a screenshot of the skills recommended for learning backend development from https://roadmap.sh/backend

You know, I really hope people are realising how trivial software development is, and that outsourcing the work to generative tools whole-sale is definitely not a footgun

I mean, look at this silly graph from roadmap.sh/backend - surely no one needs to actually know what any of this actually means?

"hey kids, you should build your 1-feature applications as fast as possible without any fundamental knowledge so that when new requests come in you'll be immediately paralysed by breaking changes you're unable to resolve"

seems legit - why not get 10 people to do this all at the same time?

An image of Outbase's confirmation dialogue for dropping tables from a database where the confirmation question asks for the solution to the mathematical formula: ln(x) + e^(x-1) - cos(x) = 0, or asks you manually type 'confirm'

The confirmation for dropping tables in Outerbase (outerbase.com) is quite something :D

@krassenstein.bsky.social alt text on your images would massively help out visually impaired users on BlueSky who otherwise may not get to enjoy your posts

The Effects of Generative AI on Design Fixation and Divergent Thinking | Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Ye, it seems that without new devs realising that LLMs may be affecting learning that there's the potential for development of a skills gap

This paper goes a little further and seems to find that LLMs may rob people of creative problem solving, though :/
dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

AI Search Has A Citation Problem We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News.

It's not a search engine. It is a tool for _generating_ output in a non-deterministic manner based on probabilities and source material

Companies peddling this BS are destroying people's ability to find real information

www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

AI Search Has A Citation Problem We Compared Eight AI Search Engines. They’re All Bad at Citing News.

Using AI/LLMs for search seems problematic

www.cjr.org/tow_center/w...

> [they] “take away transparency and user agency, further amplify the problems associated with bias in [information access] systems, and often provide ungrounded and/or toxic answers that may go unchecked by a typical user.”

Why can’t society agree on who is a “man,” who is a “woman,” and who is neither? An empirical and philosophical investigation into the metaphysics of gender. by Spencer Greenberg Gender is a central part of many people’s identities, and yet a very basic and politically contentious question is still being debated: What IS gender? And what defines w…

Interesting essay on different perceptions of gender

"Right vs wrong" arguments are not always indicative of reality

www.spencergreenberg.com/2025/02/why-...

GitHub - lihaoyun6/QuickRecorder: A lightweight screen recorder based on ScreenCapture Kit for macOS / 基于 ScreenCapture Kit 的轻量化多功能 macOS 录屏工具 A lightweight screen recorder based on ScreenCapture Kit for macOS / 基于 ScreenCapture Kit 的轻量化多功能 macOS 录屏工具 - lihaoyun6/QuickRecorder

Nice open-source screen-recording utility for MacOS: github.com/lihaoyun6/Qu...

Oh no! Hilary's emails are crashing the market on Hunter Biden's laptop! Those rapscallions!

On Fake Hannah Arendt Quotations This article discusses a mis-attributed quote to Hannah Arendt circulating on social media, exploring why such alterations occur and their potential consequences. Berkowitz argues that while simplifie...

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow."

- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951

hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/o...

holy flippin' shits, ok, you're waaaay ahead of me O.o

You're on a slippery slope towards mapping _all_ navigation to hjkl :D
Browser tabs, webpages, desktop spaces, application instances, editor panes... the world is your hjkloyster
The Vimium-C browser extension is a great segue into this world of home-row nav

The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI An exploration of the problems and possible futures of flooding the web with generative AI content

Excellent talk by @maggieappleton.com on where we currently sit with AI, potential implications for the future, and the responsibility we have to take ownership of the things that humans are good at, while using AI as a _tool_ to do things better, not as a crutch

maggieappleton.com/forest-talk

You either love false dichotomies, or you have no idea that you're using them

Sounds like it's right up my alley :)
Thanks!

I've been wondering if this'd be a worthwhile / interesting pivot from dev...
The more I hear about how people think things work, and how they interact with tech, the more terrified I am of what's actually happening out there

a screenshot of an email subscription recommending a crypto trading strategy that could bring someone financial freedom in 12 months for a few thousand dollars

A human somewhere in the world has mistaken my email address for theirs for years; I frequently get a view into their current interests

The latest: a sub to a crypto newsletter, suggesting that retirement in 12 months is possible with a few $1000 in memecoins, thanks to extreme volatility

wtaf :/

LLMs are _generative_ - they generate output using probabilities

A probabilistic outcome is unlikely to yield deterministic results

bsky.app/profile/zyea...

Avoid using them for search, and avoid using them for data analysis - they're the wrong tool for the job

This ☝️

Second-order and third-order effects can be far reaching

Systems are complex

A simple answer is not necessarily an elegant answer

no... just no...

I use AI for line completion - it saves a ton of keystrokes

Now and then I'll learn something new by chance, maybe 1 in 2000 completions

BUT, I operate in this context:

- due to expertise, I see BS immediately
- the more lines, the less useful
- completion is disabled during active learning

But this sounds like evaluating an LLM's effectiveness as a search and aggregation tool, as opposed to a generative tool

They use probabilities to generate output; probabilistic results would likely not be deterministic, which in certain scenarios is good enough for text, but less so for data

At war with a villain
You can't call a truce
You put down your weapon but now he's got two
A liar's a liar
Take him at his word
Forever rebelling against the absurd

The world made us sick
How can it heal us?

404 = not found. Anyone can create a 404 on any site by entering an invalid URL into a browser

This is more likely a 5xx error - there is either an error directly in the code, or with some external service it depends on

It could be a typo, unhandled bad inputs from users, a server being down...

Adults are often just kids in saggy bodies
Maturing is not about one's age - if one never puts effort into improving the things that they don't yet know are crappy about themselves, they'll end up acting like children until the end

Oh, what I wanted to say is that even though I no longer use a front-end framework as a goto, I haven't had to compromise on what things look like or how they feel - it's all HTML and CSS in the end

The power to build lovable UIs is still there, my toolset and effort is just massively reduced

These essays are really great: htmx.org#hypermedia-a...

It challenged many things that I took for granted, or accepted because of what frameworks encouraged, so even if HTMX doesn't fit someone's needs, the ideas are thought-provoking

This article spoke to what I was feeling: grugbrain.dev

I was exclusively front-end for about 8 years, and then transitioned to full-stack

Angular, React, Svelte, my own Sass framework etc. - I'm decent at it, and UI is important to me

But the slog, dup'd effort, and churn is too much for me now. HTMX is liberating

I was skeptical, but now I'm sold

You're correct in using alpine - the mental model for HTMX is "when X happens, get how the thing should now look from the server, and render" - e.g. when there is a change in the db

For anything interaction based that doesn't need the server, use JS / Alpine / Hyperscript

They work together :)