Accidentally wrote this while trying to figure things out, so I might as well publish it here. And, no, I didn’t bother to edit it, so expect fluff and rambling. Everywhere I look, it’s becoming more and more clear that a lot of job markets are in very bad shape. The web developer job market is in a sorry state. Software developers in general...
The web, as a platform, ecosystem, industry, and market, is in a very odd place. The platform is genuinely great. Bugs are inevitable – every non-trivial project will encounter an implementation bug in a major browser at some point – but the platform overall is in a good place with capabilities I wouldn’t have even dared to hope for a decade ago....
Incomplete thoughts. Don’t count on any of it making sense. Digital has made the boundaries between various different kinds of time-base media – the different formats of audio and video – much softer. Podcasts are recorded with video. Video essays are distributed as podcasts. Series that are made for domestic broadcast in one country end up on...
Not a great year, but also not the worst. My freelance business did not fare that well for most of it. It did improve slightly towards the end, so this year is starting on a better note than 2024. There are some freelancing/job prospects that may or may not pan out at the moment. 2024 was mostly defined by my indecision and a monomaniacal focus...
Slightly different format from the other interim notes because writing about text requires paragraphs. These interim notes are all unedited and a little bit rough. – Thinking about where text-based media – print, ebooks, websites, newsletters, etc. – are heading led me to start another re-read of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death and,...
A few thoughts on my freelance and ebook business. Random and somewhat incoherent. A deregulated US poses a significant risk to small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Banking, transaction system, or payment disruptions disproportionally harm SMBs. For example, a larger business is likely to be able to weather a month-long disruption to their...
Some thoughts, because I write to think. Tech is about to enter a proper wealth extraction phase. One of my annoyances with “enshittification” is the lack of imagination it implies. Tech, as an industry, can be much more extractive than this. There’s ways to the bottom yet. Most large tech software products are, effectively, extremely shoddy...
Back when I relaunched this site in 2010 – switching from a pair of named blogs, Loud for links and Another Quiet Day for essays, to a eponymous blog and site – the point was that it would be a more focused foundation for my career. Unlike the blogs I’d been running up until then, this site has always had a defined purpose. I might digress into...
Went out and followed the local ravens around for a bit. A few more juveniles have joined the ones that arrived the other day. I’m guessing there are at least ten currently in town. They love to perch on streetlights. They were also very good about flying past the sunset. Finally, starlings.
“Your AI code generators are your new net-negative developers”. “A Doc On How Amazon Workers Unionized Drew Critics’ Praise, But No Major Takers to Distribute”. We’re going to see a lot more like this if the US’s vestigal anti-trust efforts get abandoned. “‘Systematic reviews’ that aim to extract broad conclusions from many studies are in peril |...
Five juvenile ravens moved into town during a recent cold spell. They’re a little bit too boisterous to capture easily in groups but will pose for you occasionally. I have an unreasonable liking for the one with the autofocus mishap. And bonus starlings Icelandic horses seem unconcerned by the frost. Apparently they can handle cold and snow, but...
Big link post this time on account of there being ten whole days since the last one. The delay was because I’ve been devoting my writing time to preparing for the release of the second edition of The Intelligence Illusion, which is available with a Black Friday launch discount today and until Monday. “Yes, progressive enhancement is a fucking...
I’m publishing a second edition of my book The Intelligence Illusion (Second Edition): Why generative models are bad for business with a Black Friday launch sale! A new and updated edition – 40% longer, every chapter updated in some way – at almost a 30% discount launch deal from today (28 November 2024) until the end of Monday (2 December 2024)....
The countdown is a tried and true trope in media. The clock is ticking and you know something important will happen. It’s the perfect builder of tension. Unfortunately, we have a real-world countdown happening with the wait for Trump’s presidency to begin and, as with the proverbial ticking bomb, there are things that need to be done before the...
Sometimes photography can work as a coping mechanism – both taking them and viewing can be a way of processing that doesn’t require putting anything into words. Really like this first one. Largely because it was raining, my glasses were foggy, and I couldn’t see a thing, so I was just attemping to line up blurred shapes into something geometric....
“Denmark: AI-powered welfare system fuels mass surveillance and risks discriminating against marginalized groups – report”. “the sweeping use of fraud detection algorithms, paired with mass surveillance practices, has led people to unwillingly –or even unknowingly– forfeit their right to privacy, and created an atmosphere of fear.” This, and not...
Like all genres, queer media has a few recurring themes that are either unique to it or just less common in other media. There’s the coming out story, where the plot deals with the tension and fallout that comes with the revelation that a character doesn’t fit society’s expectations. Prejudice is also a perennial, though hardly unique to queer...
For reasons that should be obvious, quite a few of us are probably going to be reaching for more cozy comfort media over the next while as a way to help us cope and function. So, I figure I might as well make a note of a few of them as I go, in case others need something they can watch without triggering an anxiety attack. And, because I have...
A short list this week because of how delayed last week’s link post was. “Understanding Society: Dewey on habits” “Community building & traditions - annie’s blog” “Bret Victor - De Programmatica Ipsum” “Don’t expect the tech platforms to help us this time.”. “ We only got four years. And the tech barons, having gotten a taste of administrative...
I’m not going to try to analyse what happened in the recent US presidential elections or why. The US has been heading in this direction for decades, so we already know it’s not down to a single cause or event. Nor will I try to predict what’s going to happen there over the next for years. Unpredictability is part of what makes these kinds of...
These horses were not particularly interested in me or my hiking shenanigans Breaking out the emergency kitten photos today, for obvious reasons. These are of my neighbours Grása (the grey and white one) and Loðmundur (the striped one) back when they were kittens. They are considerably fluffier as adults. Finally, the two siblings as adults Turns...
“AI is consolidating corporate power in higher ed (opinion)” “Silicon Valley got what it wanted - by Brian Merchant”. “It’s time to face facts. In Trump, Silicon Valley got what it wanted: A president that will kneecap antitrust efforts, embrace deregulation, and defang labor laws.” “Mind The (Remediation) Gap - TPGi”. “Here’s where things can...
This post announcing the closure of Giant Freakin Robot set me on a bit of a journey into the state of Google. “The End Of Independent Publishing And Giant Freakin Robot” GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT isn’t the first site to shut down. Hundreds of independent publishers have shuttered in the last two years, and thousands more are on the way. I’m in...
I have, on occasion, been accused of being a pessimist, but my tendency to take honest inventory of shit that’s happening is a coping mechanism, not a belief or outlook. My default worldview is that of a disappointed optimist. I believe we are capable of great things, but humanity rarely lives up to the belief and pretending we do serves nobody....
Generally speaking, I don’t think redesigns or rebrands are constructive. Change tends to jazz up interest and rebrands and redesigns are no exceptions, but I’m strongly of the opinion that brands genuinely don’t matter that much – whatever positive associations a brand has comes from consistency – and if companies invested the same time and...
This weekend a story from ABC News on issues with audio transcription machine learning models did the rounds. “Researchers say an AI-powered transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said” But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a...
This starling was waiting patiently in a nearby tree for a male blackbird to finish to get their turn at the bird feeder. The politeness is entirely down to the fact that the starling was alone and blackbirds are quite a bit bigger. I’m very bad with names, so when I’ve been told the name of one of the local cats I’ve usually just forgotten it...
“Platform Strategy and Its Discontents - Infrequently Noted”. “The rate of failure to deliver minimally usable experiences on phones seemed to be increasing over time, despite the accelerating costs associated with the client-side JS-based stacks that teams were reaching for. Worse and costlier is a bad combo, and the the opposite of what...
This little cat was a bit concerned about how loud the neighbour’s dog was being. (That dog would be Jökull, which I know because his owner keeps shouting at him whenever he’s barking too much. “Jökull! Hættu að gelta!”) The redpolls came for another seed raid yesterday. They were quite lively and would not stand still 🙂 My sister sent me a...
“Someone edited my photo to unbutton my blouse and reveal a made-up hint of a bra or something else underneath. 🤨” “Claims that ‘AI can replace teachers’ betray a very poor understanding of teachers’ work”. “All the hype around ‘AI will replace teachers’ is as unfounded as with any other profession, and the teachers in our research project are...
This weekend I pointed out what I felt was a funny local news story here in Iceland: “AI” models are suffused with US values and, occasionally, those are quite shocking to us non-Americans An Icelandic police force used a generated image to promote a public notice People were absolutely horrified Why? Because the cop in the image had a gun, in a...
I decided to take a bit of a writing break after last week’s mammoth essay. Not because writing these things takes so much of my time. I’m a relatively quick writer and most of the time even a two-thousand word post only takes up a couple of hours of my time each week. No, it’s more a question of distance. One of the more effective tools you have...
This group of Icelandic Redpolls stopped by to snack on some birch seeds So, turns out a clear sky, autumn colours, cold still air, and a geothermally active nature are quite picturesque when combined. The steam from the mud and hot water springs was particularly visible in the cold. And people out walking in the quiet weather. For this...
“Norway’s Treatment of Sámi Indigenous People Makes a Mockery of Its Progressive Image”. “Norway often presents itself as a defender of human rights around the globe. Yet its treatment of indigenous people within its own borders tells a quite different story.” Nordic countries are only “fair” to you if you fit a specific demographic “Unmanaged...
Because this essay is over 11 000 words long(!) I’ve made a convenience EPUB file for offline reading. (EPUB only! No PDF this time.) You can download it over on the fulfilment service I use, Lemon Squeezy, with the option to pay what you want if you feel the urge to support my writing. Paying is absolutely optional. Web dev keeps arguing about...
A few starlings stopped by the bird feeder on my balcony earlier this week. (Shot through the window pane so as to not startle them. Hence the reflections.) A few of very autumnal photos from yesterday’s walk Took these two pictures of the same scene and with a similar angle, but converted one to B&W and the kept the other in colour. A couple of...
“To define custom elements or not when distributing them – Nathan Knowler”. This uses import.meta and url queries to make the custom element name configurable. Coincidentally, this is something I’ve been experimenting as well, but I then use an import map to give it a nice import specifier. “Fighting for our web”. “What used to be expensive and...
Highlight Enterprise Philosophy and The First Wave of AI – Stratechery by Ben Thompson Benioff isn’t talking about making employees more productive, but rather companies; the verb that applies to employees is “augmented”, which sounds much nicer than “replaced”; the ultimate goal is stated as well: business results. Reading this article will...
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been doing a bit of a stint watching new-ish movies. That is movies that have come out in the past five to ten years that I missed out on. I used to be an avid movie-goer, but I basically stopped going to the cinema post-COVID. Living in Montréal from 2016-2020 also cut down on my going because Montréal cinemas were...
I came across a link to this paper over on Bluesky: “Generative AI’s Illusory Case for Fair Use by Jacqueline Charlesworth :: SSRN” Jacqueline Charlesworth, the author, is the former general counsel of the U.S. Copyright Office, so I think it’s reasonable to assume she’s familiar with U.S. copyright law. It’s interesting to see how the opinions...
Since my last essay touched on writing processes and note-taking, I figured it might be useful for me to outline my current process. Mostly for myself since you can only really track how your process evolves if you actually document your process. It always starts with plain text notes. Sometimes they have markdown formatting. Occasionally they’re...
A while back I did a deep-dive researching and prototyping note-taking tools. It was the logical continuation of my life-long interest in writing and creativity tools or, at least, I thought it was at the time. But, the more I researched the audience – both through interviews and reading through so, so many forum threads – I realised that a...
Note on the bubble The problem with predicting the imminent pop of the AI Bubble by pointing out how incredibly bad its business fundamentals are, is that tech investors – the crowd that needs to panic for the bubble to pop – have an extremely high tolerance for falsehoods and unrealistic promises. Otherwise they wouldn’t be investing in tech....
I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the gaps in my skill set. As we’re now about to head into the year’s final quarter, I’ve been looking back at the two-year review I wrote at the beginning of the year and assessing my progress. And it’s a mixed bag. I decided to spend some time focusing on building up the blog and the newsletter instead of...
“Something went wrong · molily” The JavaScript community is roughly where PHP was in 2000. Which is a good thing. We have just scratched the surface of what a sensible use of JavaScript might look like. This involves rendering some pages statically, rendering some pages dynamically on the server, and rendering interactive “islands” on the client....
“Shady Firms Say They’re Already Manipulating Chatbots to Say Nice Things About Their Clients” “Going Buildless | Max Böck” “AI Gobbled A Record Share Of Startup Funding This Year”. “So far this year, 35% of U.S. startup investment has gone to AI-related companies, per Crunchbase data. That appears to be the highest percentage on record, besting...
It all began because one of the New York Times' professional opinion-havers didn’t like how chatbots were describing him. Of course, his take was not the sharpest: My theory about what happened next — which is supported by conversations I’ve had with researchers in artificial intelligence, some of whom worked on Bing — is that many of the stories...
This week’s must-read Is AI a Silver Bullet? — Ian Cooper - Staccato Signals This incredibly detailed and well thought out essay by Ian Cooper is a must-read. It took me a while to get around to reading it as it was originally published in June. Don’t be like me. Read it sooner rather than later. You won’t regret it. But the flaw in prompts as a...
People have been writing a bit about “estimated reading time”, the feature where a link to something is accompanied by an estimate of how long it will take you to read it. Matt Campbell pointed out that estimated reading times are often ableist. Adrian Roselli pointed out that existing widgets such as scroll bars do a better job of giving you a...
(Originally published on Mastodon, where I get these kinds of comments all the time.) X: We need systemic changes to tackle the climate crisis, guilting people into turning off their air con is pointless, we need to address corporate behaviour. Me: Totally. X: That’s why it’s okay for me to drive an SUV, fly for weekly for work, gamble on...
Free/open source has been on my mind lately – more than usual. (FOSS or OSS for short, the distinction matters, a lot, but for the purposes of this post the two are similar enough to lump together.) This was triggered by reading a couple of posts the other day: Tara Tarakiyee’s Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?. Ben Werdmuller’s post that...
I love doing research. My first reaction to a gnarly problem is to try to discover everything I can about it and, crucially, to see how others have tackled it. It’s not just because other people’s work often means I have to do less of my own, but experiencing the plurality of expression that’s available out there i a thing of joy. For example, a...
“TBM 308: No Unforced Errors - by John Cutler”. At times it feels like my career is nothing more than a series of unforced errors on my part, one after another, and then getting occasionally 😅 “Why JavaScript variables don’t always update” “Erika Hall Knows How to Fix Your Design Process (But You’re Probably…”. “I’ve been reading Behave by the...