I keep trying to remind myself that "AI is poisoning web search results" is really no different from the ad fodder poisoning web search results that's been going on the entire time search engines have been a thing.

It feels somehow worse, but I'm not sure it actually is. I think it's the same amount of bad, just a different application of essentially the same thing. The only difference is who profits from it 🤷 

 As a long time citizen of the fediverse, I'm continually baffled at the amount of energy people are suddenly expending trying to get other people to make their content searchable.

I absolutely understand being excited that your content can be searchable, but to be vocally trying to convince everyone else that their content should be searchable too just feels weird.

For many, the entire purpose of joining the fediverse was to avoid being searchable after suffering from the negative impacts of it on corporate social media networks. 

 I've been talking about how AI will directly lead to an Idiocracy (2006) scenario for some time, but today's update to the "can you melt eggs?" saga is as clear an illustration of how as I think it's possible to ever have.

Quora's AI answers made up the melting point of eggs, and then Google picked it up and responded affirmatively that you can indeed melt eggs.

Then people wrote articles about how stupid it is that Google says eggs can melt. Then Google fixes the answer.

Then Google ingests an article about how stupid it is that Google says you can melt eggs, and suddenly Google starts answering affirmatively again that you can melt eggs, citing the article about how stupid Google is for thinking you can melt eggs. 

 I finally got Mr. Brightside out of my head and now because today is the 20 year anniversary of its release you're all talking about it so now it's back. See you in another 20 years I guess. 

 The way Electron breaks the browser security model is definitely bad, but I think it's important to separate Electron's actual security issues from the things people do inside of Electron.

Namely, a node_modules folder full of shit they mostly don't even know the purpose of, let alone the trustworthiness of the developers who wrote it (or the trustworthiness of all the things those developer had in their node_modules folder.)

The combination of no browser security plus an unlimited number of unvetted dependencies is a really bad combination. 

 I don't find myself giving Apple props on web decisions very often, but the way they're implementing Web Push is objectively the best way it can be done, and the fact that Apple people are upset about it is somewhat baffling to me.

On iOS, a website cannot nag you to accept push notifications unless you've done "add to homescreen" to turn the webpage into an "app."  Once it's an "app," then it can prompt and ask you if you'd like push notification.

I've spent years getting irritated on Android when every goddamned website begs to enable push notifications, I've said yes to exactly zero of them that I haven't also installed as a PWA.

Requiring that a page is installed is better in every way, and I wish Google would change their model to match.