Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland
Links (4 June 2024)
“So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors”. “It’s been well over a year since I started serving 429s to clients which are hitting the feed too often. Since then, much has happened, and most of it is generally good news.”
“Adactio: Journal—Trust”. “In their rush to cram in “AI” “features”, it seems to me that many companies don’t actually understand why people use their products.”
“Information is Relational • Buttondown”. “One of the key points is that, even if the answers provided could be magically made to be always “correct” (an impossible goal, for many reasons, but bear with me), chatbot-mediated information access systems interrupt a key sense-making process.”
“Against optimization | A Working Library”. “Another way to look at this is that you cannot optimize for resilience. Resilience requires a kind of elasticity, an ability to stretch and reach but then to return, to spring back into a former shape.”
“How it feels to get an AI email from a friend”. “The email felt like getting a form letter, one of many thousands sent out by a large agency; except it was sent to me by, you know, a friend.”
“Engineering for Slow Internet”. “If you’re an app developer reading this, can you tell me, off the top of your head, how your app behaves on a link with 40 kbps available bandwidth, 1,000 ms latency, occasional jitter of up to 2,000 ms, packet loss of 10%, and a complete 15-second connectivity dropout every few minutes?”
“The use-html custom element”. I like the concept of mimicking SVG’s use element. My only note would be to throw an error instead of a string if something goes wrong. Other than that 👍🏻
“Understanding the real threat generative AI poses to our jobs”. “Generative AI is likely to be extremely disruptive to atomized, freelance, and precarious creative labor. " and, “Even if it’s not being prominently used, generative AI can be used as leverage against workers just about anywhere.”