Interesting to see the rise of ChatGPT-enabled Github spam.
The screenshots below are from one account, but if you search a bit it's very easy to find other examples.
Github doesn't appear to be on top of this at all, e.g., the account mentioned in https://github.com/swarna1101/VeChain-Thor/issues/1 has been spamming repos since last year and hasn't been banned (I reported a bad account once and got no response and nothing happened and haven't bothered since).
Apparently the Digg "algorithm", back when it worked, was one human being?
I've seen a few lists of "do things that don't scale" success stories, because VCs and founders love to bandy about survivorship bias success stories, but I'd be much more interested in a collection that included both successes and failures so that you could at least attempt to figure out what differentiated the successes and the failures.
I wonder why programming culture is (on average) so enamoured with smartness over reasonableness.
It's particularly striking if you hang out with people who have the opposite values (e.g., trades, which, on average, strongly value reasonableness over smartness). By contrast, programming culture seems quite ridiculous?
It's amazing how little many of the people who set tech policy understand about tech.
E.g., here's Senator Orin Hatch bragging about chairing the Senate High-Tech Task Force and then, puzzled, asking Zuckerberg how the company could possibly sustain a business if they don't charge users.
Zuck, caught off guard, takes a long pause and responds, "Senator, we run ads" (Zuck and the two FB staffers behind him, a VP and a lobbyist, hold in their laughter, with varying degrees of success).
A friend of mine listens to various sounds to help her fall asleep in an app that has various "sleep sounds" (ocean, wildlife, etc.)
As a former semi-serious sailor, she was excited to see that there were sailing sounds, so she started them up and immediately fell asleep. She then had rigging-related sailing nightmares all night because the soundtrack has the sounds ropes make when they're under an unsafe level of tension.
I feel like people consistently underestimate the size of "web scale" things unless they've had specific exposure to it. I'm curious if other people have noticed this or if this is some kind of bias on my end.
Some examples below (I can't think of any examples going the other direction off the top of my head):
At Google orientation in 2013, an instructor asked people to guess how many servers Google had, and no one was even close (everyone guessed quite low; I didn't guess but wish I did!).
If you look at Wikipedia's list of forum software, it's all ancient except discourse, and discourse seems unlikely to ever be something great for users
Its performance is famously terrible. People often point out how unusable it is unless you have a fast phone and the founder's response to this has been to rant about how Qualcomm sucks and need to make faster processors
This exchange reminds me of the debate I had with Jeff Atwood on whether or not servers should use ECC memory a decade ago. Jeff said no and I disagreed and said yes in https://danluu.com/why-ecc/.
At the time, there was one argument that could've, theoretically, been overturned by progress: Jeff argued that commodity non-ECC memory was becoming more reliable and was highly reliable. This was not true at the time, and it turns out this still isn't true a decade later.
I wonder when (if?) driver behavior will get back to normal. Despite barely driving, most of the most reckless driving I've ever seen has been since the pandemic.
You can see this in the data: 2019-2021 had the biggest (%) increase in U.S. per capita motor vehicle fatalities over a two year period since 1944-1946, which was due to people coming back from the war. Normalized for miles travelled, 2019-2021 had the largest increase over a two year period as far back as there's data (1921).
It's amazing how often, when I look into why something turned to junk (consumer products, tools, etc.), it turns out that it's because a PE firm or a PE-like software company acquired the thing and then made an extremely short-term optimized move that wiped out most of the value and potential revenue of the thing, e.g., I was looking into why a formerly active automotive forum is now a ghost town and it turned out they got bought by VerticalScope, which has apparently killed ~1k forums?
Something I really enjoy is seeing how products signal their quality in funny ways to appease consumer preferences. A few examples below, but if you have other examples, I'd love to hear them.
A simple example is any kind of handheld product that's deliberately made to be heavy because consumers associate heft with quality. In extreme cases, adding a weight for no other purpose than to signal that the item feels "well built" or "solid" or whatever it is people like about heavier items.
Saw a headline about how an MIT student used Playground AI with the prompt "Was trying to get a linkedin profile photo with AI editing & this is what it gave me" and it made her white. Tried this with my profile photo and the result reproduced and I became white.
Using a summer photo where I've had more sun exposure, it often turns me South Asian or African. Occasionally (maybe 1 time in 10), I'll become East Asian, but I never stayed Vietnamese or turned into any sort of Southeast Asian.
I wonder why some people find that GPT-4 is a huge productivity boost when doing programming projects outside of their normal domain (e.g., person with no web experience doing a web project) and some people find it to be worse than having no help at all.
I've seen quite a few people publicly report huge gains, but on private slacks/discords I'm on, I've mostly seen people get stuck when they end up with a mess they don't understand when GPT-4's suggestions don't fix their issues.
A site with ranked feed has somehow decided that I want to see viral UX/designer content.
In every viral UX comparison I've seen so far, the "good" version looks more "modern" but is also less legible / usable. E.g., below, the contrast is lower and legibility is sacrificed for cleanness.
Reminds me of this story where automotive engineers had to fight designers to get headlights that illuminated the road. They were actually losing the fight until Consumer Reports started testing headlights for function, which created enough of a stink that engineers were able to push for headlights that actually work over headlights that follow modern design principles: https://danluu.com/why-benchmark/
And sure, #notalldesigners, but this is a problem that goes back decades across multiple industries.
Designers were handed full control over UX. Engineers who fought for usability over a slick-looking interface burned out and left after repeatedly being overruled.
Wow, people really don't like iTerm2 adding an optional AI integration which requires you to enter your OpenAI key to use, calling it "no longer fit for purpose", etc.
Someone pointed out that this feature is optional and not only has to be enabled, but it requires you to enter a key to use. That user was, apparently, reported on gitlab and is now blocked.
I'm doing mobile performance benchmarking on various slow phones (ones sold in "developing" countries), on a low-latency high-speed internet connection (a computer on WiFi in the same location gets ~1Gbps with a few ms latency).
Using default themes, which blogging platform do you predict has the BEST performance?
