Links (12 August 2024)
On the Google Antitrust ruling #
That feeling when you read an analysis of the Google antitrust case and it opens with literal robber baron apologia—“massive consumer benefits”, “brought literal light to the masses”—and you know that reading it to the end is going to be a fucking chore.
That analysts can write “getting exploited is good for you, actually” shit like this without immediately getting chucked into the sea by an angry mob never ceases to amaze me.
On the argument made for “AI” #
The “pro” discourse surrounding “AI” is very disingenuous.
The answer to every criticism – the functionality issues, the biases, the unsafe code, the pseudoscience, or the environmental impact – is always “critics keep saying that AI is useless and that’s delusional”. They keep pretending that critics only have one argument against “AI” and a delusional one to boot.
And, yeah, there are critics who do point out that generative models are useless in their specific field. That’s valid. Dismissing that criticism just because the tech might have some use in an unrelated field is a grifter move
When you make a dishonest argument debating “AI”—during a bubble where supporting the bubble has a potentially huge financial upside – those of us who are watching have to assume that you ARE dishonest and that dealing with you will just expose us to risk.
So I, at least, won’t.
Links #
- “The Great npm Garbage Patch”. “Contrary to what npm states, this package actually depends on one of our aforementioned spam packages. This is a by-product of how npm handles and displays dependencies to users on its website.” Npm is a mess that needs to be fixed. Ecosystem brokenness can’t be fix by trying to build a wholly-owned, improved, competing ecosystem. Npm’s owner needs to fix it.
- “The AI scams infiltrating the knitting and crochet world - and why it matters for everyone | ZDNET”. “I fear this foray into the world of yarn crafting and AI scams is just the beginning of the hidden cost as AI begins to infiltrate our more mainstream activities. AI provides a new tool for deploying scams and spam – and almost every market where people spend money is a target.” “AI” is primarily going to be a tool for scammers and lazy coders who habitually ship catastrophic bugs.
- “The Canary Has Been Dead for a Long Time Now”. Apple is well off the rails here. I don’t use a Mac but even on iOS/iPadOS it keeps asking me whether to allow pastes between apps that I paste between several times a day. There’s no way this increases security.
- “JSR and Deno: Final Review 🚮 – David Bushell – Freelance Web Design (UK)”. David comes to the same conclusion I did about Deno. I was all-in for a while and now, like him, feel like a fool or a mark.
- “Announcing Official Puppeteer Support for Firefox - Mozilla Hacks - the Web developer blog”. This is incredibly useful
- “How covid conspiracy theories led to an alarming resurgence in AIDS denialism | MIT Technology Review”. This is just so incredibly depressing.
- “10 reasons why AI may be overrated : Planet Money : NPR”. “Reason 10: AI is overrated because humans are underrated.”
- “Reliable JavaScript benchmarking with Tachometer | Read the Tea Leaves”. Tachometer is a great benchmarking tool. Nolan explains why.