Reposts – Dan Q

AI and cigarettes

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In the 1980s and 1990s, when I was a kid, smoking was everywhere. Restaurants, bars, and a little before my time, airplanes!

The idea that people would smoke was treated as inevitable, and the idea that you could get them to stop was viewed as wildly unrealistic.

Sound familiar? But in the early 2000’s, people did stop smoking!

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But a few years ago, the trend started to reverse. You know why?

Vaping.

Vape pens were pushed as a “safer alternative to smoking,” just like Anil is suggesting with Firefox AI. And as a result, not only did people who would have smoked anyways start up again, but people who previously wouldn’t have started.

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Chris Ferdinandi (Go Make Things), in AI and cigarettes

I know it’s been a controversial and not-for-everyone change, but I’ve personally loved that Chris Ferdinandi has branched out from simply giving weekday JavaScript tips to also providing thoughts and commentary on wider issues in tech, including political issues. I’m 100% behind it: Chris has a wealth of experience and an engaging writing style and even when I don’t 100% agree with his opinions, I appreciate that he shares them.

And he’s certainly got a point here. Pushing “less-harmful” options (like vaping… possibly…) can help wean people off something “more-harmful”… but it can also normalise a harmful behaviour that’s already on the way out by drawing newcomers to the “less-harmful” version.

My personal stance remains that GenAI may have value (though not for the vast majority of things that people market it as having value for, where – indeed – it’s possibly doing more harm than good!), but it’s possible that we’ll never know because the entire discussion space is poisoned now by the hype. That means it’ll be years before proper, unbiased conversations can take place, free of the hype, and it’s quite possible that the economy of AI will have collapsed by then. So maybe we’ll never know.

Anyway: good post by Chris; just wanted to share that, and also to add a voice of support for the direction he’s taken his blog these last few years.

We Need to Talk About Botsplaining

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“Botsplaining,” as I use the term, describes a troubling new trend on social media, whereby one person feeds comments made by another person into a large language model (like ChatGPT), asks it to provide a contrarian (often condescending) explanation for why that person is “wrong,” and then pastes the resulting response into a reply. They may occasionally add in “I asked ChatGPT to read your post, and here’s what he said,”² but most just let the LLM speak freely on their behalf without acknowledging that they’ve used it. ChatGPT’s writing style is incredibly obvious, of course, so it doesn’t really matter if they disclose their use of it or not. When you ask them to stop speaking to you through an LLM, they often simply continue feeding your responses into ChatGPT until you stop engaging with them or you block them.

This has happened to me multiple times across various social media platforms this year, and I’m over it.

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Stephanie Vee, in We Need to Talk About Botsplaining

Stephanie hits it right on the nose in this wonderful blog post from last month.

I just don’t get it why somebody would ask an AI to reply to me on their behalf, but I see it all the time. In threads around the ‘net, I see people say “I put your question into ChatGPT, and here’s what it said…” I’ve even seen coworkers at my current and formers employer do it.

What do they think I am? Stupid? It’s not like I don’t know that LLMs exist, what they’re good at, what they’re bad at (I’ve been blogging about it for years now!), and more-importantly, what people think they’re good at but are wrong about.

If I wanted an answer from an AI (which, just sometimes, I do)… I’d have asked an AI in the first place.

If I ask a question and it’s not to an AI, then it’s safe for you to assume that it’s because what I’m looking for isn’t an answer from an AI. Because if that’s what I wanted, that’s what I would have gotten in the first place and you wouldn’t even have known. No: I asked a human a question because I wanted an answer from a human.

When you take my request, ignore this obvious truth, and ask an LLM to answer it for you… it is, as Stephanie says, disrespectful to me.

But more than that, it’s disrespectful to you. You’re telling me that your only value is to take what I say, copy-paste it to a chatbot, then copy-paste the answer back again! Your purpose in life is to do for people what they’re perfectly capable of doing for themselves, but slower.

How low an opinion must you have of yourself to volunteer, unsolicited to be the middle-man between me and a mediocre search engine?

If you don’t know the answer, say nothing. Or say you don’t know. Or tell me you’re guessing, and speculate. Or ask a clarifying question. Or talk about a related problem and see if we can find some common ground. Bring your humanity.

But don’t, don’t, don’t belittle both of us by making yourself into a pointless go-between in the middle of me and an LLM. Just… dont’t.

Two modes of Internet use

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I’ve found my relationships are healthier when I keep my offline-first relationships offline (e.g. not following each other on Facebook or Instagram) — following someone’s Instagram makes it feel like I know what’s going on with them without interacting. Following offline friends on social media can reduce what used to be normal friendships into parasocial relationships.

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I suspect bringing offline relationships online is responsible for a lot of the loneliness people feel — social media looks like you have all these friends… but no one you could ask to feed your cat while you’re away, because one-to-many broadcasting replaced direct interactions 😿 Essentially, the offline relationship became an online one.

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Tracy Durnell, in Two modes of Internet use

Tracy’s observations here are absolutely excellent, and spot-on. I’ve absolutely experienced some of the problems she’s described when trying to use social media to supplement “offline-first” relationships.

Unfortunately, unilaterally following Tracy’s segregation strategy doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’re going to avoid the problems she’s identified. That’s especially true if you haven’t always followed her guidance!

Like many folks I know, I joined Facebook when it became available to me and used it to connect with most of the people I knew in the real world. And certainly, this caused a problematic blurring of our online and offline interactions! People in my friend group would switch to “broadcast mode”, not reaching out to query one another’s status and wellbeing, and coming to assume that anything they’d shared online would be universally known among their friends (I was definitely guilty of this myself; sometimes I still am!).

I dropped Facebook about 14 years ago, but it’s still the case that my offline-first friends will sometimes assume that I’ll know something that they posted there (or to some other platform). And it’s still the case that I’m not as good as I could be at reaching-out and checking-in. (At least that latter point is something actionable that I can work with, I suppose.)

After thirty years online, it seems to me that converting an online relationship to an offline one is a rarity. But converting one born-offline into an online one, or a “hybrid” one that somehow exhibits some of the worst characteristics of both, is distressingly easy… even when you don’t intend it.

Tracy’s post’s got much more to say, and I thoroughly recommend it. I don’t know that I’m personally ready to make as firm a distinction between my “online” and “offline” friends as she seems to – there are aspects of the hybrid model that actually work quite well for me, much of the time – but I like having a framework around which to think and talk about the differences.

The Piss Saga

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Derek Milton, in The Piss Saga

When somebody started repeatedly leaving bottles of urine on top of a utility cabinet in his neighbourhood, filmmaker Derek Milton decided to investigate. During his descent into insanity as he tries to understand why this person keeps leaving their piss here (and who keeps collecting them, later), somehow sponsored by the Reolink Go PT Ultra range of security cameras, we see through this entertaining (?) documentary (??) the story of an artist trying to interpret the work of another, more-shy, artist (???).

I don’t know, that’s the best description I can come up with for this weird project. I still don’t know why I watched it from beginning to end. But now you can, too.

A chat with 19-year-old me

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I bumped into my 19-year-old self the other day. It was horrifying, in the same way that looking in the mirror every morning is horrifying, but with added horror on top.

I stopped him mid-stride, he wasn’t even looking at me. His attention was elsewhere. Daydreaming. I remember, I used to do a lot of that. I tapped his shoulder.

“Hey. Hi. Hello. It’s me! I mean: you.”

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Giles Turnbull, in A chat with 19-year-old me

I wanted to pick two parts of this piece to quote, but I couldn’t. The whole thing is great. And it’s concise – only about 1,700 words – so you should just go read it.

I wonder what conversations I’d have with my 19-year-old self. Certainly technology would come up, as it was already a huge part of my life (and, indeed, I was already publishing on the Web and even blogging), but younger-me would still certainly have been surprised by and interested in some of the changes that have happened since. High-speed, always-on cellular Internet access… cheap capacitive touchscreens… universal media streaming… the complete disappearance of CRT screens… high-speed wireless networking…

Giles tells his younger self to hold onto his vinyl collection: to retain a collection of physical media for when times get strange and ephemeral, like now. What would I say to 19-year-old me? It’s easy to fantasise about the advice you’d give your younger self, but would I even listen to myself? Possibly not! I was a stubborn young know-it-all!

Anyway, go read Giles’ post because it’s excellent.

Repost #27484

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Layoutit Terra is a CSS terrain generator that leverages stacked grids and 3D transforms.

Inspectable spikes, wedges, ramps and flats are stitched together into a voxel landscape.

Inspired by Transport Tycoon and all ’90s isometric classics.

Built from the southern hemisphere with Vue, Nuxt, and lots of love ♥
  +------+      +------+     
 /|     /|      |\     |\    
+-+----+ |      | +----+-+   
| |    | |      | |    | |   
| +----+-+      +-+----+ |  
|/     |/        \|     \| 
+------+          +------+     
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Layoutit, in Layoutit! CSS Terrain Generator

It’s not often these days that I have the experience of “I didn’t know the Web could do that‽”

Once was when I saw DHTML Lemmings, for example, at a time when adding JavaScript to a page usually meant you were doing nothing more-sophisticated than adding a tooltip/popover or switching the images in your mystery meat navigation menu. Another was when I saw Google Earth’s browser-based implementation for the first time, performing 3D manipulations of a quality that I’d previously only seen in dedicated applications.

But I got that today when I played with Layoutit! Terra (from the folks behind one of the better CSS grid layout generators). It’d be pretty cool if it were “just” a Transport Tycoon-like landscape generator and editor, but the thing that blew my mind was discovered that it’s implemented entirely in HTML and CSS… not a line of JavaScript to be seen. Even speaking as somebody who played… and then reverse-engineered… things like Blackle Mori’s CSS Puzzle Box, I can’t even begin to fathom how I’d begin to conceive of such a thing, let alone implement it.

Well done, Layitout! team.

You’ve got mail

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Subject: “Re-Design and Promotion Strategy for Dead.Garden”
Subject: “About your Dead.Garden”
Subject: “Errors in your Dead.Garden”

Dear Dead,
your website is not good enough, in fact, it is actively bad.
Don’t you know that you need Search Engine Optimization?
What are you, some kind of idiot?
Your site is currently ranked on page 1,000,000 of Google,
and if we know anything (in fact, we know everything),
this means that you are wasting not only your time,
but much more importantly
money.

We’ve had a quick look at your site
and noticed a few areas that could be improved.
We’ve discovered that your website’s UI is,
frankly,
complete ass.
Your mobile experience is bad, your CTAs should be shinier and rounder;
Maybe put a gradient here and there.
How are you ever going to get someone to buy your product
without manipulating their behaviour?

You’re not selling anything?
Well then, what ARE you doing?

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Jo (Dead Garden), in You’ve got mail

A fantastic poem that feels exactly like the subtext of every one of these emails I ever receive.

My blog is for me, first and foremost; I suspect Jo feels a similar way about their digital garden. I’m not interested in making money with it, and I’m perfectly comfortable with the fact that it costs me money. These things are all fine. I don’t need an SEO merchant to tell me how they can improve it.

Anyway: go enjoy Jo’s poem.

The Reason I Have 12 Birthdays

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or, how to fuck your shit up by ignoring obvious birthday inflammation symptoms. don’t be like me. seek help.

sorry for this barely scripted and low quality video, the next one will be worse.

special thanks to doctor jacobi for the excellent care, and to the manna charitable foundation for the flight logistics.

Blackle Mori, in The Reason I Have 12 Birthdays

The ever-excellent Blackle Mori¹ posted this about 18 months ago but I don’t think it got the level of attention it deserves. If if you’ve never experienced birthday inflammation or known anybody who has, it’s an eye-opening experience to hear a first-hand account of this unusual and definitely-real condition.

Footnotes

¹ If the name’s familiar but you can’t quite place it, here’s the previous two times I’ve talked about Blackle’s work: my analysis of the construction of the Basilisk Collection, and the (now-famous) Cursed Computer Iceberg.

AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time

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New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people – routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.

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Key findings:

45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.

31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.

20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.

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BBC Media Centre, in Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory

In what should be as a surprise to nobody, but probably still is (and is probably already resulting in AI fanboys coming up with counterpoints and explanations): AI is not an accurate way for you to get your news.

(I mean: anybody who saw Apple Intelligence’s AI summaries of news probably knew this already, but it turns out that it gets worse.)

There are problems almost half the time and “major accuracy issues” a fifth of the time.

I guess this is the Universe’s way of proving that people getting all of their news from Facebook wasn’t actually the worst timeline to live in, after all. There’s always a worse one, it turns out.

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Separately, the BBC has today published research into audience use and perceptions of AI assistants for News. This shows that many people trust AI assistants to be accurate – with just over a third of UK adults saying that they trust AI to produce accurate summaries, rising to almost half for people under-35.

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BBC Media Centre, in Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory

Personally, I can’t imagine both caring enough about a news item to want to read it and not caring about it enough that I feed it into an algorithm that, 45% of the time, will mess it up. It’s fine to skip the news stories you don’t want to read. It’s fine to skim the ones you only care about a little. It’s even fine to just read the headline, so long as you remember that media biases are even easier to hide from noncritical eyes if you don’t even get the key points of the article.

But taking an AI summary and assuming it’s accurate seems like a really wild risk, whether before or after this research was published!

It Is A War Out There – Take Control of Your Supply Lines with HtDTY

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This post advocates minimizing dependencies in web pages that you do not directly control. It conflates dependencies during build time and dependencies in the browser. I maintain that they are essentially the same thing, that both have the same potential problems, and that the solution is the snappy new acronym HtDTY – Host the Damn Thing Yourself.

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If your resources are large enough to cause a problem if you Host the Damn Things Yourself then consider finding ways to cut back on their size. Or follow my related advice – HtDToaSYHaBRW IMCYMbT(P)WDWYD : Host the Damn Thing on a Service You Have A Business Relationship With, It May Cost You Money But They (Probably) Won’t Dick With Your Data.

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Andrew Stephens, in It Is A War Out There – Take Control of Your Supply Lines with HtDTY

Host the Damn Thing Yourself (HtDTY) is an excellent suggestion; I’ve been a huge fan of the philosophy for ages, but I like this acronym. (I wish it was pronounceable, but you can’t have everything.)

Andrew’s absolutely right, but I’m not even sure he’s expressed all the ways in which he’s right. Here are my reasons to HtDTY, especially for frontend resources:

Security: As Andrew observes, you can’t protect against supply chain attacks if your supply chain wide open to exploitation. And I’m glad that he points out that version pinning doesn’t protect you from this (although subsource integrity can).
Privacy: Similarly, Andrew nailed this one. If you host your fonts on Google Fonts, for example, you’re telling one of the biggest data-harvesting companies on the Internet who’s accessing your website. Don’t do that (in that specific example, google-webfonts-helper is your friend).
Resilience: Every CDN and third-party service you depend upon is another single-point-of-failure. Sure, Azure has much better uptime than your site… but it still goes down and not necessarily at the same times as your site does! And it’s not just about downtime. What if your user’s government poisons the DNS to block the CDN? What if the user’s privacy tools block your CDN’s domain (whether rightly, for the privacy reasons described above, or wrongly)? What if, y’know, you were hosting your images on Imgur but that’s not available in your users’ country? These are all real examples that happen in the real world. Why would you choose to make your site less-reliable by loading jQuery from a CDN rather than just… downloading a copy?
Performance: Andrew rightly deconstructs the outdated argument that CDN caching improves your site’s performance. Edge caching might, in some circumstances, but still has the problems listed above. But this argument can go further than Andrew’s observation that CDNs aren’t that much of a benefit… because sticking to just one domain name means (a) fewer DNS lookups, (b) fewer TLS handshakes, (c) better compression, if e.g. your JavaScript assets are bundled or at least delivered in the same pipeline, and (d) all the benefits of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, like early hints, pipelining, etc. Nowadays, it can often be faster to not-use a CDN (depending on lots of factors), in addition to all the above benefits.

So yeah: HtDTY. I dig it.

The Scroll Art Museum

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Scroll art is a form of ASCII art where a program generates text output in a command line terminal. After the terminal window fills, it begins to scroll the text upwards and create an animated effect. These programs are simple, beautiful, and accessible as programming projects for beginners. The SAM is a online collection of several scroll art examples.

Here are some select pieces:

Zig-zag, a simple periodic pattern in a dozen lines of code.

Orbital Travels, sine waves intertwining.

Toggler, a woven triangular pattern restricted to two characters.

Proton Stream, a rapid, chaotic lightning pattern.

There are two limitations to most scroll art:

Program output is limited to text (though this could include emoji and color.)

Once printed, text cannot be erased. It can only scroll up.

But these restrictions compel creativity. The benefit of scroll art is that beginner programmers can create scroll art apps with a minimal amount of experience. Scroll art requires knowing only the programming concepts of print, looping, and random numbers. Every programming langauge has these features, so scroll art can be created in any programming language without additional steps. You don’t have to learn heavy abstract coding concepts or configure elaborate software libraries.

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Al Sweigart, in The Scroll Art Museum

Okay, so: scroll art is ASCII art, except the magic comes from the fact that it’s very long and as your screen scrolls to show it, an animation effect becomes apparent. Does that make sense?

Here, let me hack up a basic example in… well, QBASIC, why not:

Anyway, The Scroll Art Museum has lots of them, and they’re much better than mine. I especially love the faux-parallax effect in Skulls and Hearts, created by a “background” repeating pattern being scrolled by a number of lines slightly off from its repeat frequency while a foreground pattern with a different repeat frequency flies by. Give it a look!

Dogspinner

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Lu Wilson and Flora Caulton, in Dogspinner

Dogspinner is the Monday morning distraction you didn’t know you needed. Get that dog up to full speed! (It’s worth it for the sound effects alone.)

I had some difficulty using it on desktop because I use the Forbidden Resolutions. But it probably works fine for most people and is probably especially great on mobile.

I’d love to write a longer review to praise the art style and the concept, but there’s not much to say. Just… go and give it a shot; it’ll improve your day, I’m sure.

Lowriders & websites

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I think of ElonStan420 standing in that exhibit hall, eyeing those cars with disdain because all that time, energy, care, and expression “doesn’t really matter”. Those hand-painted pinstripes don’t make the car faster or cheaper. Chrome-plated everything doesn’t make it more efficient. No one is going to look under the hood anyway.

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Adam Stoddard, in Lowriders & websites

Don’t read the comments on HackerNews, Adam! (I say this, but I’ve yet to learn not to do so myself, when occasionally my writing escapes from my site and finds its way over there.)

But anyway, this is a fantastic piece about functionalism. Does it matter whether your website has redundant classes defined in the HTML? It renders the same anyway, and odds are good that nobody will ever notice! I’m with Adam: yes, of course it can matter. It doesn’t have to, but coding is both a science and an art, and art matters.

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Should every website be the subject of maximal craft? No, of course not. But in a industry rife with KPI-obsessed, cookie-cutter, vibe-coded, careless slop, we could use more lowriders.

Well said, Adam.

The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

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“OK,” the young man said, “but what can we do about the crash?” He was clearly very worried.

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do about that. I think it’s already locked in. I mean, maybe if we had a different government, they’d fund a jobs guarantee to pull us out of it, but I don’t think Trump’ll do that, so –”

“But what can we do?“

We went through a few rounds of this, with this poor kid just repeating the same question in different tones of voice, like an acting coach demonstrating the five stages of grieving using nothing but inflection. It was an uncomfortable moment, and there was some decidedly nervous chuckling around the room as we pondered the coming AI (economic) apocalypse, and the fate of this kid graduating with mid-six-figure debts into an economy of ashes and rubble.

I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming.

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Cory Doctorow, in The real (economic) AI apocalypse is nigh

I’m not sure I entirely agree with Doctorow on this one. I’ll probably read his upcoming book on the subject, though.

I agree that, based on the ways in which AI is being used, financed, and marketed… we’re absolutely in an unsustainable bubble. There’s a lot of fishy accounting, dubious business models, and overpromised marketing. I’m not saying AI’s useless: it’s not! But it’s yet proven itself to be revolutionary, nor even on the path to being so, and it’s so expensive that it seems unlikely that the current “first dose is free” business model is almost-certainly unsustainable.

But I’m not convinced that a resulting catastrophic economic collapse is inevitable. Maybe I’m over-optimistic, but I like to imagine that the bubble can fizzle-out gradually and the actually-valuable uses of AI can continue to be used in a sustainable way. (I’m less-optimistic that we’ll find a happy-solution to prevent AI from being used to rip off artists, but that’s another story.)

But we’ll see.

Is it possible to allow sideloading and keep users safe?

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Terence Eden raises some valid points:

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I’ve tried to be pragmatic, but there’s something of a dilemma here.

Users should be free to run whatever code they like.

Vulnerable members of society should be protected from scams.

Do we accept that a megacorporation should keep everyone safe at the expense of a few pesky nerds wanting to run some janky code?

Do we say that the right to run free software is more important than granny being protected from scammers?

Do we pour billions into educating users not to click “yes” to every prompt they see?

Do we try and build a super-secure Operating System which, somehow, gives users complete freedom without exposing them to risk?

Do we hope that Google won’t suddenly start extorting developers, users, and society as a whole?

Do we chase down and punish everyone who releases a scam app?

Do we stick an AI on every phone to detect scam apps and refuse to run them if they’re dodgy?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions and – if I’m honest – I don’t like asking them.

Terence Eden

Google’s gradual locking-down of Android bothers me, too. I’ve rooted many of my phones in order to unlock features that I benefit from (as a developer… and as a nerd!), and it’s bugged me on the occasions where I’ve ~~been unable to run~~ had to use complicated workarounds to trick e.g. a bank’s app. Having gone to the effort to root a phone – which remains outside of the reach of most regular users – I’d be happy to accept an appropriate share of the liability if my mistake, y’know, let a scammer steal all of my money.

That’s the risk you take with any device on which you have root, and it’s why we make it hard to the point of being discouraging. Because you can’t just put up a warning and hope that users will read and understand it, because they won’t. They’ll just click whatever button looks like it’ll get them to the next step without even glancing at the danger signs¹.

I’m glad to have been increasingly decoupling myself from Google’s ecosystem, because I’ve been burned by it too. Like Terence, I’ve been hit by “real name” policies that discriminate against people with unusual names or who might be at risk of impersonation². But I’m not convinced that there’s a good alternative for me to running Android on my mobile devices, at the moment: I really enjoyed Maemo back in the day; what’s the status of Sailfish nowadays?

I get that we need to protect people from dangerous scammy apps. But I’d like to think there’s a middle-ground somewhere between Doctrowian “it’s your device, you’re responsible for what runs on it” and the growing Apple/Google thinking of “if we don’t have the targetting coordinates of the developer that wrote the code, our OS won’t let you run it”. I’m ready to concede that user education alone hasn’t worked, but there’s got to be a better solution than this, Google.

Footnotes

¹ Incidentally, I don’t blame users for this behaviour. Users have absolutely been conditioned, and continue to be conditioned, to click-without-reading. Cookie and privacy banners with dark patterns, EULAs and legal small print are notoriously (and often unnecessarily) long and convoluted, and companies routinely try to blur the line between “serious thing you should really read but we want you not to” and “trivial thing that you don’t need to read; it’s just a formality that we have to say it”.

² Right now, my biggest fight with Google has come from the fact that lately, it seems like every time I upload a Three Rings demo video to YouTube it gets deleted under their harassment policy for doxxing people… people like “Alan Fakename” from Somewhereville, “Betty Notaperson” from Otherplace, and their friend “Chris McMadeup” who lives at 123 Imaginary Street. The appeals process turns out to be that you click a button to appeal, but don’t get to provide any further information (e.g. to explain that these are clearly-fake people who won’t mind being doxxed on account of the fact that they don’t exist), and then a few hours later you get an email to say “nah, we’re keeping it deleted”. I almost expect the YouTube version of my recent video demonstrating FreeDeedPoll.org.uk will be next to be targetted by this policy for showing me scribbling the purported signature Sam McRealName, formerly known as Jo Genuine-Person.