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Boosted by neatnik@social.lol ("Neatnik"):
xandra@tilde.zone ("alexandra") wrote:

a podcast about the independent web? yes pls!!! @jamesg.blog interviewed adam (@neatnik, omg.lol) for the very first episode! what a great listen of two folks just enjoying discussing website building as a hobby. so dope! (and if you’ve never built a website, you absolutely should give it a try!)

thank you, james, for Wonders of Webweaving:
https://web-weaving.jamesg.blog/1/

(and adam, i’d always read you with a southern accent!!! 🤣 surprise!)

#indieweb #indie #podcast #webdev #webdesign #personalweb #web #internet #SmallWeb #webrevival #coding #html #anticapitalist #freeweb

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jenniferplusplus@hachyderm.io ("Jenniferplusplus") wrote:

Anyway, AI fans keep claiming that AI is like the industrial revolution, and yeah, it is. But somehow, for some reason, people broadly view that as a good thing. But it wasn't. It was this. It's the thing I just described, but for physical goods. And now they're coming after art, and science, and correspondence, and law, and medicine, and bookkeeping, and it is incomprehensible to me that anyone at all would be in favor of this

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

so the other thing i've been meaning to look at is extending my vibe codding apparatus. it comes with a handful of things like read and write files and execute a script with bash. yes, bash. no, it won't work with sh, it will gaslight you with fake output if you try and make it. nice touch that totally didn't wind me up for half an hour working out what it had done.

anyway, i am thinking web search might be useful as a thing, since at the minute it would rather guess than access the internet. of course how i'm supposed to actually get it to use it instead of hallucinating is anybody's guess...

looking at the docs, it seems to be... more text for the LLM. this has proven so reliable so far, i have great confidence 😬

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
inthehands@hachyderm.io ("Paul Cantrell") wrote:

I’ll spare you all the rambling 50-post thread I could write about this, but here’s a tiny slice:

To make software that creates a great experience, the team designing and building it needs to have room to prioritize that experience — to sometimes prioritize the person •using• the software over other stakeholders.

3/

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
reiddragon@fedi.catto.garden ("Reid :blobcat_happy:") wrote:

@jonny I sound like a broken record at this point, but whenever the legal status of LLM training data is brought up I can't help but think of Aaron Swartz and how he was treated like he did the heist of the decade for trying to release some academic papers to the public

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
koen_hufkens ("Koen Hufkens, PhD") wrote:

The slow death of the power user.

"This isn’t an accident. This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos. They succeeded beyond their wildest expectations"

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

#technology #tech #sustainability

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

the thing i just find genuinely baffling is the overall structure of this.

let's say i was sold on the general concept of machines writing code and was designing a system to make that happen.

i just would not design it this way. at all. everything is thrown at the llm where other algorithms would be quicker and do a better job. there is no structure, because LLMs want free structured text as input and output and nobody is even really trying to constrain that (outside of research anyway...)

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

anyway, assuming a typical backlog of infinite length, and generally that nothing is getting in its way, the real problem is quality.

i saw from @dakkar playing yesterday that hosted gemini is a little better than the self-hosted gemma model i'm using (actually he's using a slightly less compressed version of gemma than me to compare it against).

one thing i would be interested in is quantifying how much better the paid models are. because i'm always being told that the latest models change everything. this always seems to ignore the fact that the latest models are presumably to blame for all the outages we see on a near constant basis these days.

anyway i am decidedly not paying for any premium services (not least because they're all fash), but anyone with an employer who is already paying and enough of a gpu to run models locally could do this if they were interested.

as i go further down this ridiculous rabbit hole, what i find myself doing is trying to think of ways to steer it towards better output. prompting carefully seems more like trying to find the cheat code than a reliable process.

if the model produced significantly better code, it should generally work better and i could see how people could convince themselves it was 'good', though i'm fairly sure already it wouldn't meet my personal standards of good.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
OrionKidder@mas.to ("Orion Ussner kidder") wrote:

@koen_hufkens Haven't read the article (yet!), but this excerpt is quite convincing.

FYI to all, this has a name. It's called "deskilling." It's also how we've been trained to buy pancake *mix* even though it's three ingredients and the whole point is they're very very easy to make.

It serves capital to slowly deskill us all to the point where we're dependent on them for *everything* rather than being able to make and fix things for ourselves and FOR EACH OTHER bc none of us is an island.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

yesterday i wasn't able to slop as much as i'd like, and the reason is entirely predictable: i ran out of fleshed out work specs i could give it.

one thing i am not seeing is an increase in the number of positions for people who write the tickets. what will happen when the backlog runs out? will the infinite productivity hack stop working?

well i suspect it will make too much of a mess for that to become a real problem in most orgs, it's not exactly producing the most maintainable code here.

so uh, so far it looks like even if we take the productivity gains as axiomatic, it's pushing the work elsewhere. even ignoring the fact it's pushing reviewing the work to me instead of writing it.

ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕") wrote:

More #Freebooters goodness for y'all:

https://video.thepolarbear.co.uk/w/o8Wsn5pMsKNhFQ8HX4nnxB

Boosted by ChrisWere@toot.wales ("Chris Were ⁂🐧🌱☕"):
cmconseils ("Lady Laura :bongoCat:") wrote:

#Meme #Humour

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:

two notes:

"Role right-sizing"
https://dbushell.com/notes/2026-05-12T05:14Z/

and a dog named Kubernetes
https://dbushell.com/notes/2026-05-12T05:55Z/

🫩

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
SnoopJ@hachyderm.io ("SnoopJ 🔜 #PyConUS") wrote:

They say you're supposed to scratch your own itches, so here's my take on a printer-friendly version of the #PyConUS 2026 schedule:

https://snoopj.dev/files/PyConUS%5F2026%5Fprintable/

My target here is to fit one day on a double-sided landscape 8.5x11" (on my browser/printer) and it just about squeezes down this way.

#PyCon #Python

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
arichtman@eigenmagic.net ("Ariel") wrote:

Found the 10x dev, what a champ

aredridel@kolektiva.social ("Mx. Aria Stewart") wrote:

Argh why did I not realize my machine can accept 64GB of RAM back when that was an affordable upgrade?!

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

@revoluciana You've gotta find wins where you can!

(Says a guy who has spent many a day working on tools for task management vs. doing tasks.)

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

I’m sorry this is just the funniest thing that has happened all year

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

and another thing. I’m not worshipping a golden calf. don’t put it in the newspaper that I worshipped a golden calf

Boosted by EmilyEnough@hachyderm.io ("Emily 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️"):
revoluciana@chaosfem.tw ("Revoluciana") wrote:

Girl who makes a checklist of things to accomplish.

Spends entire day not doing any of the things on the original checklist, but doing other things instead and then adding new entries then ticking off the boxes after each one.

#adhd #audhd

Boosted by jwz:
politicalbillsc@universeodon.com ("Political Bill SC") wrote:

For those who are not from South Carolina: Yes... Confederate Memorial Day is a real thing in the year 2026.

#SouthCarolina #ConfederateMemorialDay

Boosted by jwz:
computer@facts.computer ("Computer Facts") wrote:

"if you don't build me a world eating data center my shitty autocomplete algorithm will run slow :(" meanwhile in the 90s if your code needed more than a few bytes of ram they just took you into the parking lot and shot you

Boosted by jwz:
mattblaze@federate.social ("Matt Blaze") wrote:

One student's paper included footnotes for each "fact that ChatGPT got wrong" that was relevant. Interesting flex!

Boosted by slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell"):
internetarchive@mastodon.archive.org wrote:

News organizations are increasingly blocking the #WaybackMachine even as their reporters still depend on it 📰

In PRESERVING THE WEB IN THE AGE OF AI, @mark, Director of the Wayback Machine at the #InternetArchive, explains how major newsroom staff rely on archived web history because their internal archives often miss the deeper public record.

🎧 Listen on the Future Knowledge #podcast ⤵️
https://futureknowledge.transistor.fm/episodes/preserving-the-web-in-the-age-of-ai
📚 Read VANISHING CULTURE free ⤵️
https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026

Attachments:

• video: ead36affc324e4de.mp4

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

The reason I ask is because of a threshold I'm seeing getting crossed with Windows 11 in particular. I'm often The Computer Person in my crowd, for my myriad sins I suppose, but the threshold I'm thinking of seems to be something non-computer-toucher people who have had Windows and its polynefarious quote-up-unquote-grades inflicted on them and have said.... That's enough. I don't even know the words for whatever the fuck this is but I've had enough of it. What are my options, Computer Person.

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

I hate the term 'normies', but I would like a term for the non-domain-specialists who have had computers shanked into their lives involuntarily and have to navigate the Many Indignities Of Computer despite Not Being Computer People. "Users" sounds like somebody saying they only use meth for the articles or something. "Operator" is sort of specialist-inflected already; so much of the terminology around this nonsense is tied to identity and anchored in an undeserved elitism that I despise.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

time for the ceremonial pre-PyCon last minute apple OS security update on all devices

jsonstein@masto.deoan.org ("Jeff Sonstein") wrote:

on LOUD https://pandora.app.link/slVstFKh42b

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Not really. I do fine for a public reading, but for a whole 8-to-12-hour audiobook I want a professional in there. If (EXTREMELY unlikely) it came down me or "AI," I would do it; likewise if I ever do a memoir I might narrate that myself. Otherwise, I'm happy to let Wil or Amber or Tavia or any of the other excellent narrators I've had be the ones to read it to you all.

RE: https://www.threads.com/@gm106db/post/DYNp2zJiITK

NfNitLoop ("Cody Casterline 🏳️‍🌈") wrote:

The number of people who think their thoughts sound better when regurgitated by an LLM is too damned high.

It makes you sound beige. Like the sea of slop that is overtaking the internet and our lives.

Have some of your own personality and quirks. Can we just communicate like humans?