... works as a web developer in Hveragerði, Iceland, and writes about the web, digital publishing, and web/product development
These are his notes
Just had to deal with an “AI” customer service chatbot for the first time
The software industry honestly deserves to burn to the ground for thinking for even a seconds that this miserable, condescending, “aw shucks” experience is acceptable customer support
Just fuck right off
“On the deck-chairs of HTTP/2 — Varnish version trunk documentation”
“Who can you trust with your online business? – Cloud Four”
Managers and owners preferring bad advice that’s “standard” over good advice backed by research and experience has been a constant in my career in web dev.
“Wait, is cloud bad? - by Forrest Brazeal - Good Tech Things”
Anytime you hear an appeal to nostalgia, your instinct should be to distrust it. I was around for some of the good old days and I can assure you they were terrible
“Microincentives and Enshittification – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow”
I just did a short rewrite of the landing page for the upcoming test-driven web development course. Trying to make the value proposition clearer. 🙂️
This is happening today in Iceland
“Monopoly Power Is the Elephant in the Room in the AI Debate”
“JavaScript Is Enabled by Default in Web Browsers - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”
Browsers don’t turn off Javascript by default. And you don’t have to either.
“1Password discloses security incident linked to Okta breach”
‘Put everything into the cloud’ they said.
‘It’ll be both cost-effective and more secure’ they said.
🤦🏻♂️
“This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI”
Unlike Glaze, their earlier effort which made it harder to generative models to learn a visual style, this is an actual attack which aims to poison the model and make it less effective.
Moving very slowly through the kitchen so as to not spook the blackbird feeding on the balcony.
“Notes, Links, and Weeknotes (23 October 2023)”
www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/week…
Where I write about the high opportunity cost of writing critically about “AI” as well as links and a few other things.
I’ve just published “How do you even web dev without node? A quick introduction to test-driven web development using just the browser”
Code coverage and import maps, combined with mocha’s old-style HTML test runner, is a potent combo.
Honestly, whenever I use SASS I end up regretting it because of some subtle incompatibility with standard CSS. Like this:
“Robin Rendle — Cut the Intro”
This advice works with most types of writing: blog posts, books, docs.
The one notable exception is academic writing where being readable and getting to the point will only be used against you.
she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors
“Pixels of the Week – October 22, 2023 by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer.”
“AI’s Electricity Use Is Spiking So Fast It’ll Soon Use as Much Power as an Entire Country”
Side-eyeing every single one of you who is enabling this.
I just published “How do you even web dev without node? A quick introduction to test-driven web development using just the browser”
I figured it might be useful to publish this blog post a bit early to get more eyeballs on it before I push it out to the newsletter Monday
“Okta stock falls after company says client files accessed by hackers via support system”
Rolling your own auth is hard. OTOH centralised auth service make for extremely attractive targets for motivated hackers.