“Turning Off Adobe Acrobat’s AI Assistant - Words by Wes”

“Custom Element Naming | BitWorking”

I didn’t have an opinion on this but I’m seeing his point.

How many companies adopted MongoDB because “it’s the future!” and are now stuck with it until insolvency or the heat-death of the universe, whichever comes first?

Be careful about making technical decisions based on bubble logic

“Adactio: Journal—My approach to HTML web components”

“Why monopolies are harmful”

Remember, pretty much all of tech is either a monopoly or oligopoly. That’s how they get away with bad management, bad products, and anti-competitive behaviour

“Managing Up”

Like I’ve been saying for a while, like a broken record—that makes sense to people again, right, with the resurgence of vinyl, or is modern vinyl too durable to scratch and skip?—the tech management and exec class is manifestly bad at their job

“How do you accidentally run for President of Iceland? | by Anna Andersen”

Glad somebody wrote about this because it’s an objectively hilarious UX case study

(And they just announced that eleven people managed to get the requisite number of endorsements in time)

“Ex-Amazon Was Told to Ignore Law to Develop AI Faster: Lawsuit”

I’m not surprised.

“The polish paradox”

The more you polish, the less you see

“Thoughts on Cosmotechnics - daverupert.com”

“Luke Kanies | Why We Hate Working for Big Companies”

Please stop using generated art for thumbnails and illustrations for videos and blog posts that aren’t generated themselves. It gives people the impression that the post is spammy bullshit. Starting to see people dismiss links out of hand just because of the preview thumbnail on social media

Fun how context is important for making sense of language. Like the phrase “they live in the valley, on the Kópavogur side, in one of the Vestmannaeyja houses” (“þau búa í dalnum, Kópavogsmegin, í einu af Vestmannaeyjahúsunum”) immediately pinpoints a location if you know the context

“Why Would I Buy This Useless, Evil Thing? - Aftermath”

This x1000. Just… why?

Google laid off their python lang team. This is a bad idea:

  • Google is all-in on “AI” and python is integral to ML
  • Other lang teams should be worried. If something as core to ML like python gets axed in an AI Bubble, what hope do other langs have?

social.coop/@Yhg1s/11…

“Surviving the AI Summer. When I was in grad school in the 1990s… | by Amy Bruckman | Apr, 2024 | Medium”

Right now his research organization is only allowed to work on AI.

FFS

One of the worst things that can happen to a new idea for reforming software development is to have DHH swoop in with a half-assed shitty implementation of it, poisoning the idea for a generation of devs

“So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.”

None of this is surprising (as an end user, WordPress’s trajectory towards shit has been all too obvious IMO and I’ve heard similar from others) but it’s still eye-opening to read

“Passkeys: A Shattered Dream”

This feels broadly accurate. The UX for passkeys is, well… unusable.

That feeling when you do a customer survey for a SaaS investigating generative model features and nowhere in the survey does “I don’t want or need AI features” appear even once

“Five Things: April 25, 2024 — As in guillotine…”

I’m thinking “says it’s a good idea to ban TikTok” is my new rubric for assessing whether somebody in tech is likely to have poor judgement

On pretty much every concrete measure on “undermining the rule of law or democracy Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and tech billionaires are much worse than TikTok

“Scalable Extraction of Training Data from (Production) Language Models”

We show an adversary can extract gigabytes of training data from open-source language models like Pythia or GPT-Neo, semi-open models like LLaMA or Falcon, and closed models like ChatGPT

Surprise!

So, it turns out that my granddad’s taste in leisure reading was way more interesting before he went all-in on Clancy and Hornblower.

Two old pulp paperbacks. The first is titled “The Loveliest of Friends: complete and unabridged” by G. Sheila Donisthorpe and features a pair of women that probably don’t have a platonic relationship. The second is titled “Queer Patterns: a delicate theme treated honestly and candidly” by Lilyan Brock. Again “complete and unabridged”. It features two women. One is lounging on the sofa, smoking.

At my grandma’s place for the first day of summer (it’s an Icelandic thing) listening to her tell stories on what it was like growing up during the occupation of Iceland. Honestly strange to think it happened here.