“Something went wrong · molily”
The JavaScript community is roughly where PHP was in 2000. Which is a good thing. We have just scratched the surface of what a sensible use of JavaScript might look like. This involves rendering some pages statically, rendering some pages dynamically on the server, and rendering interactive “islands” on the client.
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Over the course of years, every real-world software project becomes a monument of shifts in product direction, power struggles, management and organizational restructuring, conflicting programming patterns and incomplete migrations.
“Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI - The Atlantic”
Reading this article made me so angry that it legitimately ruined a big chunk of my weekend. You have been warned.
Lucas Joppa, Microsoft’s first chief environmental officer, who left the company in 2022, fears that the world will not be able to reverse the current trajectory of AI development even if the technology is shown to have a net-negative impact on sustainability. Companies are designing specialized chips and data centers just for advanced generative-AI models. Microsoft is reportedly planning a $100 billion supercomputer to support the next generations of OpenAI’s technologies; it could require as much energy annually as 4 million American homes. Abandoning all of this would be like the U.S. outlawing cars after designing its entire highway system around them.
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One such pathway? Using generative algorithms to model oil and gas reservoirs and maximize their extraction, Hema Prapoo, Microsoft’s global lead of oil and gas business, said later in the meeting.
“The hidden costs of the AI boom : Peoples Dispatch”
After they faced pressure to release the data, they caved and the records were made public. They showed that Google’s three data centers use more than a quarter of the city’s water supply.
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But the reality is that as tech companies rapaciously expand to maximize profits and market share, the AI boom has serious hidden costs for working people, our planet, and the communities we live in.
The rest of the links
- “Stop Trying To Replace Your SaaS Products With AI | Stay SaaSy”. Apparently this is happening often enough for people to get angry about it happening.
- “The Ruthless Edit - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”
- “Pick Your Distributed Poison | Hazel Weakly”
- “‘Go woke, go broke’ not true for brands, says global advertising study | Advertising | The Guardian”. Marketing a product to a broader audience apparently does not alienate said broader audience. Whodathunkit?
- “‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman”. “Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records.”
- “The master’s tools will never advocate for digital rights – Hi, I’m Heather Burns”
- “Correcting the Record • Buttondown”. “But apparently AI hype has so deeply infected this journalist (or the editor) that they could not understand what I actually said. Instead, they had to put words in my mouth—literally insert them into the middle of a direct quote—to make it seem as if I was saying what they wanted me to say.”
- “Founder Mode, hackers, and being bored by tech | Ian Betteridge”. “But the other reason why the whole founder mode thing is a hot mess is that Paul Graham is entirely wrong about management and leadership.” Not going to go and read Graham because every time I have I come away thinking it was dumb and thinking less of everybody for linking to it, but this looks like a solid take on the overall thing.
- “11ty is joining Font Awesome — Eleventy”. This is interesting. Hopefully this gives 11ty a stable foundation to build on.
- “Who Actually Owns Nebula?. The phrase “creator-owned” probably… | by Cameron Paul | Sep, 2024 | Medium”. “The creators directly own 0% of Nebula.” Anybody who has work in or adjacent to tech shouldn’t be surprised by the shenanigans here. This literally what co-ops are for and there are plenty of examples of even larger coops outside of tech.
- “Kids who use ChatGPT as a study assistant do worse on tests | Popular Science”. Do I really need to keep posting these? Haven’t we all figured out that LLMs are extremely poor learning aids? (He says, knowing full well that chatbots have become the default learning aid for coders.)
- “Google is using AI to make fake podcasts from your notes - The Verge”. ‘When trying out Audio Overview for myself, I plugged in one of the sample notebooks about the invention of the lightbulb, and the results were… a bit uncanny. During the 10-minute-long overview, the two hosts had a light-hearted discussion about how Thomas Edison wasn’t the only person behind the lightbulb and that “in the end, it’s actually a story about teamwork, making the dream work.”’ Again, this is your regular reminder that “AI” is currently a bubble, those tend to get absolutely ridiculous before they pop, and we’re not even close to this one peaking yet.
- “The world we’re designing | Go Make Things”
- “Video Game Developers Are Leaving The Industry And Doing Something, Anything Else - Aftermath”. The stories in this are quite something.
- “We Spent $20 To Achieve RCE And Accidentally Became The Admins Of .MOBI”. “Great. We’d inadvertently done a thing.” This entire thing is amazing from start to finish in an “oh, my god, everything is just a house of cards” kind of way.
- “The Neverending Story”. “Applets. ActiveX. Flash. Flex. Silverlight. Angular. React.” A lot of people missed the point of this on social media (cough_Mastodon_cough), but that’s because they didn’t actually click the link to read the post and didn’t let a small detail like that stop them from having an opinion.
- “Adactio: Journal—What price?”. What he said.
- “a11y-syntax-highlighting has been updated – Eric Bailey”
- “On craft and the web | Go Make Things”. “My focus is entirely on well-crafted, quality products. I have no interest in disposable garbage, and I’m sceptical of folks who do.” Disregarding craft in software is also bad economics (unless you’re working for one of the monopolists/oligopolists). Software is a zero marginal cost good. Any software that can be created with automation will have its margins nuked.
- “Introducing: Complete CSS - Piccalilli”