Links (1 July 2024)
– Baldur
Bjarnason
- “On the energy demands of “AI” • Buttondown”. “If you use clean energy sources for that added demand, you’ve used up some of the clean energy supply that could have gone somewhere else. Until we actually have more clean energy than we need, throwing lots of it at training and using “generative AI” models is just going to make the climate crisis worse.”
- “We’ve Hit Peak Denial. Here’s Why We Can’t Turn Away From Reality | Scientific American”. “In the long run, it will be our undoing. Because the danger here is desensitization.”
- “Digital gardens and the summer of learning | Go Make Things”. “It includes coaching, courses, and coding resources, and right now, I’m running a summer of learning sale.”
- “Choose how you want to navigate the web with Firefox”. “Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral.” Even if this stays opt in once it ambles out of Nightly, all of this AI garbage means regular Firefox product dev looks dead in the water.
- “Backdoor slipped into multiple WordPress plugins in ongoing supply-chain attack | Ars Technica”. I think it’s time to be much more careful about plugins, extensions, and dependencies, whether it’s on your website, code, or text editor.
- “My honest feelings about the Vision Pro after nearly 5 months”. “But right now, my feeling about the Vision Pro is that it was the worst way I could have possibly spent $3,500 on upgrading my computing life.”
- “Why Vivaldi browser won’t follow the current AI trend?”. “As such, it does not feel right to bundle any such solution into Vivaldi. There is enough misinformation going around to risk adding more to the pile. We will not use an LLM to add a chatbot, a summarization solution or a suggestion engine to fill up forms for you until more rigorous ways to do those things are available.” I may have to try Vivaldi again.
- “Amazon Web Services dark patterns”. “I used the so-called “free” tier of AWS for one day and got charged over a hundred dollars?!?!? How is that even possible?”
- “Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites”. “Since then, this domain was caught injecting malware on mobile devices via any site that embeds cdn.polyfill.io.” Supply chain attacks are heating up.
- “Common future | A Working Library”. “We do this together or we do it not at all.”
- “Mozilla.ai did what? When silliness goes dangerous”. “the methodology is a bit … how do you say it in English … fucked up in all imaginable ways.”
- “HTMX does not play well with content security policy”
- “Researchers Prove Rabbit AI Breach By Sending Email to Us as Admin”. Honestly? This is exactly the kind of crap that happens if you’re all-in on LLMs for coding. All sorts of basic stuff falls by the wayside
- “Perplexity’s grand theft AI - The Verge”
- “Microsoft 1998 = Apple 2024 | Ian Betteridge”
- “The time for designers to learn to code is now - Piccalilli”. “That’s our job as designers. It’s not to pontificate over design tools and their ever expanding features; it’s to design things for people.”
- “How do we build the future with AI? – Chelsea Troy”
- “TBM 296: Trust Lets You Observe Reality - by John Cutler”. A really sharp observation.
- “After the rupture | everything changes”. “A rupture, whatever the cause, is also an opportunity. But fear makes us speed through the break, as if by running really fast through a dark tunnel we could escape the monsters hot on our heels.”
- “A Eulogy for DevOps”. ‘In practice I “discovered” that if NPM was down nothing worked and the frontend team “discovered” that troubleshooting Kubernetes was a bit like Warhammer 40k Adeptus Mechanicus waving incense in front of machines they didn’t understand in the hopes that it would make the problem go away.’ We’ve built systems nobody understands that hang together on a thread and a prayer.
- “Perplexity.AI Is Susceptible to Prompt Injection From Arbitrary Pages (and some other issues)”. “Perplexity AI appears to be trivially susceptible to having prompts injected by the pages that it’s trying to analyse.”
- “Ideas Aren’t Worth Anything - The Biblioracle Recommends”. “This isn’t the democratizing of creativity. It is the commodification of creativity. It is the reduction of creative acts to a product.”
- “A word for our sponsors – Pivot to AI”