Links (18 June 2024)
– Baldur
Bjarnason
Returned to the old link format as the one I tried last week didn’t translate well to RSS.
This week’s highlight #
“Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow”.
By not hiring and training up junior engineers, we are cannibalizing our own future. We need to stop doing that.
Any industry that stops hiring entry-level workers is in for a very, very bad time a decade down the line.
However, you cannot trust generated code. I can’t emphasize this enough. AI-generated code always looks quite plausible, but even when it kind of “works”, it’s rarely congruent with your wants and needs. It will happily generate code that doesn’t parse or compile. It will make up variables, method names, function calls; it will hallucinate fields that don’t exist. Generated code will not follow your coding practices or conventions. It is not going to refactor or come up with intelligent abstractions for you. The more important, difficult or meaningful a piece of code is, the less likely you are to generate a usable artifact using AI.
The rest #
- “Ricoh launches Pentax 17 half-frame fixed lens film camera: Digital Photography Review”. I really, really want one of these but can’t justify the expense. Goes onto my “in case of windfall” shopping list
- “DOC • Design without process, or the form factor trap”. “A design team that discards rigorous process loses the ability to tell whether or not the resultant artifact is fit for purpose.”
- “Justice Department Sues Adobe for Hidden Fees and Difficult Cancellations | PetaPixel”. So, this is one of the reasons why I don’t get my Lightroom subscription directly from Adobe. You can always cancel an app store subscription without hassle
- “Notes From “You Are Not A Gadget” - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”. “Jaron Lanier’s book You Are Not a Gadget was written in 2010, but its preface is a prescient banger for 2024, the year of our AI overlord”
- “Data Centers & AI Are Sucking Up Huge Amounts Of Renewable Energy - CleanTechnica”. “Ai” and crypto are soaking up the renewable energy we need for the energy transition
- “Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent • Robb Knight”. “So they’re using headless browsers to scrape content, ignoring robots.txt, and not sending their user agent string”
- “Perplexity AI is susceptible to prompt injection | LewisDale.dev”. Prompt injection is not a solved problem. Nor is training data poisoning. Most vendors are “solving” it by pretending the problems don’t exist before asking us to pay for this crap
- “Software and the monopoly of the recent | Sean Voisen”.“What struck me most in the conversation was the idea that Kell called ‘the monopoly of the recent,’ namely that the tech world is too obsessed with newness, often to our detriment and to the exclusion of others”
- “Custom Elements; Unconnected Callback – David Bushell – Freelance Web Design (UK)”. So, another possibly controversial opinion I have is that you should pretty much always use defer or type=module on your scripts and make sure the page still renders properly with uninitialised elements.
- “Microsoft Refused to Fix Flaw Years Before SolarWinds Hack — ProPublica”. “The federal government was preparing to make a massive investment in cloud computing, and Microsoft wanted the business. Acknowledging this security flaw could jeopardize the company’s chances, Harris recalled one product leader telling him”
- “Historical Accuracy, Racism, Courtney Milan, and The Duke Who Didn’t Conform to Genre Norms – Journal of Popular Romance Studies”
- “How Not to Be All About What It’s Not All About: Further Thoughts on Writing About Someone Else’s Culture and Experience - Reactor”. “Catching hell for what you write is part of being a writer. Being taken to task for our errors, innocent or otherwise, is how we find out what they are, find out how to fix them, how to avoid them in the first place.”
- “How to Stop Deepfake Porn Using AI | Teen Vogue”. "This is, unsurprisingly, a good piece that clearly explains the concept, the larger context, what to do, and what can be done. "
- “How to help someone use a computer”. “Whenever they start to blame themselves, respond by blaming the computer. Then keep on blaming the computer, no matter how many times it takes.” Yes!
- “FEATURE - The Latest Digital Divide: Systems Thinking vs. Misinformation and Malfeasance”. “The main thing to think about is the gap. What is standing between people and their ability to do what they want online? Who is responsible, and what can we all collectively do?”
- “AI Detectors Get It Wrong. Writers Are Being Fired Anyway”. “Some writing gigs are drying up thanks to chatbots. As people fight over the dwindling field of work, writers are losing jobs over false accusations from AI detectors.” And, yet again, fuck every single one of you who has helped implement and popularise LLMs.
- “Writer’s block is not a myth - by Suw Charman-Anderson”. “Writer’s block is a symptom with multiple physiological, motivational, cognitive or behavioural causes, not a cause itself. If I am stressed, then that causes writer’s block. It’s not that I’ve got writer’s block therefore I can’t write.”
- “Your brain does not process information and it is not a computer | Aeon Essays”. “Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.”
- “What Do Google’s AI Answers Cost the Environment? | Scientific American”. “Luccioni’s team has estimated it costs about 30 times as much energy to generate text versus simply extracting it from a source.” Honestly very disappointed in everybody who helped make this “AI” answer thing happen.
- “What a Stanford study of AI copilots for lawyers says about AI for everyone else | Fortune”. “Trained to be helpful and agreeable, they frequently accept the false premise and then invent information to justify it, rather than telling the user the premise of the question is wrong.”
- “roguelazer’s website: oh, the humanity”. “Maybe nobody else feels the deep and primal outrage at the thought of parents outsourcing their kids’ bedtime stories to artificial stupidity, and at the thought of our friends messages to us being mediated by fancy autocomplete.” Wait, the bedtime story thing is real? I thought that was somebody’s “pretend Apple announced something ridiculous” social media bit. Wow.
- “How to embed your WASM blob. If there’s a single thing I don’t like… | by Andrea Giammarchi | Jun, 2024 | Medium”
- “Hedge Words Affirm Creative, Imaginative Thinking - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”. “Which is why I appreciate a good hedge word now and then.” Yup. Same.