixels.camp, it’s a 3 days hackathon in Lisbon, Portugal. This time I’m living 3 metro stops away, so despite not taking days off, I’ll be participating.

One of the bigger changes from previous editions is that a new voting system will be used, based on EXP, a closed crypto-currency on top of the ethereum.

Basic rules:

• If you are at the event, you get badges, each amounting to 100 EXP (I’m ignoring the variance here).
• There are angels who own a lot of EXP’s (25.000).
• There is one lucky guy who may win 50.000 EXP by solving a scavenger hunt.
• Participants can create projects.
• Everyone can invest in projects. The invested money is controlled by the organization.
• At the end of the event (and presentations), all the money invested in all the projects is redistributed proportionally to the 10 “richest” projects. These are the main winners of the event.
• After this, the EXP collected by each project are distributed by the investors proportionally to their investment.

I believe this approach is flawed.

Problem 1: Money is worthless at the end.

Unless you are one of top 10 (out of ~100) project owners or one of the X top investors, you get nothing. There is no actual interest in saving your money, or betting in low-risk investments. You want to hit the jackpot by investing in the number one project, if you are looking for winning the investor prize (I’m assuming the angels are out of the race).

Additionally, if you are the scavenge hunt winner, you should be extra careful with how you spend your money, not to lose it (because that money without investing is useless).

So, you should invest in the best company. The question is when.

Problem 2: Project presentations are in the end of the event.

There are no “investment” rounds here with no incentive for investing early. The best approach is to invest in the end, where you already have an idea of which projects have a chance of winning. What happens if everyone invests in the end? Maybe that’s the most fair scenario, but it is no different than a regular voting system without decentralized coins.

Problem 3: If you are competitive, you should invest in your own ideas.

If you really want to win this, it makes sense for you to invest early in your own project. If everybody does this, then the prize is only decided by the angels. Except if you do the right strategy:

• Get a small team of developers who are interested in doing something useful. Alternatively, create vaporware. Doesn’t matter as long as the angels are interested.
• Get a large team of miners, participants who are not interested in building something, but rather want to collect badges and participate in activities.

This will be the best approach towards winning (unless you have the best project according to the angel’s opinions).

Problem 4: There are no rewards in this Kickstarter.

The project presentation is supposed to work like Kickstarter. The most successful projects on Kickstarter had excellent rewards for investors. Here, unless you are rich, you have no real rewards.

If I end up creating a service as a project, I will give pre-access to the service to whoever backs me. If I am doing a prototype of something that will not last, there is no real reward I can give out (except free hugs).

Problem 4: Work vs Play

You should focus either on working (to get one of the 10 prizes) or playing (and getting badges to be a great investor). I don’t believe a half-way approach is very useful towards winning prizes (Although it might be the best fun experience).

Idea 1: VC-like groups.

Let’s say I invite everyone I know to a VC company. We decide amongst ourselves in which project we want to vote. Only the most voted project gets all the money from the group members. This might seem unfair for members who didn’t vote for it, but in the end it gives that project a better chance of winning, thus making VC members richer.

Btw, contact me in case you want to join Alcides&Friends Ventures, LLC. The larger the VC group, the larges the changes of winning a prize.

Idea 2: Betting

If you have been to previous editions (called Codebits at the time), you might remember the launch of a closed instance of Meo Wallet. It was the same idea, although projects didn’t ran on this. Rui and I won the prize for most money transferred, and came close second for the most money totaled (if only I hadn’t been so generous).

Idea 3: Ponzi scheme.

This was something we also worked on. I’ve known Ponzi schemes to last for months, and we only need it to last 3 days. So contact me as soon as you can to be one of the first to take advantage of the Alcides scheme™.

Don’t get me wrong, this is an interesting idea and we should use these events to play with ideas like this. But I have my doubts it will work in the end like it is intended to.

Source for first website – table based layout, a lot of view source, a lot of Notepad, a lot of IE 6. Used to work mostly in HTML and CSS. With the help from books like “HTML for the World Wide Web – Visual Quickstart Guide”, learned a lot as a tinkerer.

Two years in: good with HTML (table layouts) and moderate CSS (fairly new), basic PHP, could use FTP and do basic web config. Could get a site up and running from scratch. This was enough to get my first developer job. This was without any computer science background.

Now: front end developer with 10 years experience, not an engineer, or a code ninja. I don’t know Angular, React, WebPack. I don’t even know JavaScript inside out. I am valuable to my team. Need more: empathy, honesty, being able to see stuff from a user’s perspective.

— Self taught developers today, via Tom Morris’ live blogging.

Back in my day, we learnt how to do things. Nowadays, kids learn how use high-level APIs, without any idea how things work underneath. They might learn Meteor, but have no idea about HTTP or Sockets or how HTTP Sessions are implemented. Which is fine for developing tiny little apps, but they miss the I understand all this sh*t feeling.

Supposedly high-level frameworks allow developers to write more complex programs in the same timeframe. However, I don’t believe this is true for small projects, because the setup time is increasing exponentially. Let’s start a new single page app, what do we need? Node, npm, webpack, angular or react or any other trendy framework. Say what you will about PHP, but it was a single one-click WAMP install away from your fingertips.

If you were a 13 year old kid wanting to develop your own app, what would you use?

After some steps to embrace the OpenSource model, specially thanks to IronRuby and IronPython projects, the day has come.

Microsoft is shipping OpenSource tools as part of one of their products: jQuery will be part in ASP.NET MVC and Visual Studio, with Intellisense support!

This is great news not because of jQuery itself (nevertheless, my congratulations to John Resig’s team), but because Microsoft is selling a product together with OpenSource code. This has been battled with a lot of effort by the IronPython and Ruby teams. For instance, IronPython is OpenSource, but cannot accept contributions from the community (in source code, bug reports are welcome). And until today, I thought they were doing the same approach with the JS toolkit for ASP.NET.

There’s this project Gimme ECMAScript (or Javascript if you prefer) library designed to make working with “everyone’s favorite scripting language” fun again!_ It is OpenSource, but since it was made by Microsoft:

Due to some licensing restrictions, code contributions from the community will not be accepted, however the Gimme source code is completely free and open to all who wish to view it and learn from it.

I’m glad Scottgu decided not to go with Gimme but with jQuery. (nothing against Gimme, but the community around jQuery is so much wider) This is the real step that tell us that Microsoft is really changing!

Qual a maior lacuna no panorama dos Social Media portugueses?

Paulo Querido: “A falta de participação.

A total ausência de informação nos mainstream media.

A fraquíssima prestação do país em termos de empreendedorismo. Os projectos portugueses que existem nesta área são TODOS de indivíduos ou pequenas startups, sem capacidade financeira. Não há mercado nem investimento nem apoio de nenhuma espécie.”

Na entrevista do Hugo Silva ao Paulo Querido, com quem concordo perfeitamente neste ponto, inserido numa série de entrevistas sobre Social Media.