Links (4 June 2024)
– Baldur
Bjarnason
- “So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors”. “It’s been well over a year since I started serving 429s to clients which are hitting the feed too often. Since then, much has happened, and most of it is generally good news.”
- “Adactio: Journal—Trust”. “In their rush to cram in “AI” “features”, it seems to me that many companies don’t actually understand why people use their products.”
- “Google won’t comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation - The Verge”. “…suggests that Google hasn’t been entirely truthful about it for years.”
- “Information is Relational • Buttondown”. “One of the key points is that, even if the answers provided could be magically made to be always “correct” (an impossible goal, for many reasons, but bear with me), chatbot-mediated information access systems interrupt a key sense-making process.”
- “An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them - SparkToro”. “My read is that Google likely uses the number of clicks on pages in Chrome browsers and uses that to determine the most popular/important URLs on a site.”
- “Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked”. “Google spokespeople have gone out their way to misdirect and mislead us on a variety of aspects of how their systems operate in an effort to control how we behave as SEOs.”
- “Despite buzz, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT see minimal daily use, survey finds | Euronews”. “Despite higher awareness and usage rates among younger populations, the overall frequency of usage remains low.”
- “Your site or app should work as much as possible without JavaScript | Go Make Things”. “I’m amazed at how often this is a controversial opinion, but…” Yeah. This shouldn’t be a controversial statement at all.
- “Against optimization | A Working Library”. “Another way to look at this is that you cannot optimize for resilience. Resilience requires a kind of elasticity, an ability to stretch and reach but then to return, to spring back into a former shape.”
- “How it feels to get an AI email from a friend”. “The email felt like getting a form letter, one of many thousands sent out by a large agency; except it was sent to me by, you know, a friend.”
- “Cybercriminals Abuse Stack Overflow to Promote Malicious Python Package”. “When reached for comment, Stack Overflow told The Hacker News that it took steps to suspend the account.”
- “The different ways to build a resilient website or web app | Go Make Things”. HTML first. Build on that, either statically, through templates on the server, or both.
- “Partnering with an AI company means I can no longer trust your output”. “But, if you’re going to leverage AI tools that we all know to hallucinate in the context of journalistic output, I won’t be able to trust that input.”
- “Engineering for Slow Internet”. “If you’re an app developer reading this, can you tell me, off the top of your head, how your app behaves on a link with 40 kbps available bandwidth, 1,000 ms latency, occasional jitter of up to 2,000 ms, packet loss of 10%, and a complete 15-second connectivity dropout every few minutes?”
- “The use-html custom element”. I like the concept of mimicking SVG’s
useelement. My only note would be to throw an error instead of a string if something goes wrong. Other than that 👍🏻 - “11ty Goes Fully Independent—JS Party #325—zachleat.com”. “I’ve been blown away by the response so far, y’all are amazing. At time of this post we’re currently at 56% of the goal.”
- “The feed reader score service is now online”
- “Catch-22: Thoughts on “AI” in Marketing and Inevitability — As in guillotine…”. “One of the biggest reasons “AI” is gaining traction in marketing circles so quickly is most marketing is actually pretty bad already. Sorry, not sorry.”
- “The different static site generators (and which one to choose) | Go Make Things”. “All of this is to say, if I had to choose an option for a client today in a vacuum, I’d like recommend 11ty if I had no additional context.” This x1000. By far the most convenient choice IMO if you’re familiar with JS.
- “Reader feedback: feed reader scores and “like” buttons”
- “Understanding the real threat generative AI poses to our jobs”. "Generative AI is likely to be extremely disruptive to atomized, freelance, and precarious creative labor. " and, “Even if it’s not being prominently used, generative AI can be used as leverage against workers just about anywhere.”
- “A modern approach to browser support | Clearleft”
- “Apple Annie’s Weblog · WeblogPoMo 2024 Retrospective: Communities of Content”. I didn’t participate in the WeblogPoMo but it was fun to follow people who did.
- “Witnessing the death of the web as a news medium | Christian Heilmann”. “Almost every social platform now ranks posts with links lower than posts that are just statements.” I know this but I still can’t bring myself to not add links to most of what I write.
- “New zine: How Git Works!”. Looks both fun and useful