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

baldur, to random
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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, 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

baldur,
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@alda They absolutely are. They’re just more accessible than JS, IMO

baldur,
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@FalkAppel 🙂👍🏻

baldur,
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@alda 😄

baldur,
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@cogdog That’s absolutely brilliant 😄

baldur,
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@teleclimber @alcinnz So, the problem I have with this is that floats or tables for layout were not a standard. Blaming standards obscures the fact that floats and tables themselves, if you learned them all those years ago, still work without change. And by the time web specs are standard, they are remarkably stable

I reject the idea that you have to learn how to do something pre-spec. Don’t blame standards when it’s you memorising somebody’s work-in-progress

baldur,
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@Farbs This comparison is nonsense. It’s like saying that English is harder to learn than Icelandic just because its vocabulary is much larger. Icelandic has a much smaller vocabulary, but it’s grammar is more complex and many of the most common words in use (which you have to learn) are irregular, meaning the learning curve to get from zero to productive is much steeper.

The JS versus CSS comparison is similar. JS is much more complex and “irregular” and requires a much steeper learning curve

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

baldur,
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@brennen Yeah, exactly!

baldur,
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@icejam_ Yeah. Absolutely.

baldur, to random
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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,
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I have no idea why that thought popped into my head or whether it's making a point or not 😝

baldur,
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@0xDEADBEEF 😁

baldur, to random
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“Apple Annie’s Weblog · Working for a Living When Your Living isn’t Working, Part IV”

The other three entries in this series are worth your while as well. https://weblog.anniegreens.lol/2024/05/working-for-a-living-when-your-living-isnt-working-part-iv

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

baldur, to random
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React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/react-electron-llms-labour-arbitrage/

baldur,
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@jeanetienne My pleasure’ 👍🏻

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