Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

A question came into focus for me yesterday: is the success of Open Source for early-in-career folks building portfolios a contributor to frontend's ethical dessication?

OSS is "software for me, incidentally for thee"; does introducing that ethos to young programmers keep us from driving home the lesson that when you get paid to write code, your responsibilities are to users and customers?

Yesterday we had another example of LLMs creating support issues for us.

User: "hi, how do I do this thing? Your docs say I can go here and change some options, but there's no settings there"
Me: "that's right, we don't have such a feature, but also we don't say you can do it in the docs, where did you read that?"
User: "oh I didn't actually read the docs, I asked 'AI' and it hallucinated this answer. Sorry!"

At this rate I'm looking forward to 2025 when I'll be spending 100% of my time doing support to correct falsehoods about our app made up by LLMs

The frontend community is in crisis. I know, because I could spend every waking hour helping e-commerce and productivity apps fix the *unbelievably* bad performance that is now the hallmark of contemporary, JavaScript-first web development.

But it's worse than that. This stuff has infected public services; the sorts of sites that have to serve *everyone*, iPhone or no.

Part 2 of this series is the hardest to watch, but essential to understand how far we've fallen:

https://infrequently.org/2024/08/object-lesson/

Corporations are a poison.

Anyway, think about the implications of the things you say.

I listened to people talk about what this company would do with this man inevitably died for years. I probably repeated the line.

Everyone always said it with a kind of chuckle. As if it was easier to say that than "retires" or "takes another job." As if it was somehow better to imagine his children grieving than it was to suppose he'd ever just move on.

I spent half a decade working for a big tech company in the Games/Social space. You've heard of it, but I'm not naming it here because the point of this story is universally applicable.

One of my key job responsibilities when I was brought on was Learn Everything from That Guy so someone knows what he knows in case he gets hit by a bus.

Eventually, I built a whole team to operate the tools That Guy built, and to build new tools that solve the same problems in our new software stack/with less manual work.

That Guy grew less vital to the success of the company, and he retired shortly after I left. Everything he had been responsible for was transfered to two people I hired and trained, or was turned off.

Less than a year later, That Guy was involved in a head on collision and died on the spot. This was a few days ago. I don't know if the collision involved a bus.

The pragmatist in my head says "see, it was a real risk." The compassionate part of my head says "why the fuck do we talk about other human beings with such a callous disregard for their sum."

That Guy was repeatedly reduced to a set of skills and institutional knowledge. Leadership feared he would die and that would negatively impact the business. Leadership didn't give a solitary fuck about his life.

He was one for the first 50 employees in the organization. He was the second or third longest serving member of the company. He was a pragmatic, overworked sysadmin who was mistreated and undervalued, and put in a position to engineer the majority of the infrastructure of a multibillion dollar company single handedly.

it is so humid that my yarn is sticking to the wooden knitting needles and wow i absolutely hate everything about that

Commander Riker,

There has been a security breach in our computer system. Your search history is being broadcast to the entire crew.

Worf

"Removing focus indicators for keyboard users is like hiding the cursor for mouse users." - @matuzo in Web Accessibility Cookbook

Brilliant comparison!

In fact, it made me wonder... can you hide a cursor for mouse users? Yep, you can set it to a custom png file that's completely transparent.

If you want to see for yourself how annoying that is, visit https://nonvisualwebsite.com/ #a11y

Can anyone recommend me an *offline* horizontal timeline-making tool?

I'm looking for something akin to TimelineJS or Tiki Toki (pictured), to visualise some periods of my life, but given the current state of internet scraping, I don't particularly want to upload a bunch of personal info to someone else's server.

I'm not after Gantt charts or vertical-scrolling timelines.

(Open source would be ideal, but I'm willing to buy a product if it's good enough.)

“The Woman Who Could Smell Parkinson’s - The New York Times”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/magazine/parkinsons-smell-disease-detection.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Ck4.qfQL.LUj1Izb7kVzU&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb

This is amazing

#OnThisDay, 13 Aug 2014, Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani won the Fields Medal for her work on complex geometry. She was the first woman to win it since it began in 1936.

She died in 2017, aged just 40. Multiple awards and initiatives are named after her.

#WomenInSTEM

@tshirtman @quietmarc @SallyStrange There was a meta data paper where someone studied all the papers on archeological digs as a whole and worked out that something was wrong because something like 80% of all bodies were “male” which obviously isn’t right. So they went back and reexamined findings and basically because gender from physical remains was somewhat guesswork they based gender also on grave goods which, of course, was a circular argument. Now they are better at it (not perfect) so we now have female roman gladiators found in London, Shield Maidens found in the north of England, and a Galli follower of Cybele (trans woman) also in Northern England.

edit: i meant compsize

what was the name of the command line tool again, that shows how much the filesystem compression compressed the files in a directory? i always forget the name… (i think it starts with ch)
#askFedi #linux #unix

Finally resumed work on my "booleans as a service" platform for enterprise.

In the free edition of the API, a `GET` to `~/Values/True` will return `1`. Rate limits apply.

In the professional tier, you get the features of the free edition, but also, a `GET` to `~/Values/False` will return `0`, plus, rate limits are higher.

In the enterprise edition there are endpoints such as `~/And/1/1` (which returns `1`!), and many more endpoints. All of these, of course, depend on an LLM.