jaredcwhite

I will write code until the day I die. It is an art form which I embrace, alongside many other art forms I enjoy creating in like electronic music, writing, essays, travel, photography, and much more.

It is a terrible mistake that some people have come to believe that code is only as useful as its final executable result, and not the art of expressing logic and meaning within a computer system purely on its own merits.

A few minutes in and I see numerous unnecessary code paths and outright errors. What is this trying to prove and why would anyone besides your organization use it? Also, it's malpractice to claim this is "secure". Who is offering up this guarantee and on what basis?

I'm not on TikTok and never have been, but I've seen plenty of shortform videos shared elsewhere. Here's the thing about all of them.

They never inform.

The number of video creators I can actually recall and point to who have affected me on any real emotional or intellectual level via shorts I can count on one hand.

"Old-school" longform video (on YouTube and elsewhere) is a medium with real utility and artistic merit. Shorts are mildly entertaining at best and mind-numbing goop at worst. And, as usual, the meme is true: *this could have been a blog post.*

"As we build [employee replacements that are always 100% remote] that will define this era, we need the kind of energy and momentum that comes from smart people working [not remote because remote is too hard to manage]."

Oh the irony! double facepalm emojis

RSS isn't a format that's super-helpful for publishers. There are a variety of reasons why. But it's an absolute dream for consumers. And that's what makes it so awesome, so powerful.

Case in point: I saw someone had unsubscribed from one of my email newsletters, and when I went to go read the "reason why" field, they'd filled out: "subscribed to the RSS feed instead."

That's right, my email newsletter has an RSS feed (thanks Buttondown!), and they prefer to receive the newsletter that way rather than via email. And can I blame them? Absolutely not! I love RSS. Is it better for my vanity to have their email address in my database instead, rather than some nebulous XML file going out to who-knows? Of course. But again, this format keeps on winning year after year because it's one of the best consumer-first features of the open web.

That already happened. Now we're not debating if scaling efforts run up against reality like physics, math, and finance, but what will be the economic and societal fallout.

Personally, I fear the worst.

The bubble is bursting. Hope y'all are alright in the midst of it.

GenAI image generation is not fair.

also: “Cloudelare” ;-P

This article can easily be dismissed when hardly a moment in you see the headline "Agents Are Inevitable"

I'm sorry, but the "agents" of "agentic AI" is completely different from the original purpose of the World-Wide Web which was to support user agents. User agents are used directly by users—aka browsers. API access came later, but even then it was often directed by user activity…and otherwise quite normally rate-limited or paywalled.

The idea that now every web server must comply with servicing an insane number of automated bots doing god-knows-what without users even understanding what's happening a lot of the time, or without the consent of content owners to have all their IP scraped into massive training datasets is, well, asinine.

That's not the web we built, that's not the web we signed up for; and yes, we will take drastic measures to block your ass.

I thought AI was going to help us all* enjoy much more leisure time while our digital twins do work on our behalf.

* Oh sorry, I guess that was just for the Zoom CEO.

tbh, I've been using the official app on iOS for years and it's…fine. It's certainly gotten more attractive as of late, but I really do prefer it to Apple Mail. I also directly use the webapps on desktop OSes and they are also fine.

Consumers have a right to know what the source is of the content they are ingesting into their minds, and specifically if that content originated in another actual human mind or if it's the slop generated by a synthetic text extruder.

It's really a pretty straightforward proposition to understand, and disclosure is absolutely the key so that consumers, if they choose as I do to boycott such output, can make informed decisions.

I have a feeling if someone wrote an article about how great GPT-5 is and the first big quote was from Sam Altman, you'd say it's a cool article.

It's only "bias" when you don't like it.

Slop does not improve anything. Many people have a visceral negative reaction to it. Every blog post I see with some crappy AI image attached, the content is drastically devalued for me. Some workflows are actually slower now. People become deskilled. Some start to fall into delusion.

This technology is not an industry win.

P.S. Google has a bazillion dollars but can't figure out how to maintain a new secure XSLT library or update to a newer one which exists already? The usage argument is dumb…maybe a lot more sites would find good uses for XML/XSLT if this stuff was actually maintained and promoted properly!

XML for document content (like, the whole point of markup) = awesome.

XML for app configuration or basic data transfer formats = horrible.

Unfortunately I fear so many people got burned by the latter issues they forgot (or missed entirely) all the greatness of the first.

That's the exact same problem in coding as well. Oh, we'll have senior level devs dive into the hard problems in the codebase and AI agents will handle the easier stuff.

And how, pray tell, will any people in future learn how to get the level where they can solve hard problems in the first place??

What if pigs fly?

Haha, good one! I love me some juicy satire.

Wait…erm, is this for real?? :face_with_spiral_eyes:

> as a developer if youre not using these tools youre staying behind

Well that's certainly a belief. Why are you not applying your lofty analysis to your own bias?

Blood money.

Note GPT-5's subtle mouthfeel reminiscent of cranberries with a touch of bourbon.

It is literally impossible for someone to understand what they're "coding" in a day if 10,000 lines (!!) just got farted out of some codegen tools. I cannot believe anyone would say this responsibly with a straight face.

Gaslight, gaslight, gaslight. That's all Google does now. Their AI tools gaslight us, and their human leadership gaslights us. It's all truly sad, considering what a major breakthrough Google Search was in the early days.

Use DuckDuckGo, use Kagi, use virtually anything OTHER than Google.

The sound quality is worse than 128Kb MP3. It might fool some people on their smartphones barely paying attention, but "studio-grade music" is an outright lie.

I dumped DuckDuckGo for Kagi. heh heh

Seriously, I haven't used Google in years. I stopped even relying on Google as a decent backup option because it's gotten so-o-o bad. DDG has gotten incrementally worse simply because they're unable to fend off the reams of AI slop taking over everything (and it's also based in large part on Bing's index).

I recently tried Kagi now that they have free and lower-cost tiers, and oh wow I can feel the difference. This is like 2010s-era search, and I mean that as a distinct compliment. I signed up and won't look back. The "Quick Peek" feature is truly fantastic…it feels like it's some sort of AI but it's simply just a good set of queries with good excerpts of REAL text from REAL links. Bravo!

I'm genuinely scared of what the crash will do to society. As much as I loathe AI boosterism, I'm starting to think my personal desire for schadenfreude may not outweigh the fear that I and everyone else I care about will get swept under the tsunami of the bubble burst.

How it started: platform starts up to help people share the code they wrote with each other.

How it's going: platform wants to stop people from sharing the code they wrote with each other.

> Either you embrace AI, or get out of this career.

OK. I quit. Bye!

Ha, I genuinely laughed at that. Thank you!

I think the "you" in the quote is referring to the programmer of the PR, not the reviewer. I agree that it's probably unrealistic to expect reviewers to understand every line of code in a PR. That's why it's crucial that the programmers of said PRs themselves understand every line of code. I'll go one step further:

If you submit a PR and you yourself can not personally vouch for every line of code as a professional…then you are not a professional. You are a hack.

That is why these code generation tools are so dangerous. Sure, it's theoretically possible that a programmer can rely on them for offering suggestions of new code and then "write" that code for a PR such that full human understanding is maintained and true craft is preserved. The reality is, that's not what's happening. At all. And it's a full-blown crisis.