@baldur This is so, so depressing.

“Adactio: Journal—Unsaid”https://adactio.com/journal/21525> Whenever the issue of ethics came up, it was only ever in relation to how we might use these tools: considering user needs, being transparent, all that good stuff. But never once did the question arise of whether it’s ethical to even use these toolsI have to confess that my disappointment in the dev and UX fields is ongoing.

That feeling when you’re chatting with a neighbour, trying to tip-toe around political topics because you don’t want to start a “thing” until they drop a mention of “redistribution of wealth” being a positive thing into the conversation and you realise they too have been couching their words throughout the conversation

“AI overwhelmingly prefers white and male job candidates in new test of resume-screening bias – GeekWire”https://www.geekwire.com/2024/ai-overwhelmingly-prefers-white-and-male-job-candidates-in-new-test-of-resume-screening-bias/

Saw a discussion on Bluesky about how web devs end up having no body of work as sites disappear, companies fold, and agencies shutterThis first happened to me in the 2000s. Almost every project, large and small, I've worked on since has disappeared. Even most of the ebooks I made for a publishers have been replaced. I've been doing this for almost thirty years and my body of work exists only as screenshots and vague memories

@baldur Oof. I hope a lawyer can make a good suit out of this one.

@baldur @inthehands I recently talked with a web developer who had been working on an application for recording biological lab values.Their group was unaccountably told to try using ChatGPT.They stopped when it immediately inserted impossible values into the data tables.

@baldur I have generalized anxiety disorder.I have never had a worse time in my entire life than these past couple of years.

Whenever I have a go at reading through a bit of the leftist “blogosphere”—newsletterosphere, I guess would be the modern word—I get deeply uncomfortable by how common talking points such as “DEI, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights are liberal imperialism” seem to beToo often it feels like these people are just looking for ways to agree with fascists and religious extremists

@baldur AI for code reviews and security checks

@baldur As someone who actually hates JS, I also think the notion of 'rewriting it in a different language' is purely masturbatory, and doesn't in any meaningful way solve the problems of why JS sucks. Hint: It's not the runtime speed of execution!There's an analogue here that I come back to over and over again. It's that of "Bukowski Man". It's very common for young males (always males) in their 1st or 2nd years of uni to discover him. Then literally everything becomes about Bukowski, man…

@baldur “Imagine, for example, participating in a medical study without even knowing! Your personal information scraped, analyzed, reported on, and sold to behemoth or burgeoning pharmaceutical companies for their profit. And what about your consent? It’s assumed by default. Explicit opt-out is required.”Nice

@baldur Danish police has carried guns since 1965 (where four unarmed cops were killed by an escaping burglar), but the protective vests are a lot more situational. When I see them on the street, they're most often in regular uniform shirts or jackets.(And they don't carry guns either at social functions like eg. social outreach to schools.)

“AI” models are suffused with US values and, occasionally, those are quite shocking to us non-AmericansAn Icelandic police force used a generated image to promote a public noticePeople were absolutely horrifiedWhy?Because the cop in the image had a gun, in a holster, AROUND CHILDREN The uniform was also not accurate for an Icelandic cop but what people found obscene was the idea that anybody would carry a gun around children, even holsteredhttps://www.ruv.is/frettir/innlent/2024-10-20-logreglan-a-sudurnesjum-aetlar-ad-haetta-ad-nota-gervigreindarmyndir-af-logregluthjonum-425104

“Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing? | Oceans | The Guardian”https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other> The sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heatingNot the time to be doing anything that increases emissions

Seeing more and more sites in web dev-related search engine results that are obviously AI crap hallucinating non-existent APIs.Some of the pages are sort of accurate, which is going to make beginners more likely to trust the hallucinated onesStuff I've seen these pages hallucinate:- A "swipe" event- Date.parseISO- A Date.parse method that returns a Date instance- Drawing primitives like a Rectangle classThose are just the obviously incorrect ones. A lot of it is plausible but wrong

Icelandic language trivia of the day: a common colloquial term for "dog" in Icelandic, used the same way you would the word "doggie" in English, is "voffi".It's derived from the word "voff", basically the Icelandic version of "woof"So, dogs in Icelandic are often literally called woofers.

@baldur To be blunt, tech bro literary comprehension is often less "subtle misunderstanding that someone with a comp.lit degree will notice", more "a goddamn 10-year-old with a library card could call bullshit on this".

“It turns out I'm still excited about the web”https://werd.io/view/6707fe1b68490c909b0770a2Yup. This.

@slightlyoff @nolan I would have loved to see mixins/traits.