Ross's Micro Blog

This is not good. Curl is EVERYWHERE!!

https://mastodon.social/@bagder/117398235777756798

Long chat with my wife tonight about what on earth my career looks like right now.

Pretty sure there’s a correction coming at some point. But what’s left after the correction is what’s important. And that’s crystal-ball stuff.

I’m lost. But clinging to the things I have and am good at.

Like, sure, I’ve built some dumb shit in my time. But I was thoughtful and learned my craft while I was doing it. These people burned the planet, created slop and learned nothing! This is not fun or interesting. It’s probably irresponsible.

3/3

https://youtu.be/ku83Cdoj_G0

– A vibe coded app that you manually input a bunch of health data into, with zero discussion of security or privacy? That’s fine then!!
– And wait. Is that… really… an app that… calculates the mean average of two provided numbers??? 🤦‍♂️

2/3

I know this was meant to be fun, but The Vergecast getting people to pitch vibe-coded apps at them just showed why just-because-you-can-doesn’t-mean-you-should.

– A vibe-coded app that collects photos of dead people. Nothing could go wrong there, I’m sure.

1/3

My daughter is away for the week on a school residential and my son is old enough to be pretty self sufficient and OH MY GOODNESS WHAT DO ALL YOU CHILDLESS ADULTS DO ALL EVENING LONG???

This Drone-Delivered Potatoes thing is excellent buffoonery. I approve.

https://www.theverge.com/report/1002172/potato-by-air-wing-drone-delivery

Yay! Travel and hotel booked for #WordCampManchester!!

I’m properly going to be there!

(Just need the day off work now! 😂)

It’s a great TV season right now in the UK. We’re in the midst of The Celebrity Traitors, Taskmaster, Ludwig and Ted Lasso.

However, as well as Ted Lasso I’m also catching up on S3 of Colin from Accounts, and I’m SO confused because Keely/Ash + Roy/Gordon are basically the same story, aren’t they?

Did someone I know post a script or something for removing the AI packages from a new Laravel project? I can’t seem to find it and I’m sure I saw it.

Anyway, I’ve mostly been ill for the last two days and all that has, apparently, been brewing in my neurons while my immune system worked (and boy was it working hard!!)

🤷

I do really lament the apparent lack of (or possibly mis-directed?) curiosity that LLMs seem to have created.

Sensible assessment is mostly drowned out by hype.

And I really worry that we’re handing over critical thinking to corporate-controlled machines that may not be there in the future.

But mostly I’m thinking about how there is this AI divide in tech.

I’m sure there is something about neurotypes or personality types involved.

I’m a moderate, curious thinker. And I wonder how we can bridge this divide and find some helpful common ground. 😕🤔

Only atoms and lists, as far as I recall.

But that’s a good foundation right there!!

(I reckon this was my first academic textbook)

https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/117360462307042201

I properly read this post about the “gestalt” of tools yesterday. I think it’s incredibly insightful.

Tools are part of systems.

There’s something about systems thinking and friction-as-a-good-thing that I’ve not pieced together properly yet.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/no-such-thing-as-just-a-tool

Like, I was _genuinely_ excited about learning how to do a new thing the other day. I like learning how to do new things. That’s exciting.

But the world thinks it’s more exciting that a computer did a thing for them and that they had to do nothing!

“Look at all the learning I’m NOT doing!!”

Sigh

I’m also hearing, and deeply thinking about, the relentless (and possibly toxic) positivity of the pro-AI crowd.

I get why one could find this era attractive and exciting.

But how can the alternatives be presented in a positive light without sounding glib?

Thing that I’ve not seen discussed anywhere:

Chat interfaces must be a real accessibility boon for some.

But do they exclude people who struggle with words?

Like, is this LLM world really problematic for people with dyslexia?

Is literacy going to become even more important if LLMs persist?