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baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“Half-ass it | everything changes”

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

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“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/

jimfl,
@jimfl@hachyderm.io avatar

@baldur “We believe that quality is more important than just piling on features; we believe that quality is the most important feature. And we believe that high quality is transformative — it makes for an app you never hesitate to reach for. You can rely on it, and you do, again and again.”

This is precisely the principle that is violated when someone sloppily gorilla-tapes LLM features onto their app for no good reason.

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,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@timolaine Yeah, I agree completely.

falcon,
@falcon@mastodon.falconk.rocks avatar

@baldur right. Such a lengthy regex necessarily has a lot of marginal cases that need to be verified or at least tested. But the state of practice being what it is, I imagine the developer wrote (at best) some random accept-reject tests, and trusted that the LLM verified the regex.

Which is asking a lot of something that demonstrably lacks mathematical reasoning but oh well.

Making that verification cognizable to developers is a very hard problem which of course LLMs don't solve; it's new.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“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
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“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,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

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
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“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
sstephenson,
@sstephenson@mastodon.social avatar

@baldur had to stop listening to his podcast back in 2021 after he and his cohost repeatedly made clear their support for b-secamp

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

@sstephenson Ugh. I had completely missed that

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“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
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

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

alda,
@alda@topspicy.social avatar

@baldur don't forget that many of us have been learning those as web standards have grown in complexity.

We have two decades of institutional knowledge that people just breaking into the industry don't have and management types rarely value.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

“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,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Every time I try to understand WASM’s new component model I bounce right off it 🤷🏻‍♂️

theshaunwalker,
@theshaunwalker@phpc.social avatar

@baldur based on my witness account of the JavaScript ecosystem as a server side engineer, I’m going with “yes” 😂

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

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.

Tijn,
@Tijn@dosgame.club avatar

@baldur "I'm not saying JS sucks"

  • "So you agree we should add as much JS as possible?"
baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

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

alcinnz,
@alcinnz@floss.social avatar

@baldur Its worth emphasizing: These skills don't goes out-of-date! Browserdevs go out of our way to ensure the pages you've written yesterdecade still work!

New optional features have been added, & best practices have solidified since the 1990s... But still!

Having to periodically rewrite outdated code is something webdevs bring upon themselves! Having to keep ontop of the latest frameworks is something webdevs bring upon themselves!

residualentropy,
@residualentropy@c.im avatar

@baldur Not just accessible to learn, accessible in the normal sense too :)

There might be a place for crazy JS and meta-frameworks, but I've always found it wild how beginners are steered towards them.

And imo JS actually isn't that bad when you use it for small things that augment a mostly-HTML/CSS site, just like it was originally meant for.

baldur, to random
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

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,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

And his poor judgement has been quite consistent for a while now. It just seems to be more on the surface lately

Like this earlier post on the Scarlett Johansson thing where he talks about ‘an “OpenAI can’t trusted” narrative’, which would imply that the only real problem is how OpenAI’s behaviours are framed, that the actual behaviours themselves are fine.

baldur,
@baldur@toot.cafe avatar

Or this post https://www.manton.org/2024/05/21/microsofts-recall-on.html where he praises the idea behind Microsoft’s “AI” spyware feature “Recall” despite its obvious potential for abuse

At least, the potential for abuse should be obvious to somebody who runs a social network that puts privacy and control over your own data front and centre. That he doesn’t see the potential issues makes you wonder how careful he’s being about privacy issues on micro.blog

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