Coding

“If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.” – Stephen Stills song, “Love the One You’re With” JavaScript is the cockroach language of The Internet Age. JavaScript’s a survivor… but NOT because it has always been good. JavaScript survives because it was the first way anyone could create dynamic websites – thanks, Netscape Navigator!!! – and its privileged position within web browsers quickly became entrenched. No matter how good or bad Mocha, LiveScript, ECMAScript, er, JavaScript was, that’s what you had. ...

I’m excited to announce GuessTheUS.com, a challenging quiz on important topics regarding current American government, law, and economics. In my previous post, I explained how I used AI to build a website using a language with which I had little familiarity, Python. In this post, I’ll simply focus on what I built and why anyone might care. I created GuessTheUS because too many Americans aren’t paying attention to politics/government, aren’t bothering to vote, and are voting against their selfish economic interests and our broad collective interests. ...

The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time. — Tom Cargill, Bell Labs In a follow-up post, I’m announcing the official launch of GuessTheUS.com. This post explains how I used AI to build GuessTheUS.com to become more familiar with AI and what I learned about AI’s current abilities and shortcomings. ...

UPDATE: After I received a $140 bill for half a day’s use of Gemini 2.5 Pro, I spent days going back-and-forth with Google Support, and they eventually kindly cut the bill to a fraction of the original charge. I don’t recall how much, but I think they charged me about $45. After watching videos to see how veteran programmers – and even non-programmers!!! – are using AI to code, I decided to grab the wheel and take AI for a spin. ...