238 lines
16 KiB
YAML
238 lines
16 KiB
YAML
- url: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/07/12/2009-Ranger
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name: "Tim Bray: 2009 Ranger"
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summary: |
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> Car companies: Dare to do less · I couldn’t possibly walk away from our time in the Ranger
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> without thinking about the absolutely insane amounts of money and resources and carbon
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> loading we could save by building smaller, simpler, cheaper, dumber, automobiles.
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Please, yes. In the last 15-20 years, auto makers, particularly US auto makers have completely
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abandoned the basic sedan market and the _actual_ light truck market. Before that, base sedans
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and trucks were intentionally sabotaged (e.g. base trim without aircon) so that dealerships
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could upsell you expensive packages (e.g. aircon plus a bunch of shiny bits you don't care about
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for $5,000).
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I feel like there's an opportunity for someone to change the game with a car like this:
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- ✅ A stero system that is basically a dash-mounted $20 bluetooth speaker and one USB port
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- ✅ Aircon.
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- ✅ An eye toward user-serviceable.
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- ✅ Cheap, reliable, and durable.
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- ❌ No other computer-y or electronic bits.
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- url: https://maggieappleton.com/home-cooked-software
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name: "Maggie Appleton: Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers"
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summary: |
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I love so much about this presentation. I believe in the power of writing simple, rough software
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for small communities, or even for communities of one (e.g. yourself). I've done a lot of that.
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I also have been feeling the pull of local-first software with really simple tech stacks. That
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might be my disillusionment with the complexity of modern DevOps.
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That said, I don't buy that LLMs are going to suddenly allow a lot of people who have never coded
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before to start coding. Every LLM-based coding tool I've tried has been basically IntelliSense, but
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with more variance (plus and minus). To say that people without any other assistance can use
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IntelliSense to develop whole applications would be nonsense, and so far, I think it's the same
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for LLMs. Now, does richer developer tooling lower the barrier to entry? Certainly.
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- url: https://jeffhuang.com/productivity_text_file/
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name: "Jeff Huang: My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file"
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summary: |
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My system is pretty similar to this, though I'm still living the one-file-per-day life. I've tried
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just about all the options out there, and for me, the one that has the lowest friction and highest
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interoperability is text files.
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It also reminds me of the adage I've heard repeated many times about David Allen's Getting Things Done system: "if you
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can't do GTD with a pen and paper, you aren't really doing GTD."
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- url: https://pcalv.es/mosh-pit-rules-applied-to-social-media/
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name: "Mosh pit rules applied to social media"
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summary: |
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As an old punk, I love this.
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Though, I'd much rather be in a terrible mosh pit than an average social media site.
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- url: https://wireframer.design/
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name: "Wireframer"
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summary: |
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Cool idea— a font to replace distracting lorem ipsum.
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I feel like this solution isn't ideal. My preference is for writing-first design i.e. forcing the
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client to write their message before you start creating high-fidelity design assets. And I think if
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I were in a situation where placeholders were appropriate, I think I would prefer something that
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still _felt_ like glyphs. I feel like the first question from a client would be "what's with all of
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these blocks everywhere?"
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- url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHHqQDKzjTg
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name: "Struthless: The Answer Isn't Online Masculinity"
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emoji: "📺"
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summary: |
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If you don't know Struthless (Campbell Walker) yet, he's making some of the best video essays about creativity, life improvement, mindset, and internet culture on YouTube right now. Go check out his stuff.
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In this one, he tackles the "radioactive" subject of masculinity. I know what you're thinking. Uh oh. Is he for or against masculinity? Which camp is he in? Watch the video.
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- url: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/
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name: " Nikhil Suresh: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again"
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summary: |
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Yeah, this pretty much sums it up.
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- url: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/vdt11/comment/c53o23x/
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name: "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them."
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summary: |
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Neil Stephenson wrote _The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_, a
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novel featuring an AI storybook which teaches the protagonist. A Redditor asked him
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"My ultimate goal in life is to make the Primer real. Anything you want to make sure I get right?."
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Neal simply replied "Kids need to get answers from humans who love them."
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I wish the generative AI people would take that wisdom to heart.
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- url: https://simonwillison.net/2024/May/8/slop/
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name: "Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content"
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summary: |
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> Watching in real time as “slop” becomes a term of art. the way that “spam” became the term for unwanted emails, “slop” is going in the dictionary as the term for unwanted AI generated content.
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_Slop_. I love (/hate) it.
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- url: https://brettharned.com/they-broke-the-cookie-cutter/
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name: "Brett Harned: They broke the cookie cutter!"
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summary: |
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> Essentially, Scrum Masters are corporate dog trainers. Command, control, and structure strengthen the pack and the bottom line. Once they're trained, it's time to move on
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I wish more people in the software business understood this. Having permanent, full-time Scrum Masters is an anti-pattern. Their prescence, at least in the long term, is a sign that you don't actually have an empowered agile product team.
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- url: https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/
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name: "Molly White: We can have a different web"
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summary: |
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> The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back. If anything, it's become a lot easier. _We can return._ Better, yet: we can restore the things we loved about the old web while incorporating the wonderful things that have emerged since, developing even better things as we go forward, and leaving behind some things from the early web days we all too often forget when we put on our rose-colored glasses.
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- url: https://www.collectorsweekly.com/articles/the-polyamorous-christian-socialist-utopia-that-made-silverware-for-proper-americans/
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name: "The Polyamorous Christian Socialist Utopia That Made Silverware for Proper Americans"
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summary: |
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The fascinating origins of Oneida silverware.
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- url: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/excuse-me-but-why-are-you-eating
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name: "Adam Mastroianni: Excuse me but why are you eating so many frogs"
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summary: |
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> I think the devil is real and he wants you to be more productive. He’s everywhere,
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> spreading wickedness disguised as wisdom.
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>
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> ...
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>
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> For legal reasons, I’m not saying the people who write this stuff are literally
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> Lucifer in human skin. It’s just that, if I wanted to maximize human misery, I
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> would 100% try to convince people to spend more time doing things they hate.
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- url: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_bezzle
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name: "Concept: The Bezzle"
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summary: |
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> The bezzle is a term originally coined by John Kenneth Galbraith for a long-term
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> pattern of bad faith in which the mark does not realise at the time that they
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> have been a victim, and may even feel that they have gained in the short term,
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> until being disillusioned later on. The term is a contraction of the word
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> "embezzlement". The bezzle does not necessarily require criminal acts; the creation
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> of illusionary wealth suffices.
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I think we're living in the bezzle.
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- url: https://xeiaso.net/shitposts/no-way-to-prevent-this/CVE-2024-1086/
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name: >
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"No way to prevent this" say users of only language where this regularly happens
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summary: |
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> In the hours following the release of CVE-2024-1086 for the project The Linux kernel, site reliability workers and systems administrators scrambled to desperately rebuild and patch all their systems to fix a vulnerability that allows an attacker with unprivileged command execution to gain read/write access to page tables. This is due to the affected components being written in C, the only programming language where these vulnerabilities regularly happen. "This was a terrible tragedy, but sometimes these things just happen and there's nothing anyone can do to stop them," said programmer King Bud Hodkiewicz, echoing statements expressed by hundreds of thousands of programmers who use the only language where 90% of the world's memory safety vulnerabilities have occurred in the last 50 years, and whose projects are 20 times more likely to have security vulnerabilities.
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- url: https://amycastor.com/2023/09/12/pivot-to-ai-pay-no-attention-to-the-man-behind-the-curtain/
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name: "Pivot to AI: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain -- by Amy Castor and David Gerard"
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summary: |
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> The magical claim of machine learning is that if you give the computer data, the computer will work out the relations in the data all by itself. Amazing!
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>
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> In practice, everything in machine learning is incredibly hand-tweaked. Before AI can find patterns in data, all that data has to be tagged, and output that might embarrass the company needs to be filtered.
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>
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> ...
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>
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> Commercial AI runs on underpaid workers in English-speaking countries in Africa creating new training data and better responses to queries. It’s a painstaking and laborious process that doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.
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>
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> AI doesn’t remove human effort. It just makes it much more alienated.
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- url: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14374597-The-Homework-Machine-by-Shel-Silverstein
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name: "Shel Silverstein: The Homework Machine"
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summary: |
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It appears that Shel Silverstein predicted ChatGPT all the way back in 1981.
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- url: https://fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/any-technology-indistinguishable-from-magic-is-hiding-something/
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name: "Jason Velazquez: Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something"
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summary: |
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> I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on
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social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and
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artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing
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power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health,
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but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
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- url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_with_Withered_Technology
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name: "Concept: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology"
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summary: |
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> [Gunpei Yokoi, long-time Nintendo designer and producter,] said "The Nintendo
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way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize
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mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply." He articulated his
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philosophy of "Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology" (枯れた技術の水平思考,
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"Kareta Gijutsu no Suihei Shikō") (also translated as "Lateral Thinking with
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Seasoned Technology"), in the book Yokoi Gunpei Game House. "Withered technology"
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in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood.
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"Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology.
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Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting-edge technology;
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novel and fun gameplay are more important. In the interview, he suggested that
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expensive cutting-edge technology can get in the way of developing a new product.
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ht [Simon Willison](https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/14/lateral-thinking-with-weathered-technology/).
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- url: https://coryd.dev/posts/2024/look-for-longevity/
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name: "Cory Dransfeldt: Look for longevity"
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summary: |
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> Everyone has a list of products they've seen fail and disappear or get acquired
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and disappear. I want a less-ambitious, lower-scale, bootstrapped company with a
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plan. I love solo founders with low costs and a fair subscription price.
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_Yep_. What deranged times we live in that it is routine not only for businesses
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to launch with no plan for ever generating a sustainable income, but for those
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businesses to rake in buckets and buckets of investment.
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- url: https://chaos.guru/essays/2024/hostile-environments/
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name: "Luka Kladaric: Shipping quality software in hostile environments"
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summary: |
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A harrowing tale of fixing an unsustainable software project. I've been there.
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After being there, I agree with one of Luka's takeaways-- you cannot wait for
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permission to fix maintainability problems in software. You have do it. And if you
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have to do it quietly and subvert "the process" to make it happen, do it anyway.
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- url: https://pando.beehiiv.com/p/javascript-was-slowing-me-down-all-in-on-elixir
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name: "Roberto Pando: Javascript was slowing me down. All in on Elixir"
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summary: |
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I love to hear these kind of stories about adopting Elixir. I went through a similar
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arc when I moved from Python/Django, to Node, to Ruby/Rails, and finally to Phoenix/Elixir.
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- url: https://darthmall.net/weblog/2023/rss/
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name: "Evan Sheehan: RSS?"
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summary: |
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There's a swing back to RSS right now, which I think is good. But I also think that Evan's
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thoughts here are good. RSS can't be the only solution for how we take in the web. It can't
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be the only solution for how we decentralize the web again.
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Hat tip to [Greg Morris](https://gregmorris.co.uk/2024/01/29/visit-more-blogs) for his related
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post that helped me find this one.
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- url: https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/generative/
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name: "Ethan Marcotte: Generative"
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summary: >
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A collection of quotes about AI from 1683 to 2024.
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- url: https://seldo.com/posts/ai-ml-llms-and-the-future-of-software
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name: "Laurie Voss: On AI, ML, LLMs and the future of software"
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summary: >
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A level-headed explanation of what exactly AI, ML, and LLMs are. "LLMs are really complex markov
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chains; but the really complex part makes them qualitatively different" has been by go-to
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explanation of LLMs. I disagree, however, with the idea that LLMs "understand" anything. LLMs
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contain big statistical models of sentence and paragraph structure, and of the relationship
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between words and phrases. This allows them to generate text that is more of a statistical match
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for text written by humans. That humans see this as "understanding" is a form of pareidolia.
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This distinction is narrow, but important.
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- url: https://coryd.dev/posts/2024/towards-a-quieter-friendlier-web/
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name: "Cory Dransfeldt: Towards a quieter, friendlier web"
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summary: >
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A series of great principles for a better web! Hear, hear!
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Side note: thanks to Cory for inspiring me to add a link log feed to this site,
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inspired by his at coryd.dev.
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- url: https://www.abstractmachines.dev/posts/am013-easy-to-write-code-considered-harmful/
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name: "Leandro Ostera: AM013 – Easy-to-Write Code Considered Harmful"
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summary: >
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Leandro argues that the key to writing readable code is taking implicit context
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and making it explicit. I agree!
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This is also one reason I love Elixir. Many of the design choices in the language
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and standard library encourage you to explicitly write what you mean-- even if it
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is more keystrokes.
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- url: https://soatok.blog/2024/02/27/the-tech-industry-doesnt-understand-consent/
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name: "Soatok: The Tech Industry Doesn't Understand Consent"
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summary: >
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A brilliant lens for thinking about our relationship with tech products, design,
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and terms of use. Opt-out "consent" isn't consent at all. "Maybe Later" isn't
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consent either.
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