Weird Al

I said last post that I wasn't going to talk about AI, but Nik Suresh made a guest appearance on Ed Zitron's feed and, as expected, really touched a nerve for me.

Oh, and here's a block list for AI which you can add to uBlock.

The list of voices that are starting to say 'this bubble will pop' soon is growing. Cory Doctorow has a great write up, but the Bank of England is now warning of a 'sudden correction' and Deutsche Bank and Bain & Co also taking the time to point out that the maths doesn't quite add up.

So, you're saying a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and that this is a bubble that's going to burst and take the whole economy with it?

- Doctorow

This article on the "Electric Slide" also has a pretty interesting take on energy policy with some AI takeaways.

This article on AI delivering the semantic web's promise also struck a chord. We made displaying things on the internet easy but made ordering that data beyond the technical reach of your average Wordpress user. Now AI is helping us to structure it again.

I thought this was a very useful and pragmatic guide to writing RESTful APIs. I might squabble around the edges on a few points but over all it's very well written and is clearly based on a huge amount of experience. I also really like this breakdown of how React works. It clarifies a bunch of the finer details really well (and possibly highlight many of my issues with React which happens to be the frontend library I use most). As always, you should probably just fucking use HTML, your website probably doesn't need JavaScript at all.

While we're on software development, Making Software is a pretty cool reference manual. Similarly, this guide to reviewing code.

QANTAS have a court injunction to prevent Have I Been Pwned from telling customers their data has been breached. Cool cool.

In birder news, The Tawny frogmouth won the Guardian's Bird of the Year competition. There is a pair in each of the parks I walk the dog through every day. Coming home this afternoon there were a couple of young, fashionable-looking guys looking up in the tree who looked at me and said 'do you want to see a Tawny frogmouth!'

The Github CEO has stepped down and Github itself has been folded into Microsoft’s CoreAI organisation. Let the enshittification begin, which is an alarming situation given the centrality of Github to the open source community.

Speaking of Open Source, the Ruby community has been in a big mess of late. Justin Searls has a good write up, as does 404 Media. In tangentially related news, Tedium provides a review of the Omarchy Linux distribution which was created by Ruby-on-Rail created DDH. It pulls on a lot of threads that interest me, including the Framework laptop whose creators are excited about Omarchy, but are receiving backlash for "supporting far-right racists".

In good news for OpenSource, Webflow donated $150,000 to the Astro project which I'm a big fan of. Cloudflare have done the same. Thank goodness someone is putting their money where the critical tools their businesses run on is.

Here's a guide to YouTube downloaders.

Ele Elna Elak (What we own, you own) is a non-profit that provides fresh water and clean food to people in Palestine. Bisan Owda recently mentioned the amazing work they are doing on the ground in the Gaza Strip so I just donated to them and I encourage you to do the same.

25 years ago I was fortunate enough to work at Our Community. It was a sliding doors moment for me in many ways. I was young, very impressionable and generally learning a lot about life. I grew a lot being in an environment like OC. Because of the leadership of people like Dennis Moriarty I did my masters in Public Advocacy and Action, and also just happened to learn SQL and HTML. I took an unexpected tangent from there, moving into the tech industry, but I take OC with me everywhere I go. So I enjoyed reading Dennis' reflections on the last 25 years.

Cosmos: a Personal Journey is now available on the Internet Archive.