I’ve been on my summer break over the past three (ish) weeks. I’ve let the links pile up in the meantime, but this link post is still about average in length ‘cause holiday. I don’t read tech stuff for entertainment, y’know.
I’m also trying out Bluesky. I’m using their domain username feature-thing so I’m @baldurbjarnason.com there. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it, but for now I’m cross-posting links. If you like to follow my link posting in a social media format, but Mastodon isn’t your kind of thing, then you can follow on Bluesky.
I also have a special “notes” blog that collects them, and I’m @baldur on micro.blog if you’re more an indie-web person.
Interesting
- "The Wizard House". “Either it’s all of us or it’s none of us, because if we leave the answer up to the Reagans of the world and all the people who enabled him in the name of lower taxes and Democrats who wring their hands, weeping oh I don’t agree with it but we’ll lose the election if we fight it right now, the answer is none of us.”
- "Nowhere to retvrn | Red Pepper". “The idea that women had no business outside the home not only erases working-class women but was also a short-lived one that peaked in the later Victorian and early Edwardian eras.”
- "Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift"
- “Antitrust Guidelines and Overthrowing a Corrupt Priesthood"
- "The Hereditarian Hypothesis and Scientific Racism - Kevin Bird". “However, the persistence of the debate is more understandable if we stop thinking about the genetic hypothesis as a good faith scientific venture, and rather as a concerted effort to inject and distribute fringe ideas into the mainstream.”
AI
- "How to report better on artificial intelligence - Columbia Journalism Review"
- "Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical | by Emily M. Bender | Jul, 2023 | Medium"
- "How elite schools like Stanford became fixated on the AI apocalypse: A billionaire-backed movement is recruiting college students to fight killer AI, which some see as the next Manhattan Project.“
- 'Adactio: Articles—“Web3” and “AI”‘
- "Google Says It’ll Scrape Everything You Post Online for AI"
- "Word Count 53: The state of AI and the Goodreads fiasco"
- “The shady world of Brave selling copyrighted data for AI training". This does not surprise me. Brave had a lot of dodgy cryptocoin ideas, so it stands to reason that they would have a lot of dodgy AI ideas.
- "Signal’s Meredith Whittaker: ‘These are the people who could actually pause AI if they wanted to’“. “If you were to heed Timnit’s warnings you would have to significantly change the business and the structure of these companies. If you heed Geoff’s warnings, you sit around a table at Davos and feel scared.”
- "Pulling my site from Google over AI training – Tracy Durnell"
- "Study claims ChatGPT is losing capability, but some experts aren’t convinced". “I remain skeptical of those claims—I think it’s more likely that people are seeing more of the flaws now that the novelty has worn off.”
- "Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles - The New York Times". Any news organisation that falls for this deserves the inevitable rug-pull where the tech is used to consolidate traffic on Google’s own sites instead of driving it elsewhere.
Dev
- "The new font-face syntax"
- "RFC 9413: Maintaining Robust Protocols"
- "Can We Query the Root: The complexities of containment, overflow, and". What I’ve been doing is use main as the primary container.
- "Language-Level Toll Roads - Jim Nielsen’s Blog". Jim makes a good point.
- "Deno 1.35: A fast and convenient way to build web servers". Still a fan of Deno, though. Support for the official puppeteer package makes a big difference to at least a couple of my projects.
- "A Deep Dive Into SVG Path Commands"
- "Tiffin Tom: Fish, chips and a side of identity theft". This is an amazing story about massive, criminal developer incompetence.
- "The article element and screen readers - Manuel Matuzović"
- 'New Low in the Accessibility “Industry:” Overlay Company Sues Globally-Recognized Accessibility Expert – Law Office of Lainey Feingold'
- 'How to Identify “Truthy” Tech Trends'
- "Stop Being Fancy - Jim Nielsen’s Blog"
- "Adactio: Journal—Permission"
- "Stop treating all of your content as if it were news – Rachel Andrew". This is one of my biggest peeves about modern dev-oriented writing.
- "The affordance loop - Erin Kissane’s small internet website"
- "Business Model Fueling Silicon Valley Tech Companies May Be Illegal". This is what many of us in tech have been saying for years. Also, another one for the “break up all the big tech cos” pile.
- "siderea | How Professional Ethics Work". “If I didn’t have a profession with an ethical code behind me and a license board to enforce it, every time something came up, it would be me, alone, deciding whether to make a personal stand against a person who pays my rent.”
- "Chris’ Corner: More Like CSBest - CodePen Blog"
- "AddyOsmani.com - Software engineering: problem-solving and critical-thinking"