baldur

baldur, 8 hours ago to random

This talk by Meredith Whittaker is excellent. I originally clicked way from it without reading because the title is in German, but turns out the talk itself is absolutely in English.

https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/aktuelles/detail/die-rede-der-zukunftspreistraegerin

> What we call AI today grew out of this toxic model – and must be understood primarily as a way of marketing the derivatives of mass surveillance and concentrated platform and computational power.

baldur, 6 hours ago to random

“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, 12 hours ago to random

“Distracted”

https://lmnt.me/blog/distracted.html

> This industry used to sell solutions. Now it sells nothing, disguised as possibility.

baldur, 1 day ago to random

Worth noting that the “would you rather be alone in the forest with a man or a bear?” question plays out slightly differently in my circles.

baldur, 1 day ago to random

“Faking William Morris, Generative Forgery, and the Erosion of Art History”

https://maggieappleton.com/generative-forgery

> To confound matters, the Etsy stores selling these generated images also sell genuine prints by Morris, Monet, Klimt, and Matisse

baldur, 2 days ago to random

“How the new Microsoft Recall feature fundamentally undermines Windows security | by Kevin Beaumont | May, 2024 | DoublePulsar”

https://doublepulsar.com/how-the-new-microsoft-recall-feature-fundamentally-undermines-windows-security-aa072829f218

baldur, 2 days ago to random

At least we can comfort ourselves with the thought that at least this AI Bubble shall pass too, leaving behind a new global infrastructure for fraud, misinformation, and spam, ensuring that everybody involved in implementing these models will have helped make the world much worse, contributing to our collective inability to fight the global climate crisis and paving the way for the return of fascism.

No, wait, that’s not comforting. That’s the other thing.

baldur, 3 days ago to random

Ran across this on social media

"I just used ChatGPT to generate a 300 character regex for me, saved me an hour.

TBH if you aren’t using it that seems like a skill issue."

And it’s a perfect example of what I mean when I say that “AI” tools are a fundamentally conservative force

baldur, 3 days ago to random

Anybody who thought that OpenAI and Sam Altman were trustworthy before the recent drama has already demonstrated a pretty darn high tolerance for bullshit and shenanigans. A CEO positioning a voice chatbot as a celebrity soundalike without permission isn’t even going to blip on their ethical radar

baldur, 3 days ago to random

“Half-ass it | everything changes”

This is excellent advice. https://everythingchanges.us/blog/half-ass-it/

baldur, 3 days ago to random

“Boring is good”

I don’t think it’s that much of a coincidence that I read this in NetNewsWire. https://coryd.dev/posts/2024/boring-is-good/

baldur, 4 days ago to random

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, 4 days ago to random

“WebAssembly: A promising technology that is quietly being enshitified”

"So we have this WASI thing that is only version 0.2, and that is already way more complex than the alternative solutions. Is there any way that it will succeed?" https://kerkour.com/webassembly-wasi-preview2

baldur, 4 days ago to random

“Forget Subtext – People Don’t Even Get Surtext – Terence Eden’s Blog”

In my experience, reactionaries generally do not even do a surface reading of texts https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/05/forget-subtext-people-dont-even-get-surtext/

baldur, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago) to random

“Manton Reece - Yesterday’s AI thoughts”

Two things worry me about this post:

1. Explicitly taking the side of a company and CEO that many have good reason to distrust is not “balanced”
2. The replies would seem to indicate that micro.blog is becoming a one-sided pro-AI echo chamber https://www.manton.org/2024/05/22/yesterdays-ai-thoughts.html

baldur, 5 days ago to random

We really don’t make enough of the fact that you don’t need JS to make a nice website. Just HTML and CSS

And, whatever most programmers say about them, HTML and CSS are absolutely much more accessible to learn than JS ever has been or will be

baldur, 4 days ago to random

“ongoing by Tim Bray · The Colors of Racism”

"Trollope’s writings and opinions were strikingly self-inconsistent"

Inconsistency is one of the core characteristics of a reactionary and Trollope is pretty much the dictionary definition of a reactionary https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/05/17/Colors-of-Racism

baldur, 4 days ago to random

Why you need to go back to basics if you want to learn HTML or CSS: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/css-and-back-to-basics/

baldur, 4 days ago to random

Some, not many but some, people seem to think saying something like “CSS and HTML can do great things without JS” is the same as saying “JS sucks!”

This is why social media is honestly a chore sometimes.

baldur, 5 days ago to random

Manton’s takes on “AI” specifically and big companies in general exhibits a level of poor judgement that makes me really worried as an active user of micro.blog

The community there is fairly nice, but I really regret adopting it for my bookmarking/web notes all those years ago.
https://social.lol/@robb/112479532439276941

baldur, 5 days ago to random

Steve Jobs second tenure at Apple was 1997-2011: 14 years

Tim Cook’s run it for 13, 2011-2024

Since Jobs’ health steadily declined from 2006, requiring Cook to step in regularly, I think it’s safe to say that modern Apple is now more of a Tim Cook organisation than it is a Steve Jobs one

baldur, 5 days ago to random

It’s almost as if Sam Altman has a history of disregarding somebody’s consent.

baldur, 6 days ago to random

The deskilling of web dev is harming the product but, more importantly, it's damaging our health – this is why burnout happens: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-deskilling-of-web-dev-is-harming-us-all/

baldur, 6 days ago to random

“Google Cloud shows it can break things for lots of customers • The Register”

Like I said when the layoffs where first announced, you’re going to see random shit go wrong because these cos now have a bunch of systems nobody in-house understands any more. This is what happens with mass layoffs https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/20/google_cloud_network_outage/

baldur, 6 days ago to random

“Relating Natural Language Aptitude to Individual Differences in Learning Programming Languages | Scientific Reports”

"These results provide a novel framework for understanding programming aptitude, suggesting that the importance of numeracy may be overestimated in modern programming education environments."

Ya think? https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-60661-8