“93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs | Colin McMillen”

😄 https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/

Kolka, my sister’s cat, always looks mildly astonished. #caturday

“Where have all the websites gone?”

"So here’s the bad news— we are the ones who vanished" https://www.fromjason.xyz/p/notebook/where-have-all-the-websites-gone/

“Google confirms it just laid off around a thousand employees - The Verge”

I’d like to remind you that lay offs don’t work. The org is generally less functional, less reliable, and less profitable after a mass lay off. Lay offs are also always a symptom of exec incompetence https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/11/24034124/google-layoffs-engineering-assistant-hardware

“Things are about to get a lot worse for Generative AI”

Like I and quite a few others have been saying for ages, generative models are very prone to verbatim copying both text and image. People in tech pretend it doesn’t happen but it’s much more prevalent than people think https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/things-are-about-to-get-a-lot-worse

“Covid: It’s That Bad” https://www.okdoomer.io/its-that-bad/

One thing that’s important to note about National Geographic and Popular Science no longer publishing their magazines is that the magazines were still making money.

They were, even after the massive changes in the media landscape over the past few decades, still profitable.

They were shuttered because they weren’t profitable enough.

The thought pops into my head that free/open source, and by extension software in general, shares many characteristics with “creative” industries such as publishing or music

The foundation of these industries is unpaid passion labour that’s treated as disposable.

It's absolutely irresponsible of Google to continue to promote Chromium-only APIs such as the File System Access API as if they were standard APIs you can use with the expectation that cross-browser support will come eventually

Glossing over the difference between APIs that have genuine cross-browser implementation interest and Chrome-only APIs that are unlikely to ever get implemented in Firefox or Safari is tantamount to tricking devs into making their projects Chrome-only.

“Monaspace”

The good thing about bad companies releasing interesting stuff with an open license, like fonts, is you can use it without directly supporting them.

And this is a really interesting idea. https://monaspace.githubnext.com/

“AI’s Electricity Use Is Spiking So Fast It’ll Soon Use as Much Power as an Entire Country”

Between this and crypto, the tech industry’s innovations seem to be doing a good job of nullifying whatever progress we make on the climate crisis. https://futurism.com/the-byte/ai-electricity-use-spiking-power-entire-country?utm_source=social&utm_medium=bluesky&utm_campaign=manual

“Jim Nielsen’s Notes”

"Just say “No!” to A/B tests."

This might be a trend. https://notes.jim-nielsen.com/#2023-09-26T2200

“Fixing Search”

"However, browsers selling users to search engines to keep the web going is a bit like selling weapons in a war zone to bankroll cancer research. As mentioned, it’s a betrayal of users" https://berjon.com/fixing-search/

I’m not pessimistic about technology. I’m disappointed and let down. The distinction is important because “pessimistic” implies that things haven’t already turned to shit.

> You see, if somebody robs a store, it's a crime and the state is all set and ready to nab the criminal. But if somebody steals from the commons and from the future, it's seen as an entrepreneurial activity and the state cheers and gives them tax concessions rather than arresting them. We badly need an expanded concept of justice and fairness that takes mortgaging the future into account.

- Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology

So, what are the odds that the main reason why Google sold Domains off to Squarespace was that they accidentally fired a core part of the team and discovered they destroyed their own ability to manage the product effectively?

Got to be at least 50/50, right?

“What is the real point of all these letters warning about AI?”

Quotes some smart people. https://www.fastcompany.com/90902786/what-is-the-real-point-of-all-these-letters-warning-about-ai?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social

The only two viewpoints on generative AI that get any play among tech punditry are:

1. AI is a lever that helps people do better
2. AI is effective automation that will replace people, or be a threat to them.

The third viewpoint, that AI tools are kind of shit and, if used in their current form at scale by corporations and governments, will “enshittify” large portions of our society, doesn’t seem to register with them at all.

Turns out that Adobe is collecting all of its customers' pictures into a machine learning training set.

This is opt-out, not opt-in so if you use Lightroom, for example, it defaults to adding all of your photos to the set.

If these are unpublished pictures, work-in-progress, etc. they'll still be analysed as soon as they're synced.

I've been using Lightroom to sync photos from my Windows desktop to my iPad. Now I need to reconsider that.

Idle thought of the day: if you assume that environmental crises, political instability, and authoritarian states are going to become more common over the next couple of decades, how would that change the way you design your websites and apps?