Free social media from billionaire control.
I just donated $40. These guys are promising to do whatever it takes to make sure the AT Protocol is genuinely owned by everyone.
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Sexual symmetry and asymmetry.
Alexander Pruss has a bizarre, but at first blush convincing, argument that complementarians about gender don’t have to appeal to morally significant intrinsic differences between men and women.
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Please just stop saying 'just'.
A pretty good case for avoiding the word 'just' in software engineering. I admit I've been guilty, too.
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The Human Cost Of Our AI-Driven Future.
In case you'd forgotten: content moderation is still carried out by appalling worker exploitation. This is not news, but nonetheless an excellent and suitably chilling essay on the topic. Be aware that the essay describes some deeply traumatic content.
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LLMs don't 'hallucinate'.
I posted on the Scott Logic blog a while ago about how the word 'hallucination' doesn't accurately capture how LLMs work.
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Story points are wasting time.
Pretty convincing to me. The biggest potential weakness in his argument is his claim that none of the most common reasons why devs disagree on story points exposes anything which ought to be resolved in an estimation meeting. If you can provide other common reasons besides the ones Dave considered, you could rebut his argument. I don't feel experienced enough to judge this myself.
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Don’t use booleans.
A nice idea. But I think this advice only applies well when you've got many inter-dependent flags. If you have independent flags, re-writing those as enums will just end up with you re-implementing the boolean type for every parameter, and not getting much profit, I reckon.
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Big Data is Dead.
Did you know that most organisations store less than 100GB, and almost all analytics is run on the last 24h of data? I didn’t. Though take it all with a pinch of salt: the guy’s writing on his company blog which sells traditional data warehouses.
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Instagram is training AI on your data. It’s nearly impossible to opt out.
Yuck, yuck, yuck. Makes me glad I’m not on Instagram. For people already stuck there, though, this just sucks. Highly recommend either opting out of AI training or quitting Insta, if only to give the twits the middle finger they deserve.
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State-based UI is an anti-pattern.
Chris Ferdinandi has a hot take here. I would be keen to test this idea out one day: push the limits of how much complex state you can manage within the light DOM.
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154 McDonald Road: Gone but not Forgotten.
A superb tribute to the building and analysis of the failures of the planning system. This was published in my free local newsletter, and is worthy of any broadsheet newspaper.
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Beware the cloud of hype.
Jay Hoffman spots some striking parallels between the current AI hype and the dot-com bubble.
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Saving the News from Big Tech.
Cory Doctorow, writing for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that to save news media, we need to dismantle ad-tech monopolies, ban surveillance advertising, open up app stores and have an end-to-end web.
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Primary and Secondary Values.
Colin McGinn makes the case for primary and secondary moral values, just as there are primary and secondary qualities, apparently thereby managing to assert both moral realism and anti-realism at the same time without contradiction.
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Pluralistic: They brick you because they can.
Cory Doctorow writes incessantly about the harms of monopolised markets. This essay is particularly good, because he collects many of monopolists’ greatest hits from recent years. Do keep reading to the end. It just gets better.
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Parenting.
‘Once you find yourself in the position of being someone’s father you’ll quickly realize that you’re not actually raising anyone here, you just happen to be the veteran in the trenches alongside them, showing them the ropes and hoping they’ll survive and turn out okay.’
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Boys.
Catherine Carr did a fantastic job of unveiling how teenage boys are experiencing masculinity in Britain today. Plenty here to surprise, shock and inspire.
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BCS manifesto.
Good for what it is. Good policies. Succinct. Should be the beginning (not the end) of some interesting conversations.
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