@baldur@toot.cafe
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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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baldur, to random
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“Half-ass it | everything changes”

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

baldur, to random
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“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, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

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,
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It will never tell you that your bad idea is bad. Doing even minimal research would force you to at least consider the possibility that this might be a bad idea with long term consequences about the maintainability of your project. ChatGPT will never do that.

It will never tell you that you’ve made a fundamental mistake in your assumptions or design.

Instead it will help you accelerate full-speed in the wrong direction.

baldur,
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@timolaine Yeah, I agree completely.

baldur, to random
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“I Need Your Help to Make 11ty Fully Independent and Sustainable in 2024—zachleat.com” https://www.zachleat.com/web/independent-sustainable-11ty/

baldur, to random
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“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,
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Also, I’m the person on the private mailing list who warned people about Trollope’s racism. The reason I I used the toned-down wording I did is I knew I was in an audience of Trollope fans who are almost certainly blind to how much of a reactionary classist he was.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“The most harmful belief I had as a beginner photographer — aows”

Speaking of mental models that hold back your learning. https://aows.co/blog/2024/5/20/the-most-harmful-belief-i-had-as-a-beginner-photographer

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“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, (edited ) to random
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“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,
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@sstephenson Ugh. I had completely missed that

baldur, to random
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“My own little patch”

"It feels like things have descended in to a complete shitshow1 and are only getting worse." https://rachsmith.com/my-own-little-patch/

baldur, to random
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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, 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,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

If you're unlucky enough to start at something with the wrong mental model, it's always going to be a struggle until you actually do the work to unlearn it. This is very hard to do on your own because we generally aren't aware of our own worldviews

And comparing the relative effectiveness of tech you don't fully understand versus one you do is always going to favour the latter and does not accurately reflect the capabilities of either

baldur,
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@alda Oh, yeah. Absolutely that too. Both that advancing as a dev with the stack as it grew more complex results in a lot of institutional knowledge and that this knowledge isn't being valued. Both true.

baldur,
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CSS vs JS is a case in point. JS’s complexity tends to come from systemic interactions between language structures whereas CSS complexity tends to come from interactions in the DOM. (Generalising a bit, but roughly.) If you come at CSS with the JS worldview in an environment where you don’t control the DOM you’re basically fucked as a learner and CSS will feel unpredictable and super complex.

baldur,
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This is why it’s generally a bad idea to teach a component system before HTML or CSS. The purpose of components—web or React—is to abstract away the DOM. Learning components first, then CSS, means you’ve just turned CSS into a black box system where every action will have unknowable interactions and consequences. This is fine if you already know CSS. You have the tools to dig in and discover why, say, position: sticky isn’t working. But to somebody learning it makes CSS feel like chaos incarnate

baldur,
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@luxmoore Absolutely.

baldur,
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@jen4web 👍🏻 It’s a super hard job that’s constantly under-appreciated.

baldur,
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@jen4web Yeah, this is my experience as well.

baldur,
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@cferdinandi 🙂

baldur,
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@thomasapowell I’ve heard similar things from others.

baldur, to random
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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,
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@teleclimber My point was that you should not blame standards for skills in non-standard techniques becoming obsolete.

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@teleclimber @alcinnz Apologies. I misunderstood what you said in the rest of that post. It sounded like you were blaming standards for float- or table-based layouts or other “tricks” becoming obsolete. Sorry. 🙂

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