A modest UI proposal

Not-good-at-tech mode 

I begin to suspect that certain apps could use a new, over-arching control. One that (a) increases the size and weight of all text elements, (b) forces the facility into the lowest-common-denominator do-what-it-says-on-the-tin mode, and (c) hides all the complex controls. It should be easy to find and disable, of course, as we're not trying to take options away from anyone: just give them an easy button.

Though perhaps I should reconsider my proposed name for the feature...

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Full disclosure: I asked Gemma4:31b to write the CSS and HTML for the sample.

I wonder what the experts would think of my take?

Learned about "property based testing" today. A little. Initial impression: it's (at least in part) fuzzing at the unit test or integration test level instead of the end-to-end level.

Also I already do something like a lite version of that in a few cases. Indeed, I've been trying to formulate a good blog post about one of my practices that I don't see much in other discussions of unit testing. Alas, it seems there's a whole community out there stealing my thunder.

Sometimes one facepalm is just not enough

Still working on my little JavaScript side-project as a way of learning AI workflows. Still not using AI for a lot of code-gen but instead for friction reduction. It's going fine, thanks. I mean, the last few weeks haven't seem many new features, but instead a couple of re-factoring passes intended to enable big things in the future, but I count that as progress.

Anyway, while thinking about the evolution I had a question. I was fairly sure the language would do things the "right" way, but felt the need to test, nonetheless. And being an old guy, I wrote the test code by hand:

const primes = [2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17];
const fibonacci = [0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13];
let combined = [...primes, ...fibonacci];
combined.sort();
console.log(`primes: ${primes}`);
console.log(`fibonacci: ${fibonacci}`);
console.log(`combined: ${combined}`);

the point of which was just to assure myself that sorting the combined array would not scramble the source arrays. I would have been very surprised if it had, but I had to check.

That said, the results were not what I expected:

primes: 2,3,4,5,7,11,13,17
fibonacci: 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13
combined: 0,1,1,11,13,13,17,2,2,3,3,4,5,5,7,8

Wat?

An array filled entirely with numbers has been sorted lexically according to their naive string values.

And on reflection, that's not terribly surprising in a language, like JavaScript, that is both dynamically typed and quite compact because it is the prescription most likely to work in most situations. But it sure came as a surprise to a guy used to strongly typed systems intended for systems and scientific work.