... works as a web developer in Hveragerði, Iceland, and writes about the web, digital publishing, and web/product development
These are his notes
Seeing so many people who I previously considered smart and sensible convince themselves that a glorified excel spreadsheet is conscious—the latest iteration is that “consciousness is an illusion anyway”
All I can say is that I thought you were better than this and it saddens me that you’re not
Just saw somebody on a mailing list describe “AI” sceptics as performative contrarians and I guess they mean people like me. 🤷♂️
“Doing their hype for them • Buttondown”
The central claim of the tech companies selling LLMs is that any work that people do that results in text artifacts is just “text in-text out” and can therefore be replaced by their synthetic text-extruding machines.
And all too many people I know buy this line from them
“The most beautiful word in the world is ‘No’ — Chocolate and Vodka”
This whole post is very relatable. Esp. the bit about feeling like a financial failure 😅
“This inherently bad technology whose consequences are overwhelmingly negative has affected me, but I still actively pretend that the positive and negative are roughly equal because I’m smack-dab in the middle of a tech bubble” is a genre of blog post that should have died off years ago and yet…
“DHS report rips Microsoft for ‘cascade’ of errors in China hack - The Washington Post”
Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being the absolute worst at security and yet it has zero effect on its business because software quality genuinely does not matter one jot
“Jon Stewart Confirms Apple Wouldn’t Let Him Do Show on AI With FTC Chair”
‘Tech co doesn’t let contractor talk to FTC’ is always going to be a bad look, no matter the context
“Substack Is Setting Writers Up For A Twitter-Style Implosion – Home With The Armadillo”
“How we’re approaching theming with modern CSS - Piccalilli”
“You Are All On The Hobbyists Maintainers’ Turf Now”
I’ve been saying for a while that commercial software today is fundamentally about extracting value from OSS (I leave out the “F” intentionally). Most code in the software people interact with, even on closed platforms, is open
“’I’m not a cynic, I’m disappointed’ – the ‘Software Crisis’ Easter Sale – Baldur Bjarnason”
Last day for the ebook Easter sale. $10 USD discount code for every ebook. And, yeah, that means that you can get the two $10 USD ebooks I have for free with the discount code.
“Don’t modernize your code just for the heck of it | Go Make Things”
This. “Modernising” a code base is quite often a prelude to some of the worst software disasters you’ll ever see. It requires much greater expertise than just writing for a new project
Once I realised that quite a few people not only don’t enjoy reading or writing, many actually resent it and consider one, the other, or both to be the biggest chore at work, a lot of things clicked into place about both generative models and how people read
Ah, fuck. It’s “post lies without a fucking punchline and pretend it’s funny, only for this shit to be rediscovered as misinformation a few months down the line” day
A pox on every house that participates.
“Antitrust, Meta, Apple and more | Ian Betteridge”
But governments mandate how products are designed all the time, and not just in the EU.
This too is really good.
“EU votes to ban riskiest forms of AI and impose restrictions on others | Ars Technica”
The “obligations for high-risk systems” will only take effect after 36 months, the announcement said.
Mark my words, 36 months from now, tech cos will say that they didn’t get any advance notice about the law taking effect
This too was really quite good. A bit on the long side but worthwhile. And not just because I agree 100% with its take on auteur theory.
This essay is well worth your time.
My sister just sent me another batch of photos of her cat, Kolka, who is very much enjoying the comfort of indoors
(Kolka spent the first 18 months of her life outdoors in the Icelandic weather and seems to be quite done with outdoors thankyewverymuch, to my sister’s relief.)
#caturday
At some point, all these articles analysing LLMs by comparison to this or that prior tech will force me to write a post on how to use E.F. Schumacher’s framework of convergent vs divergent problems as a lens to analyse tech and with that I’ll alienate every non-academic reader I have for good 😝
“Front-end development’s identity crisis - Elly Loel”
There is no choice anymore, I can’t escape it. React is so pervasive that almost every job is using it. On the rare occasion that they’re not using it, they’re using something like it.
“Understanding Software – Ceejbot’s notes”
Why? Because communication is, as we nerds like to say, an order N squared problem. Adding the 10th person to a project team adds 9 new lines of communication to worry about to everybody.