“This quality – of flattery, reinforcement of established beliefs, intellectual passivity, and positive feedback at all costs – is also what irks me most about the behaviour of current models." - this is one of my biggest annoyances too. Lots of other really good content in this post.
A good set of rules for publishing Python packages.
These lessons from 9 years of tricky bugs are interesting. It’s a great idea to make notes on these – I wish I had done that over the last decade or two!
I haven’t used it yet, so it’s hard to really judge, but this is my feeling too, as some who used an iPad as my main computer for about a decade.
“In matters of romance, destiny’s role was overstated. Most of the magic was in how any two vaguely suited people could discover the wonder of each other if given space and time. … Accepting that truth both took away some of the enchantment in love, the romance book type of magic, and added a different kind of wonder in its place, one that perhaps made you a better person.” – The Book That Held Her Heart (Mark Lawrence)
Interesting predictions about the next AI winter.
I think the neutral value point is overstated - lots of people (outside tech) are pretty positive still, and the bubble popping will only partly counter that. I do think there will be a small move towards bad.
Tech crash: 100%
Scrapers: yes, seems very likely. I suspect a rise in ways to purchase data from high quality, human generated, content stores.
Mockery: like the first one, I’m less sure. Yeah, there’s plenty of this, but there’s also a lot of amazement, and I think it will wash out a bit.
I wish there was a New Zealand Sovereign Tech Fund. It seems like there is obvious merit. I love the appendix in this post about the EU one.
Fun story of the development of several colour pickers at Apple at the end of the ’90s.
Very well written counterpoint to the recent fly.io post on AI.
If you train models on stolen copies of all the world’s fiction, I don’t think you should be surprised when they blackmail, narc, or murder.
This article on the rise of Markdown was going ok until it called the ‘#’ character “hashtag” 🤮.
This is five years old now, but a delightful walk through the history of CSS, most of which I was around for (I mostly bowed out in the later years).
An interesting pair of articles from authors I very much admire, one pro and one less so. Glyph’s resonates with me much more right now, but it’s hard to disagree with Armin’s.
Interest [summary of a study on what people do when reviewing code]Ihttps://rdel.substack.com/p/rdel-94-how-do-experienced-engineers).
This is a great list of what open software development needs to do better.
Sometimes I end up rereading something old, like this Joel on Software post on pricing and am reminded how well-written these pieces were. I read lots of insightful things now, but some of the grace seems to have disappeared.
An interesting take on writing clever code.
Imagine how great it would be if AoNZ also built up ‘clouds’, for us and the smaller Pacific countries. And especially keeping the open-source element so that it’s synergistic with Europe doing it. Of course, we’d be starting even further behind, but being smaller could potentially move faster.
A fair summary of AoNZ’s COVID response. A great start, with flaws, leading into a hugely wasted opportunity and screw ups. And somehow long-COVID entirely missing from the conversation.
Interesting details of improvements in the cryptography functionality of the Python standard library.
Meanwhile, we’ve been telling our kids that the standard for decent people is enthusiastic consent. That’s very evidently not the case for the tycoons running the technology industry.
I mostly read Simon Willison (for the pro & practical side) and Ed Zitron (for the anti & economic side) but this is a good take of LLMs in coding.
Whatever the chocolate milk version of nerd-sniping is, this is it.
I have never seen Drink Da Milgy, so will keep my eye out for that. I don’t remember having Bickfords Iced Chocolate Almond Milk. They missed Green Valley, but I’ve also not managed to find that. I think it’s wrong to include protein drinks but exclude mixes (Quarterpast and the like).
Outside that, this is the right order:
The story of Slack continues and is now at a point when Slack arguably started to deteriorate. Interesting to read the positively-put background of the time.