HTML Rules!

So I thought I'd try "Siri Intelligence". Started by asking it the result of the last Tottenham game which it managed. Good it's vaguely up to date. Then I asked a follow up question which it couldn't answer. Then I asked about it's context window and it didn't understand, then I asked it if it could tell me my last few requests (because I couldn't remember my follow-up question) and it asked me if I wanted to ask ChatGPT that. This is going great.

I try to be conscious of my cognitive bias. I'm quite convinced AI is a massive bubble and that it will all come crashing down when the investors in these multi-billion dollar businesses start expecting returns on their investments. Eventually they have to start charging what these queries cost and no one is willing to pay what it actually costs because it's just not that good. OpenAI lose money on their $200/m pro plan. It also consumes up to half a litre of water to write a 100 word email. How many billions of words of spam have been spewed out? How much water has that consumed in a world where LA continues to have severe wildfires in the middle of winter? It's clear big tech is trying to hide the emissions generated by AI.

I've been on a project at work where they really want us to kick the virtual tyres of AI so I've been using Cursor exclusively and leaning into it as hard as I can. I hate to think how much carbon that has emitted. It's definitely helpful, but I'm definitely cleaning up a lot of mess left behind - often only noticing it when I submit a code review and realise that I've accept a suggestion in multiple parts of the codebase without realising. Am I more productive? Very marginally. Certainly not worth the actual cost of that would be. I think it's helpful in 'cut and paste' situations where I'd previously use some pretty advance multi cursor techniques, and not having to dip out into docs for more advanced features of frameworks and package that I'm using. The important caveat being that the AI often just either hallucinates or is reliant on old and out of date docs/examples. It argued with me about the existence of NextJS 15 the other day, then gave me a link to NextJS 15 docs that don't exist.

I've been having a conversation at work which starts something along the lines of "if AI is the next lay of abstraction, are you comfortable with that?" Anyone that is half decent at writing code and has used these AI tools enough immediately replies: "Oh god no!". This article asks the question: is AI a Silver Bullet, asks a similar question about layers of abstraction which I find instructive. While there are modest productivity gains to be made, they're not proving to be the order of magnitude we've been promised.

It's a conversation I'm starting to find tiresome, but somehow I keep coming back to it.

This is a good breakdown of writing with AI. Again, an attempt to be objective which is refreshing. Basically it's not that bad, but also not that good:

Why should someone bother to read what you didn’t bother to write.

The Human Rights Law Centre, Reset Tech Australia, Psst and Digital Rights Watch have published a Practical Guide to Whistleblowing which gives me faith in humanity and deserves as much publicity as possible.

Speaking of things to draw attention to, Mapping the Digital Gap is a really great initiative which draws attention to the digital gap that many of Australia's First Nations Peoples experience.

As a bird noticer and professional nerd I was pleased to see the NBN installing nesting platforms on top of their towers. And while we're on the NBN, The Guardian has a good article on the latest announcement to unfuck the mess left by Malcolm Turnbull all those years ago:

It’s taken nearly 15 years but we have just about met Windsor’s last point, with the Albanese government announcing on Monday that about 95% or 622,000 homes currently accessing the NBN via fibre-to-the-node (FTTN, which uses existing copper lines from the node to the premise for connection) will be able to upgrade to full fibre by 2030 at an additional cost of $3bn.

Stilgherrian has one of the better breakdowns of just how fucked Meta and Zuckerberg are (geez, a bit sweary today). I quit Facebook 15 years ago and haven't looked back. I just need to get off Instagram and WhatsApp, the latter being the hard one. As a parent, a lot of kid-related stuff if organised on WhatsApp.

And you know what, fuck it, HTML is a programming language and I will fight you if you disagree. In all seriousness, there's an art to HTML and many people don't appreciate just how important it is. Doing it well is hard.

Finally, I just got the news that David Lynch died last night. I think Lost Highway is one of my favourite films and Twin Peaks still haunts dark recesses of my mind. He also seemed like a genuinely lovely man. The world is a little less weird without him.