@baldur@toot.cafe
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

baldur

@baldur@toot.cafe

Writer, web developer and consultant based in Hveragerði, Iceland. Lapsed Interactive Media Academic. Webby Tech Stuff and webby book stuff.

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gianarb, to random
@gianarb@hachyderm.io avatar

Thanks for writing it down! I discovered and subscribed to your rss feed recently (3 months) so I don't want to look provocative but I am genuinely curious and thus is the question that your article has left to me. Why are you sharing on social media? This is a question I tried to answer to myself multiple time. So thanks for answering @baldur

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/social-media/

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@gianarb

I first started posting links on social media back in the early days of Tumblr and shortly after that Twitter (so 2007-ish)

And I've been maintaining a personal website of one form or another since pretty much the moment I first got my own dial-up account, so around 1996

So, I've been doing this for quite a while now and much of it has just become an ingrained habit, TBH

But, ultimately, it feels like a waste when you find something interesting and don't tell anybody about it 🙂

mhoye, to random
@mhoye@mastodon.social avatar

There is only one thing that I disagree with in @baldur 's excellent article on "the deskilling of webdev" - https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-deskilling-of-web-dev-is-harming-us-all/ - but I feel like it is a significant omission.

Baldur even touches on it here, earlier in the year, but doesn't explicitly connect the dots: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

It's the passive voice of the title.

Development isn't mysteriously becoming deskilled. It is actively being directed, to manage the employment market, by the largest players in that market.

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@mhoye Ah, yeah. Absolutely. As soon as you point it out it, that issue with the title becomes glaringly obvious to me.

Gonna try to find the time tomorrow to come up with a better title and rename it. 🙂

bkardell, (edited ) to random
@bkardell@toot.cafe avatar

In the past 10 years, how many times have you switched your default/main browser?

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@bkardell I’m in the four or more category. I tend to stick with the platform’s default browser until it pisses me off. Then I stick with the other one until it too pisses me off. And so on. Browser UX is not designed for people who do a lot of research and reading, it seems.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation - The Verge”

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166177/google-search-ranking-algorithm-leak-documents-link-seo

> suggests that Google hasn’t been entirely truthful about it for years

So this is what the SEO types have been shouting about

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@yatil Yeah, for me it’s context for the angry shouting coming from SEO types I know who have been picking through the leak and finding cases where they felt personally lied to.

Hence the “this is why SEO types are shouting”

The Verge reporting is always a bit “this is a thing that happened” without much analysis. It’ll be interesting to see what SEO specialists themselves think is important enough to write about in the leak, if anything.

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@smallcircles 😄

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@smallcircles Ah, thanks! 🙂

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@rrwo I mean, same. But I have a few ex-coworkers who got into it in a big way so every time I go onto Linkedin I’m exposed to whatever it is they’re obsessed about at the moment.

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@scott If it works to their advantage, then I’m pretty sure it’s unintentional. I honestly don’t think Googlers are that clever

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@kylotan What’s missing from the coverage is Google has invested a LOT over the years in maintaining a positive relationship with the so-called “White Hat” SEO industry. They put effort into being accessible, constantly giving out advice, and maintained the image of transparency. Because of this, when SEO researchers discovered things that contradicted the official message, they brought it to these friendly Googlers who, turns out, then lied to their face and told them that they were mistaken.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Ugh. Not now Volcano, please. We’re busy sorting other crap out.

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@cjewel The area has been evacuated and the eruption doesn’t seem to contain any surprises so far 🤞🏻

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked”

https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak

> Google spokespeople have gone out their way to misdirect and mislead us on a variety of aspects of how their systems operate in an effort to control how we behave as SEOs

Like I wrote earlier, many SEO types are quite angry about this

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them - SparkToro”

https://sparktoro.com/blog/an-anonymous-source-shared-thousands-of-leaked-google-search-api-documents-with-me-everyone-in-seo-should-see-them/?ref=platformer.news

> My read is that Google likely uses the number of clicks on pages in Chrome browsers and uses that to determine the most popular/important URLs on a site

The original leaker.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Information is Relational • Buttondown”

https://buttondown.email/maiht3k/archive/information-is-relational/

> One of the key points is that, even if the answers provided could be magically made to be always “correct” (an impossible goal, for many reasons, but bear with me), chatbot-mediated information access systems interrupt a key sense-making process.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Adactio: Journal—Trust”

https://adactio.com/journal/21160

> In their rush to cram in “AI” “features”, it seems to me that many companies don’t actually understand why people use their products

Manton’s drive to add “AI” features to micro.blog is related to this. He doesn’t seem to get that a decent-sized portion of his customer base are creative industry types threatened by OpenAI’s actions or people who thought micro.blog would be a safe haven during a relentless AI Bubble

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Seen in this light, the only remarkable thing is that people didn’t get angry at Manton much much earlier, since he’s been extremely enthusiastic about both “AI” and OpenAI for a long while now.

(Personally, my issue is that micro.blog keeps adding new features, new apps, new stuff while leaving core issues unfixed and the core UX extremely unpolished for years. The “AI” stuff is just the latest in a cavalcade of distractions.)

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

(And, by “decent-sized” I mean that the people who are angered by this are a subset of micro.blog’s user base that’s large enough to be noticed. I doubt it’s a large enough group to have anything more than a minimal effect on the service’s bottom line, though.)

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@dave Yeah, it’s a bit odd. But in Manton’s defence, he’s both a genuine enthusiast of the tech (of the “it’s the greatest thing since the invention of the web” kind) and he’s been respectful enough to add a single settings checkbox that lets you turn off “AI” features site-wide

It is a bit weird that somebody so dedicated to the “small”, open, and indie web is also so all-in on something so heavy and opaque as generative models and OpenAI, but I guess people are complex that way

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@mcg Yeah, I think that's very reasonable.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“AI engineers face burnout in 'rat race' to stay competitive hits tech”

https://www-cnbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/05/03/ai-engineers-face-burnout-as-rat-race-to-stay-competitive-hits-tech.html

> He said he often has to put together demos of AI products for the company's board of directors on three-week timelines, even though the products are "a big pile of nonsense."

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Unless you have experience teaching or training a variety of web tech (HTML, JS, CSS, SVG, etc), you likely don't fully understand their relative learning difficulty

Basing your assessment of which is harder on your attempts to teach yourself is esp unreliable

It's hard for you to know if a tech is hard or if you were just unlucky in stumbling into a bad entry point. Getting into something with the wrong mental model means you have to first unlearn a bunch of crap before you can actually learn

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Not going to link to the actual review because I don’t care and will not care about the movie in question, but I find it interesting how quickly and thoroughly the meaning of “AI” in the public vocabulary as shifted from “futuristic automated intelligence” to “bad and lazily made”

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors”

https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2024/05/27/feed/

> It's been well over a year since I started serving 429s to clients which are hitting the feed too often. Since then, much has happened, and most of it is generally good news.

Like I’ve said too many times: most software projects fail outright, those that don’t are largely broken, and those that aren’t outright broken are buggy as hell. Much of dev is repair and salvage.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

So, yesterday I wrote a bit about how my experience with social media has been changing:

"Social Media."

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/social-media/

> I decided to lean into that and rely instead on something much simpler: Text files.

I also finally remembered to add a link to my Bluesky profile to the site footer.

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@smallcircles @rysiek So, one problem I have with this framing is that both-sidesing this is extremely unlikely to result in software improvements and features that address the problem.

"How can Mastodon help me protect myself from replies from assholes?" is a framing much more likely to result in effective tools because anything that requires cooperation from the replier is going to be ineffective against the many many many people who are habitually aggressive assholes to people online.

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