Glossing
Hit and Miss #468
Gloss (glŏs), transitive verb 1. To render clear and evident by comments; to illustrate; to explain; to annotate.
Mandy Brown, glossing Ursula K. Le Guin:
Le Guin gives us a glimpse of another way. The Kesh are not ignorant of digital technologies. The world in their time is connected via a vast computer system with huge amounts of data, text, story, audio, information, literature. Anyone is free to interact with that system as they like, and some few people choose to make it the locus of their work. But to connect to this network requires visiting an exchange—a physical place—of which there is only one in the entire valley. They could have more exchanges, if they liked, but they choose not to. They do not carry the network in their pockets, nor do they invite it into their homes. Perhaps there is a clue: that to keep the word, we must keep our distance.
L. M. Sacasas, glossing C. S. Lewis:
Thus, I was initially tempted to suggest that in the face of a certain strand of apocalyptic AI doomerism, one could do worse than repurpose Lewis: If we are going to be destroyed by some Lovecraftian super-intelligence or a Kafkaesque paperclip maximizer, let it find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about AI safety.
With time, I’ve gotten good at quickly looking down my plane’s sole; the thin black line of my iron leaps out and, even if the lateral adjustment is just a few thousandths of an inch off, it’s obvious. I’m not getting any new visual inputs, but my brain has learned to resolve the information. Woodworking, and I suppose all of life, is full of sensory inputs that can completely pass us by if we don’t know how to decipher them. It can feel revolutionary when you learn to understand the signals transmitted to you, or so frustrating when you know you’re getting the information but can’t quite understand it.
Gloss, transitive verb [imperfect or past participle Glossed; present participle or verbal noun Glossing.] To give a superficial luster or gloss to; to make smooth and shining; as, to gloss cloth.
Dave Rupert, glossing your code:
I made a smol client-side syntax highlighter that uses the CSS Custom Highlights API called MicroLighter. I’ll talk about why I made it in a bit but first I wanted to… ahem… highlight… some of the features.
- Zero-dependencies
- ~2kb minifed+gzipped
- Uses CSS
::highlight(token-name), not spans- Leverages Textmate’s language grammars
- Human-readable
light-dark()themes- All languages/grammars loaded on-demand
- Moves all non-highlight functionality to a
<micro-lighter>custom element
All the best for the week ahead!
Lucas