Fred and Loathing on The Internet

JSON Dumps Their Problems Into Our Environment

2023-Sep-19

A number of updates to talk about today. The big one involves my first successful stab at using the variables in my Flask views in the plotly-dash apps. So at the moment you can get a dashboard view of any artist found in my app’s artist catalog if you go over to /dash/art_search/ and then add an artist name with _ wherever a blank space would be.

If you look at the archives of my daily charts, the number one artist on each day will link to this dashboard without you having to fumble with URL stuff. It is only in that one spot because it is not a very scalable solution. My coding dependencies hang around me like a couple of albatrosses. On the plus side the archive view has some snazzy new CSS. The chart for today has a lot of new visuals that I hope make it more readable.

As for books, I’m about a third into a cyberpunk novel written in 1988 and set in 2023. This was not on purpose, just ugly luck. It is my first Bruce Sterling novel. He is one of the few big names in classic cyberpunk fiction I have yet to try. It is remarkably prescient. I suppose if you were cynical about human progress in 1988 it would be easy to prescient. He paints a very ugly world of lives deprecated by the short sighted policies of their parents. In some ways uglier than the 2023 we live in now, and bursts of optimism here and there. Not just tech ones- whereas the setting actually seems somewhat more low-tech than now- but has introduced some novel utopian ideals like ‘democratic corporations’. Ha! I’m eager to see if the protagonist loses her idealized attachment to her employer. They’re not like the other ones, or so she says.