thomasapowell

angusm, 1 day ago to LLMs

It's fashionable to criticize #LLMs, but can you think of another human invention that allows us to spend the energy budget of Tanzania to lift shitposts out of context and present them as if they were authoritative knowledge?

#AI

ricci, 2 days ago to random

At last, some information from Google that students can really use!

glyph, 3 days ago to random

New Blog: A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle https://blog.glyph.im/2024/05/grand-unified-ai-hype.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

baldur, 5 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/

mgs, 5 days ago to random

You are not your fucking iPad https://spyglass.org/macos-on-the-ipad/

hawkticehurst, 5 days ago to random

New post: Bring your own base class

The discussion over on a thread by @chriscoyier spurred me to respond in the form of a blog post (and also finally add the seventh installment of the web component series I started in December).

I talk about how building dependency-free #WebComponents that last a life time does not have to mean a bad developer experience.

https://hawkticehurst.com/writing/bring-your-own-base-class/

david_whitney, 7 days ago to random

I wonder if the root of all problems in software is our general inability to comprehend size and scale.

Everything from bad estimates, to premature optimisation, premature generalisation, poor abstraction and factoring, misunderstanding total cost of ownership, right sizing designs, the failure of microservices - it's failure to comprehend size.

tdp_org, 11 days ago to webdev

My pals in BBC World Service have been doing some awesome work on "lite" versions of their news articles (other page types to follow).
They essentially skip the Server-Side React hydration which means you end up with a simpler HTML+CSS page, no JS.
Page sizes drop significantly:

• Transferred: ~600KB -> 30KB
• Total: 1.65MB -> 135KB
  Just append .lite on a URL e.g. https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/crgyyvdz1dro.lite
  There's no on/off UX at the moment but they're working on that too.
  #WebDev #WebPerf #WebPerformance #BBC

Screenshot of a BBC World Service Mundo "lite" page with Dev Tools open showing bytes transferred and total as stated

cory, 15 days ago to random

This is pretty brutal https://how-i-experience-web-today.com

alfiekohn, 14 days ago to random

Jerome Bruner reminded us that we want students to "experience success and failure not as reward and punishment but as information." This insight is so essential that I call it Bruner's Law.

Its immediate implication is that grades must be eliminated (not merely tweaked) since they're inevitably experienced by students as rewards and punishments.

Beyond that, we should use Bruner's Law as the standard by which to weigh all other assessment practices and whether they make sense.

ufried, 14 days ago to random German

you can find the (unabridged) slide deck of my talk "from here to resilience" i gave at #jotb2024 at https://speakerdeck.com/ufried/from-here-to-resilience-a-travel-guide.

it discusses what resilience actually means (as there is a lot of confusion), how a typical journey towards resilience looks like and if we always need to go the whole way.

enjoy if you like ... ;)

wongmjane, 16 days ago to random

A stealth startup that’s so stealth that nobody but the founder knows about it and that it’ll remain stealth and kept as a secret forever

No address, no website, not even a line of code — in fact, it all stays in the founder’s mind only, to maintain highest level of stealth

kevlin, 25 days ago to random

As a human I want to be required to enter a default value in a field that shouldn't be present on an input form so that a developer doesn't have to change any code

AlSweigart, 26 days ago to random

deleted_by_author

collinsworth, 26 days ago to CSS

The question of whether CSS is a programming language serves only one purpose: to demote those who write it.

There is no confusion that needs to be clarified, and no other purpose to the debate beyond the most trivial kind of pedantry.

The debate itself is an act of gatekeeping, whether intentional or not. Its only meaningful effect is to elevate some work over other work, despite their nearly identical nature.

The only meaningful function of the question is segregation. #css

noybeu, 27 days ago to random

🚨 noyb has filed a complaint against the ChatGPT creator OpenAI

OpenAI openly admits that it is unable to correct false information about people on ChatGPT. The company cannot even say where the data comes from.

Read all about it here 👇

https://noyb.eu/en/chatgpt-provides-false-information-about-people-and-openai-cant-correct-it

rauschma, 28 days ago to random

Web apps—topics I’d like to be discussed more:
– Offline capability
– Peer-to-peer operation (syncing etc.)

It’s a shame that most web apps cease to work properly whenever the internet connection is flaky or gone. For me, that happens whenever I travel (train, plane, etc.).

Native apps are better at offline (but not much).

deadprogram, 1 month ago to random

New term we just discovered this morning: "Buzz Factor"

"Buzz Factor is how many buzzwords have to fall out of popularity for your system architecture to require a redesign."

brucelawson, 1 month ago to random

Why do marketing people get so obsessed about time someone spends on a page (with the assumption that longer=better because 'engagement')? Good IA should mean users find what they want quickly; good UX means quick ordering. Good copywriting means quick comprehension, doesn't it?

designatednerd, 1 month ago to random

Hello my name is senior dev, my pronouns are it/depends

rakyll, 1 month ago to random

FOMO in tech is a disease and is working against anyone who wants to tackle hard & important problems. I don't know any other sophisticated/technical industry where trends matter this much, and have this level of impact. We routinely force people to drop what they do and pivot to catch a bus they already missed.

trochee, 1 month ago to random

May I never ever ever be the kind of guy who Ed Zitron gets a hate on for

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Just a devastating career-long rundown of the dude who drove Google search into the ground, and some of the people on whose necks he stepped along the way

Via @mhoye

ChrisPirillo, 1 month ago to random

genx still bringing the thunder

stefan, 1 month ago to random

Haha! Apparently, some people celebrate a new "web day" — JS Naked Day.

It's 4/24 and this is heck smart. 😂 👇

https://js-naked-day.org

collinsworth, 1 month ago to random

I think we're focused on the wrong thing when we look at what tech works for a company like Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.

We should be looking at what tech works when you don't have a small army of staff engineers optimizing it. I want to know what I can scale without paying someone a half million dollar salary to do it.

There should be more case studies on things that don't have a billion-dollar company propping them up, humming along quietly on a cheap-ass VPS somewhere.