That feeling when you’re chatting with a neighbour, trying to tip-toe around political topics because you don’t want to start a “thing” until they drop a mention of “redistribution of wealth” being a positive thing into the conversation and you realise they too have been couching their words throughout the conversation 😄
Me: “Ah, damn. I never replied to X, did I? Fuck. It’d be too weird to reply now”
Just a reminder that I’m exceedingly bad at the whole “social media” thing. Half the time I don’t know what to say to a reply so I either just reply with an emoji or just put it off until I forget about it, only to be hit several days later by a super-vivid memory of planning to reply. Or, if I did reply, a super-vivid memory of what I should have written instead
This whole society thing is complicated as hell 😅
“Is AI a Silver Bullet? — Ian Cooper - Staccato Signals”
https://ian-cooper.writeas.com/is-ai-a-silver-bullet
> But the flaw in prompts as a description of the code to be generated tends to be that natural language is a remarkably poor medium for expressing the model that we want to use in our software. Every time we move away from a 3GL to create a more natural interface, we rapidly get diminishing ability to author software.
This entire essay is excellent
“Critics keep talking as if it’s useles, but it isn’t. It’s cheap and even though it has some flaws, is extraordinarily effective at some of its use cases.”
“So, what? Are we supposed to accept all the downsides of LLMs just because it’s occasionally useful?”
“LLMs? No I’m talking about asbestos.”
Web dev: constantly figuring out new ways for people to experience the joy and perfection that is “this is best experienced in…”
Kudos to the original pioneers: Netscape and IE. Other innovators: yarn vs npm, Early iPhone era Safari. Modern Chrome
And now packages registries with JSR. Wonderful
Tech talking about anti-trust regulation conveniently ignores the AT&T and IBM consent decrees (and related actions). Those directly and indirectly lead to some of the biggest economy-growing, market-making innovations in modern history
Because apparently regulations never work
Occasionally I stop to think about how much of the modern software development infrastructure and community is run at a massive loss: Stack Overflow, npm, Github Copilot (probably Github itself), VS Code.
Also how much of it is owned and run by Microsoft.
So much of it could disappear at a short notice if just one CEO changes his mind about his company’s marketing strategy.
“Meta in Myanmar, Part III. The Inside View”
Again, all the content warnings. But also this:
"I think that if you make a machine and hand it out for free to everyone in the world, you’re at least partially responsible for the harm that the machine does." https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-iii-the-inside-view
We have, what, maybe a decade left of our current hyperconnected global tech industry left before it becomes unsustainable because of the climate crisis and we’re wasting it on generative “AI”?
That’s where we’ve decided to spend the time that’s left?
Sheesh.
I expected the AI bubble to get bad, but the scale of the bullshit still hits hard
Only those who weren’t likely to get involved in it anyway seem to have heeded any warnings
Everything I see in the LLM space is close to the diametric opposite of what I would have recommended
“Adactio: Journal—Websites in the dock”
"I wonder if there’s much point using wrappers like Electron any more?"
IMO there are only two concrete reasons left: 1. You need to make a document-oriented app. 2. The design really needs native menus to work. https://adactio.com/journal/20520
So, a little bit of notice here: I usually mute posts that get even just a little bit of traction, largely because the conversation always seems to instantly go off-topic, with a substantial chunk of it being just outright condescending.
What is it with 80s/90s movies presenting predatory sociopaths destroying people’s lives as sympathetic and loveable?
Made the mistake of watching Other People’s Money, which claims to be a satire but seems more interested in satirising the people whose lives are being destroyed
“Introducing Railway V2”
> They say the day you delete all the Kubernetes code from your codebase is the day you truly start living
The few experiences I’ve had with Kubernetes have all been nightmares. https://blog.railway.app/p/railway-v2
Every so often it hits me again that tech doesn’t just reward incompetence, it rewards _destructive_ incompetence.
Like, sure, letting Blogger wither, die and rot is a bad management, but destroying LiveJournal? Special kind of incompetence. Same with properties like Movable Type, TypePad, Posterous and Pownce (both popular early micro blogging service). All destroyed through half-baked management by execs that are still highly regarded by the industry
“Critical WebP bug: many apps, not just browsers, under threat”
One of the issues with the popularity of Electron apps is that when Chrome has a vulnerability, they all have one
And because they all come with their own copy of Chromium, they need to be updated separately https://stackdiary.com/critical-vulnerability-in-webp-codec-cve-2023-4863/
I’m assuming that the reason why every goddamn tech commentator in the world is currently pretending that nobody in the world owns USB-C cables—“OMG! Apple is going to sell so many dongles”—when in reality anybody even remotely likely to buy a new iPhone almost certainly has a bunch of them lying around…
…is down to either the usual Apple Reality Distortion Field or are suffering from the usual tech punditry brain damage
Relax. Even my parents have more USB-C cables than lightning.
I've been seeing on social media a lot of comments along the lines of "LLMs helped me learn X so much quicker, almost like a direct skills download" where X is a notoriously tricky feature that is regularly misunderstood and habitually causes problems, sometimes even an outright footgun.
And I'm like 😬
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Notes by Baldur Bjarnason | export