Links and Photos (4 March 2024)
– Baldur
Bjarnason
Dev Links #
- "What the heck is going on with the UX job market?". This doesn’t look particularly good.
- "JavaScript Bloat in 2024 @ tonsky.me". “This is obscene. JS payloads this big are just outright broken on low- to mid-range devices. Here I am, worrying about every K that ends up in the final project payload, and these assholes are just outright shipping a dozen MB to every visitor.”
- "Event currentTarget to the rescue - Piccalilli". This is a classic problem that appears regularly. Just saw it pop up as a bug in a codebase this week.
- "Unexplanations: query optimization works because sql is declarative"
- "PWAs wont replace native iOS apps". The reason? Bugs, bugs, and more bugs.
- "AI search is a doomsday cult". "To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist.
- I’d use the phrase “he’s the sort of person who would enthusiastically tries to get his posts to the top of Hacker News” as a scathing insult more often if it weren’t for the fact that those types would see it as a compliment."
- "It’s a process; not a product – Terence Eden’s Blog"
- "JSR first impressions". All those words and not one of them on the issues caused by ownership of a package repository. The features of JSR don’t really matter. Going from a Microsoft-owned npm to a VC-owned (via Deno) JSR is not progress.
- "Why is JavaScript fragile? | Go Make Things". Devs often dismiss HTML and CSS as toys. But the simplicity and robustness means that any time a feature can be implemented in HTML/CSS, that implementation will be substantially more reliable and less buggy than the same feature in JS.
- "How Allowing Copyright On AI-Generated Works Could Destroy Creative Industries | Techdirt"
- "Microsoft Is Spying on Users of Its AI Tools - Schneier on Security". This is an inevitability with all cloud services, and with code copilots much of the industry’s coding activity that used to be private is now in the cloud and fully analysable by Microsoft.
- "The AI community needs to take copyright lawsuits seriously". Maybe people will take this more seriously when a law professor says it. They certainly weren’t paying attention when I was making the same argument.
- "npm-free LiveReload(ish): Simple scripts for asset watching and auto-reload in the browser - Ross Wintle". Love to see people discover Server-Sent-Events/EventSource 🙂
- "AI worms can spread through generative AI-powered emails. - The Verge". If only somebody could have kno—hang on… ::puts finger in ear:: I’m being told that we actually did fucking know and told you so, repeatedly
- "Automattic Is Doing Some Weird Stuff With Users’ Public Data – Pixel Envy"
- ’“AI” and accessible front-end components: is the nuance generatable? | hidde.blog’
- "Generative. — Ethan Marcotte". A post so good I wish I could think of something clever to say about it.
- "ongoing by Tim Bray - Money Bubble". “Things have been too good for too long in InvestorWorld: low interest, high profits, the unending rocket rise of the Big-Tech sector, now with AI afterburners.” We’re in a massive bubble, now largely driven by ‘AI’. The pop is going to be unpleasant.
- ’Notes from “Why Can’t We Make Simple Software?” By Peter van Hardenberg - Jim Nielsen’s Blog’
- "Care"
- "Exists is the enemy of good". “This idea is pretty simple, in principle: sometimes we miss a good-enough solution because a not-quite-good-enough solution is already out there and in use.” Not only that. Often good-enough is quickly turned into not-quite-good-enough in an effort to make more money.
- "Where I’m at on the whole CSS-Tricks thing – Chris Coyier"
- "Platforms are selling your work to AI vendors with impunity. They need to stop."
- "More Files Please - Jim Nielsen’s Blog". This is the thing that’s missing from the web because apparently neither Mozilla nor Apple think the show*Picker family of APIs can be done safely. And I hate the fact that recent events make me sceptical of the accuracy of their pushback.
- "AI and Democracy"
- "No big surprise, Matt does it again.". Turns out free/open source software isn’t immune to the deleterious effects of having a tech bubble thinker in charge.
- "Bugs I’ve filed on browsers | Read the Tea Leaves"
Other stuff #
- "Tell that watcher at the gates of your mind to eff off — Chocolate and Vodka". This post is excellent advice. A few years ago I went through a similar process of reading up on improv to unlearn some of my bad practices and it changed how I write on a fundamental level (first draft at least)
- "Dopamine for Me, Addiction for Thee – mssv". It is wrong to use dopamine in place of “addiction” or “habit-forming” but everyone does it anyway.
- "On The Enshittification of Everything!". It’s remarkable to discover just how many people have both poor taste and judgement and uncomfortable to discover how many “intellectuals” fall completely for delusional bubble hype.
- "No more forever projects — Diana Kimball Berlin". This is an aspect of creating book-like objects that I happen to really enjoy.
- "On Being an Outlier - Gegenüber - Goethe-Institut". “For disabled people, it has been viscerally, fatally clear, that the purpose of algorithmic inference in medical care, benefits determination, and public health, is to accelerate disabled death.”
- ’The Stubborn Myth of “Learning Styles” - Education Next’. “It seems harmless enough, but when teachers work to accommodate learning styles, which have no empirical support, they divert attention and effort away from instructional strategies that are supported by a substantial body of research.”
- "An Anti-Defense of Science Fiction – Ancillary Review of Books". “However, it’s much more common that invention is the mother of necessity—making something new and then convincing everyone they need it, regardless of actual utility, ethics, or larger consequences.”
Photos #
Photos from a mental health walk. Scenes near Varmá river here in Hveragerði.
A couple of shots of one of the local ravens in transit.
Vintage cat photos.
These are photos my sister took of the cat we had as kids thirty years ago. She was blind in one eye when we found her, abandoned as a kitten, but always full of fight and energy
This neighbour came for a visit on Saturday. Did an inspection of the flat. Checked out my great-grandfather’s chair. Then did a big stretch on the landing before heading out.
