Massive link post to start off the year
– Baldur
Bjarnason
Quite a lot of links. Almost a month’s worth.
Links #
Software Development and related #
- "Untangling Threads - Erin Kissane’s small internet website"
- "Michael Tsai - Blog - iOS 17 Autocorrect". People are saying that autocorrect improves after a few weeks, but Icelandic autocorrect is now weirder than it was before.
- "Deep Cloning Objects in JavaScript, the Modern Way". Love structuredClone. Probably overuse it TBH 😄
- If this would help us drop 100k rich text editing widgets then I hope every browser gets on board ASAP. "EditContext API Explainer". At first glance it looks good. This, transitions, and the navigation API would cover a good portion of the biggest pain points in web dev today.
- "LH units are cool - Piccalilli"
- "Why accessibility is good for business (according to my mechanic) – The Interconnected"
- "Eigensolutions: composability as the antidote to overfit - Lea Verou"
- "Reflections on a Month with BBEdit and Nova — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho". If I ever switch back to to the mac, it’ll be because I miss the indie apps on the platform. Windows, Linux, the web, and mobile/tablet apps don’t really compare, IMO.
- "Shadow DOM and the problem of encapsulation | Read the Tea Leaves". I really enjoyed this post, but it’s triggering many thoughts on teamwork and collaboration in web dev. Mainly that the field has a management problem that we’re trying to solve with technology and specifications.
- "Tech issues: The myth of inevitable technological progress - Vox".
- "Adactio: Links—Cold-blooded software"
- "Blind CSS Exfiltration: exfiltrate unknown web pages | PortSwigger Research". If you allow unvetted CSS, this is why you need to both limit all URL references to an allow list and to probably block CSS variables as well
- "WCAG 2: Guidelines and Guardrails - Eric Eggert"
- "Adactio: Journal—Words I wrote in 2023"
- ’Notes from “An approach to computing and sustainability inspired from permaculture” by Devine LuLinvega - Jim Nielsen’s Blog’
- "Fix The System Problem, Not The People Problem – Paul Taylor". Always post a link to somebody quoting John Seddon.
- "A lot of what people use React for would be better handled with vanilla JavaScript | Go Make Things". And you can substitute “React” there for pretty much any framework around. Frameworks and dependencies are overused.
- "Advice for new software devs who’ve read all those other advice essays - Buttondown"
- "Simple and Small Git Hosting". It feels like every time I read about Git I learn something new. And I once spent a couple of weeks reading up on git’s internal storage format just out of curiosity, so it’s not as if I’m unfamiliar 😄
- "The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn’t Exist | jakelazaroff.com". The taxonomy here looks fairly accurate
- "Only you can give meaning to your career: How to mark moments that matter by planting a flag"
- "An Unreasonable Investment – Rands in Repose"
- "Should you use an SSG or SSR to build your static site? | Go Make Things"
- "Cold-blooded Software - Jim Nielsen’s Blog". This still remains one of the better analogies on software design I’ve seen in recent years
- ’Questionable Advice: “My boss says we don’t need any engineering managers. Is he right?” – charity.wtf’. Most tech cos are founded by guys who don’t understand what management is for and when they’re forced to implement a management structure they reach for authoritarianism
- "NPM registry prank leaves developers unable to unpublish packages | SC Media". Making this single registry that foundation of all node and web development remains a supremely bad idea.
- "Harmful complexity: using React for static content | Go Make Things". That people do this is honestly a bit mind-boggling.
- "Reflections on 2023. Reflections on changes, work, home… | by Sarah Drasner | Jan, 2024 | Medium"
- "#AudioEye Has Dropped Its Suit Against Me — Adrian Roselli". Thank $DEITY. I have to hope that with this gross attempt at intimidation AudioEye has thoroughly nuked their own reputation
- "Only you can give meaning to your career: How to mark moments that matter by planting a flag"
- "In Case You Missed It: 2023—zachleat.com"
- "Level Access crosses the line; buys accessibility overlay company - Eric Eggert"
Media #
- "Warner Bros Discovery Eyes Paramount Merger, Because Its Last Two Disastrous Mergers Apparently Weren’t Disastrous Enough | Techdirt". The headline says it all, really. Mergers are almost always an incredibly bad idea for the companies involved. The merged entity is less valuable and less profitable.
- "They Want You To Forget What A Film Looks Like - Aftermath". “There’s an entire portion of the population that takes overt pleasure in the over-smoothed, perverts that prefer all media to be fast, high frame rate, and scrubbed squeaky clean.”
- "They Want You To Forget What A Film Looks Like - Aftermath". “But the modern application of much of AI is precisely about taking labor out of the equation. Why transfer a tape correctly when we can just have a computer guess badly instead?” Good enough for two quotes.
- "Enough of the homogenous and soulless content all around the internet | Zell Liew"
- "Five Things: January 4, 2024 — As in guillotine…"
“AI” #
- "‘Where Do You Get Your Ideas?’ AI and the Creative Industries – Oisín McGann". “I can’t think of a better metaphor for this whole thing than using overwhelming financial power to claim ownership of someone else’s voice and then using that to make more money.”
- "Artificial intelligence can find your location, alarming privacy experts : NPR"
- "Child sex abuse images found in dataset training image generators, report says | Ars Technica". There’s almost certainly much more of that material in the dataset.
- "Pluralistic: What kind of bubble is AI? (19 Dec 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow"
- "Inside the First ‘SEO Heist’ of the AI Era". The lesson here seems to be that Google is perfectly fine with generative garbage taking over its results as long as the perpetrators don’t brag about it.
- "Things are about to get a lot worse for Generative AI". Like I and quite a few others have been saying for ages, generative models are very prone to verbatim copying both text and image. People in tech pretend it doesn’t happen, but it’s much more prevalent than people think
- "AI does not produce reliable information. As Trump’s former lawyer has fucked around and found out. — Joan Westenberg"
- "Dark Visitors - A list of known AI agents on the internet"
- "More than calculators: Why large language models threaten learning, teaching, and education". “So here is my informed prediction: LLMs will ultimately be a net harm to student learning and schools, accelerating the collapse of public education.”
- “What we will be left is teachers who cannot do instructional design, students who cannot learn, and an inescapable dependency on whatever was published on the internet circa 2022, when humans used to write.”
- "Diane Duane on Tumblr" “Can you add AI to the hydraulics system?” We’re in the middle of a massive bubble and this is only a fraction of the ridiculousness it’ll reach before it pops, and all of you who are using generative models have a hand in inflating it.
- "The New York Times Sues OpenAI, Microsoft for Copyright". This was inevitable. Especially if search engine traffic is tanking.
- "Generative AI Has a Visual Plagiarism Problem". As a consequence of using benchmarks intended to measure human performance generative models are designed to memorise, which makes them prone to overfitting the output. There is a wealth of academic research demonstrating this
- "Silicon Valley runs on Futurity - by Dave Karpf". Tech co stocks will get annihilated once the AI Bubble pops, so they’ll do everything humanly possible to keep it going. Be supremely sceptical about AI-boosting press, research or case studies.
- "What’s next for Mozilla? | TechCrunch". ‘He also believes that AI will become part of everything Mozilla does. “We want to implement AI in a way that’s trustworthy and benefits people,” he said.’ Boo, hiss, boo.
- "jwz: My dinosaur just threw up in its mouth a little"
Photos #
Did a bit of photography during the break.
