Graham Ashton

You know you've not become too dependent on social media when you can't remember the Blue Sky URL

Or at least, I'm telling myself that this particular brand of memory-fail is a good sign…

The last thing you want to see when debugging some browser tests is CSS that sets z-index to 2^32 - 1

Oh. Bugger it…

Having a rare experience tonight, listening to a new record that I've never heard before, and bought on a hunch

It's a double album, I'm now 3 sides (and 3 beers) in, and it's had me smiling all the way through

www.piccadillyrecords.com/154033/Vario...

Oh balls. I use Hover for registration, dnsimple to host my DNS. V happy with both.

True. And context is critical with these things. It's just a shame that the 30 second answer is at best going to have the taste of the average community member, at best, and the AI tool doesn't know about the context either

Sadly…

I popped into @piccadillyrecs.bsky.social at lunch to pick up their superb annual publication on the best of the year's music 🎶

Also bought an album, and was given a copy of their 2024 "Sampler" CD 💿 — 20 hand picked tracks from the year

Listening now. It's a good one

Also, might have met Bono…

You make a good point. I think mentors are handy for this kind of thing, if you can find one (team mates also work well)

Just raised my standing desk, which pulled my computer's power lead out of its socket

To be fair, that's a fairly typical level of performance for November so far…

Totally. I've had a free account for years now and still haven't turned it on.

I love @amyhoy.bsky.social's point — if we let these things type stuff out for us (or write text for us), we deprive ourselves of the learning that comes with doing.

And learning is a lot of fun. It makes no sense.

YouTube video by Computerphile Has Generative AI Already Peaked? - Computerphile

I do love Computerphile. Here they are with some facts about how far generative AI can go.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDUC...

tl;dr — there's a plateau. Because science.

I wanted to make a social networking site for people who'd just started their careers at BT at the same time as me, so we could arrange to go to the pub get to know each other. It was 1996.

Time to define a `git push` alias that also launches the browser?

Top tip, thanks!

"oh, it wrote that email for me!" no it didn't. it cribbed from a bunch of other people's writing online and gave you a mishmash of all of them. a gutter average.

you could've looked at hand-tuned example emails written by somebody who knows what they're doing and learned from that instead

Why aren't more people making this point about cheating ourselves out of learning?

I just don't get the appeal of getting the computer to do my thinking for me, and learning "prompt engineering" feels like a decidedly short term strategy

what i find really fascinating about people who use gpt to try to do their actual work ISN'T EVEN that they're cheating themselves out of learning, insight, and mastery

it's that when you use gpt output… any other fool can get the SAME results as you

you're obviating yourself

why??

Fantastic idea, and I really appreciate just being able to click "Follow All" 👏

Posts from Awesome Folks Links about people, culture, organisations, systems, outcomes, facilitation and teams collected throughout the week by Emily Webber at Tacit.

Hello new blueskyers, every Friday, I post a newsletter of blog posts I found interesting that week. You can follow along at hellotacit.beehiiv.com or I’ll probably post links here too.

Occurs to me that if we spend far more time reading code than we do writing it, any tool or technique that produces more of it without making it easier to understand is likely to have a negative overall impact on productivity.

Where are the tools for *that* ?

Yes, I think that's an excellent way of putting it

So I'm thinking in a Venn diagram of all these terms, free speech and hate speech don't actually overlap.

So I looked it up. Wikipedia says that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights defines free speech as the "right to hold opinions without interference" but that it carries "special duties and responsibilities". They go on to talk about protecting the rights of others, and morals.

I'm noticing some internal dissonance over the idea that free speech and moderating hateful language are mutually exclusive. To me, free speech is about the right to share your position and critique others' actions/call for change, without fear of repercussions. But am I missing something?