Ross's Micro Blog

📻 The previous post, by the way, was a reaction blog to this REALLY FREAKIN’ EXCELLENT episode of This American Life that looks at intelligence – artificial and otherwise – from a number of different creative angles.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/803/greetings-people-of-earth

🤖 I don’t remember who recommend it, but DANG this episode of “This American Life” that tells stories about intelligence – artificial and otherwise – was good.

So good I had to write some thoughts down about it.

"Is ChatGPT clever because it _has_ "theory of mind", or is it stupid because it _lacks_ the instincts that keep a toddler alive.”

https://rosswintle.uk/2023/07/what-is-intelligence-anyway/

The route to death of a social network on my mobile is:

Level 1. App deleted. Try to use just the web app on mobile.
Level 2. Ignore on mobile. Only use on desktop occasionally.
Level 3. Stop using altogether.

Current status:

Facebook: Level 2.5 – just need schools to stop using it for critical comms

Instagram: Level 1 but only for school stuff

Twitter: Level 2

Can you believe I’ve NEVER been on TikTok?

Threads opinions

---

*Opens Threads.*

What’s all this stuff in my timeline from accounts that I don’t follow?

Oh, it’s an addictive engagement machine.

No thanks.

*Deletes Threads*

I guess I always thought that posting on my blog was keeping my content out of the social companies. But are they just seeing it all anyway and attributing it to me?

I’m trying not to talk about the Threads app, but if it’s federated does that mean Meta will scrape my Mastodon content and use it in my social/ad profile?

And is this something new? Are Meta/Twitter doing this already?

Do they need permission? Do they have it already?

I'm at that point of being not-very-well where I can do things sat down, with my brain, but the moment I try to, say, walk somewhere, I'm exhausted.

Also… can people stop talking to me please? Especially the small people who have SO many words.

Why are people – governments mostly, but corporations and individuals too – not looking at the climate, utterly freaking out, and making big, serious, fast decisions? Who is leading?!

World's hottest day since records began https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66104822

OK. Beta 3 of #WordPress 6.3 is out. It's fixed the command palette styles.

My opinion: They shouldn't release the command palette in this form. It's too early. It's REALLY inconsistent. People will be put off the whole idea.

Put it back in the plugin until it's ready.

❓ There's been so much discussion about the NAME of the #WordPress Command Palette, but I've not seen much discussion of the actual feature/functionality.

Styles are broken right now (https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/52097) but what do people think of it?

Does it look like a useful tool?

I updated the final paragraphs of this as it wasn't very clear. Turns out I *was* having a bad day and was being a bit too clever in my writing.

I love learning new things. But it really helps if I find them compelling, or their use is properly justified.

I have a website you can visit as many times as you like.

You can even get a feed that you can put in an RSS reader (I like Feedbin) with other peoples website feeds.

And you can check your feeds as often as you like.

Magical.

Am I having a bad day?

Will I regret writing this?

Does it add anything to the converstion?

I don't know. But I feel compelled to write it.

"The web used to be fun and simple and easy to get stuff done with. Now it's discovering that someone who doesn't know what they were doing used a div instead of a button and fixing it involves half a day of poking around files that make no sense and fixing a broken build process.”

I'm tired of web dev!

https://rosswintle.uk/2023/07/im-tired-of-web-dev/

🚗 This is a really excellent article on the pros and cons of EVs. Debunks lots of myths. LOTS of data.

https://philsturgeon.com/unf-king-the-climate-electric-cars/

Me: Can add the cricket for a month to my TV package?

TV people: You’ll need to sign up to a premium TV package and then add the cricket on. It will cost you 10 times what you are currently paying for TV if you sign up for a 12 month contract.

😱

I should probably say that as the maker of Turbo Admin (https://turbo-admin.com) I feel pretty qualified to talk about #WordPress command palettes: building them, naming them, and marketing them.

I have opinions.

And I’m available for interviews and podcast appearances!

😃

Why did the cricket people have to use the term DRS?

I don’t know if I’m watching cricket or F1 these days! 😂

Boring EV numbers

---

First longish drive in the Ioniq today. 70 miles. Mostly motorway with some hilly rural roads.

I SHOULD get 5 miles per kWh.

So that should be 14kWh

That’s about 36% of our battery.

I charged it up to 80% on Weds and it’s currently on 32%.

So that’s 12% unaccounted for = 4.7kWh = 23.5miles

I reckon we’ve done 18 other miles since I charged.

So the numbers are good to within about 5miles out of 90.

Pretty good!!

We should REALLY get up to 190miles from this thing!

PSA: If you have Dependabot alerts for “semver” and Dependabot can’t patch them for you…

Before you get into a horrible JS dependency mess, WAIT A FEW DAYS!

It looks like a bunch of popular tools are locked to semver v5.x and v6.x, but they’ve only patched v7.5.x

Babel’s team will fork and back port the fix soon if the semver maintainers don’t.

I consider this my contribution to WordPress 6.3. In more ways than one!

https://wptavern.com/wordpress-6-3-will-introduce-a-command-palette