Links (29 July 2024)
– Baldur
Bjarnason
- “When ChatGPT summarises, it actually does nothing of the kind. – R&A IT Strategy & Architecture”. “No really: ChatGPT doesn’t summarise. When you ask ChatGPT to summarise this text, it instead shortens the text. And there is a fundamental difference between the two. To summarise, you need to understand what the paper is saying.” This is why LLMs frequently make subtle but devastating errors while summarising.
- “Node.js — Node v22.5.0 (Current)”, “add node:sqlite module.” Whaaaaaa? I like it. Didn’t expect it. But I like it.
- “From data breaches to legal liabilities: The hidden risks of AI chatbots | Ctech”
- “Design for Real Life News! – Eric’s Archived Thoughts”. “One of the things Sara and I have decided to do is to eventually put the entire text online for free, as a booksite. That isn’t ready yet, but it should be coming somewhere down the road.” I expect this to be a common approach for former A Book Apart titles whose technical content might be perceived as outdated. (The perception is enough to tank sales, I’m guessing.)
- “Practical SVG is Now Free to Read Online – Chris Coyier”. Looks like A Book Apart closing up shop is going to result in a bunch of useful stuff becoming free online.
- “How a North Korean Fake IT Worker Tried to Infiltrate Us”. This is all sorts of yikes. Both on the malware actor side and the prospective employer.
- “TBM 302: Why Reflexive Thinkers Need to Take More Breaks”. “if you identify more with Person B—how they think, the paradoxes they carry, etc.—you will need to spend extra time taking care of yourself”. This post was exactly what I needed to read today
- “A Book Apart Books | Ryan Trimble, UX/UI developer”. “Still Available A Book Apart Books”. That’s a bunch of excellent books, many of them for free online. But the ones that are for purchase are excellent too.
- “This Machine Exposes Privacy Violations | WIRED”. “This is, incidentally, how he plans to fund the operation—the basic version of webXray will be available to all, but Libert will offer a specialized tier for litigators, regulators, and businesses looking to keep their digital presences compliant with the law.” Honestly, this might work.
- “Anyone can Access Deleted and Private Repository Data on GitHub ◆ Truffle Security Co.”
- “Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal”. Do you want antitrust lawsuits? 'Cause that’s how you get antitrust lawsuits?
- “The Grimy Residue of the AI Bubble • Buttondown”. “After the AI bubble bursts, where do these careers go? Managers and execs sure as shit aren’t going to decide to hire back career workers to do the skilled work they once did.”
- “Developers want more, more, more: the 2024 results from Stack Overflow’s Annual Developer Survey - Stack Overflow”. “76% of all respondents are currently using or planning to use AI tools” and… “Technical debt is a problem for 62% of developers”. Devs are deeply unserious about the job and this industry makes farces look like Oscar bait. We’re such an unserious profession that we make clowns look like morose statesmen.
- “The CrowdStrike Outage and Market-Driven Brittleness | Lawfare”
- “Rabbit r1’s AI assistant has secretly been storing user chats that can’t be deleted | ZDNET”. So, one of the core points of the book I wrote last year was that using “AI” in your business was inherently risky because the industry historically attracts con artists and snake oil salesmen. Thinking about this for no particular reason.
- “Everlasting jobstoppers: How an AI bot-war destroyed the online job market | Salon.com”. ‘LinkedIn reported in March that hiring on its platform was down almost 10% over the previous year. Pantheon Macroeconomics economist Oliver Allen says that shifts in small business payrolls imply overall private sector job growth “dropping to zero over the next few months.”’
- “WSJ: Amazon Has Lost Billions Selling Millions of Alexa Devices – Pixel Envy”. ‘According to Mattioli’s reporting, in a span of just four years — 2017 through 2021 — Amazon lost $25 billion on “devices”.’ The thing to note is that not only will big tech cos lose unfathomable amounts of money over several years on nonsense, media will uncritically cheer them on every step of the way, assuming that they’re riding a hype train to a glorious future.
- “writer’s block does not exist. I realize this is a strange headline… | by Doc Burford | Jul, 2024 | Medium” “Maximizing the mechanical act of writing is maximizing your own inefficiency, not efficiency”. And “Don’t let AI be the thing that breaks you by empowering you to go far past your limits and destroy yourself.” This has a lot of really solid advice. Also, as somebody with one foot in the writing world and one foot in dev, it strikes me that—since coding is a creative skill that’s dominated by unrelenting clichés and constant management interference—most coders exist in a constant state of either writer’s block or writer’s burnout.
- “AI crawlers need to be more respectful - Read the Docs”. “This was a bug in their crawler that was causing it to download the same files over and over again. There was no bandwidth limiting in place, or support for Etags and Last-Modified headers which would have allowed the crawler to only download files that had changed. We have reported this issue to them, and hopefully the issue will be fixed.” Dollars to doughnuts this company is also all-in on using LLMs for coding