Mostly sharing thoughts on #webdev, #softwareengineering, #retrogames and humanistic aspects of tech. Old tech guy, UCSD CSE Lecturer, Author, pint.com founder, and person behind ZingChart and ZingGrid. š¤
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2026-06-11T13:59:37Z Event JSON
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Last Notes npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Apparently my disk space is bigtechās disk space? Good to know. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Got to enjoy being accused of using AI to produce slop. Well Iāll have you know that was 100% human made slop written the old fashioned way. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Pondering things after this whole Claude Code source business npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell It's so "fun" use GenAI for coding sometimes. "Oh wait that isn't it. Oh let me do this thing (did it already 3 times). Oh you're right I already did that. Oh the user is saying to do this (proceeds to do something different)" npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Oh, and a satirical vibe coded game to go along with the post because why not. Best on the phone npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Well, there's one good thing about #AI right now: it is hyperscaling my #shitpost output! npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell The tools of the enemy... npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Contract-driven programming would be great with LLMs if they didn't just break contracts or "forget" that contracts exist. Tried deterministic guards, small context, etc., always the same result ~80% max & ~50-60% w/o guards. We verified with a reduced case with a web component ZingGrid with a strict schema, markdown docs, contract, hooks, and a huge unit tests. - same max ~8/10. This is the inherent non-deterministic wall. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Who did we invade now ? I havenāt been online for a day. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Fuck Sam Altman. Thatās the post. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Why does Star Trek: Starfleet Academy gotta go and actually be good? This last episode drops and I am completely floored. What the heck just happened !?! Paul Giamatti just shifted into 4th gear. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell As a SWE Prof who builds software for a living outside of school my frequent statement now for decades that npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦wuus absolutely but I think that is more a function of a need for precision. Any time code comes in contact with a need for precision any form of YOLO dev be it copy pasta or vibe code will be not allowed or used very carefully. I think frontend / backend work can be that just depends on use. Consider in my space of dataviz the idea of YOLO style viz creation is frankly insane. It does omit data which means bad chart which means wrong insight. Even Excel warns of accuracy with AI npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell GenAI is awful like plastic bottles with filtered water is. If you can pause for a second that idea is ludicrous esp considering we have potable water, but yet many of us consume literal pallets of that stuff. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell XHTML makes more sense now that we are doing probabilistic coding via GenAI markup generation. Humans bristled with strictness and I get why we went html5 but conditions because of GenAI have changed. Same for semantic html. <div> soup is more of an anti-pattern than ever! Funny how things work. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell I think the saving grace of Mastodon over Bluesky is the folks here are either plain old, appropriately salty or just natural free thinkers of absolutely any age that even when something is obvious for āreasonable folksā think you still get that āwell actuallyā¦ā as annoying as that can be it is also acts like a group think and idiocy immune system. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell The Moltbook story so far has peak NFT/Web3 vibes. It hyped fast but turns out to be as stupid & bad as youād imagine. Yet like the NFT story the true believers are all āyou donāt get it! This is the futureā despite literally pwning their systems & burning š°. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell I felt like I was supposed to dislike Starfleet Academy but I simply donāt. Sure it has a very Beverly Hills 90210 in Star Trek universe in the 32 century vibe but it works and oddly it doesnāt grate like Discovery even when itās over the top. Not sure what this means besides I got more Trek to watch now. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Should be standard post #AI slop legal boilerplate npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell The image says it all npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell La La La masked men executing American citizens. No that canāt be he was a domestic terrorist America is great again. La La La. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Yep even 1 year of Trump-onomics hits and not in a good way. On the bright side I bought in Nov and December before he was sworn in so I have made a killing l, but to not see his economic destabilization is willful avoidance #uspol npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Modern coding is now like 17th century humans. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Greenland PM Jens-Frederik Nielsen says his country would rather stay a part of Denmark npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Dungeon Crawler Carl series is a good read. I blew through the first two books and am on the third. Escapism wise I am not sure I want to live in his terrible world, but at least once grinding with Carl, Princess Doughnut, and Mongo I can forget our current shit show. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦h8rl it is the only way people got upsold and generally folks are just skipping web sites and just installing the lib and coding via LLM tools with no doc visits no awareness of upsell and no commercial licenses. No support means what was a commercial FOSS success falters. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Source for those quotes if you care is in this issue. https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss.com/pull/2388#issuecomment-3717222957 npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Git issue quotes from Tailwindās creator. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell So I am starting to think vibe coding with LLMs is like crack for ADHD type devs. Yeah you are āefficientā with them like meth user is efficient cleaning their house. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Watching Christmas Vacation and getting in the spirit. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell XHTML if we are being honest wasnāt really a big thing. People cosplayed using it mostly and browsers didnāt enforce without Mime type changes. So it was more npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell I think the first day of 2025 day was trying to tell us something? npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Two times already this morning my wife said to me āIs this AI?ā to validate an image. I didnāt know for one of them. š¬ npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell As an older I really wish the 80s / 90s that GenZ and Alpha imagines was what sadly was not this. It echoes but it wasnāt as ideal. I worry how the unlived nostalgic view is common now. As a youth way back few of us were correspondingly 50s / 60s sentimental back then. Our parents were but mostly not us, the youth interest today is telling how messed up our world sadly is. Youth wish vs better times are different things. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Over on Amazon noticing lots of products are now using #AI generated pictures to demo their products. Itās so off-putting I immediately think itās junk and want to find something more authentic which is saying a lot since this shopping for Cheesy Resin Garden Gnomes. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell This #AI piece by @nprofileā¦998y is very well done š https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/ npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell React apparently is becoming the Wordpress of JS frameworks in all ways. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Sorry not sorry but I am watching the Star Wars trench run sequence for some very high number of time it truly is epic. Stay on target ā¦ stay on target. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦cmhq ugh I never want to see anyone validate that baloney spewing platform. Yet to be fair if anyone has the āsocial media armorā to walk into that thought wasteland and survive maybe even thrive despite it you do Aaron. Give āem truth, logic, and sarcasm hell. š npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Maybe we should just make a contest to see just how wastefully one can create a Towers of Hanoi solver, a todo list app, Pac-Man, etc. people sure be showing they are super up for it. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Apparently people arenāt super stoked about Donald Trump who could have figured? npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Saw letting us all know what to think about Portland. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Detecting no lies here npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell What a fantastic day. Went to Portland to visit a dear old friend, Portland Retro Game Expo, No Kings protest, then Timbers vs SDFC match in the rain to clinch Western Conference 1st place in our first season. Time for wine and cheese with a fire and friends. Gonna be hard to beat this amount of good times. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell So noticing Claude being down made me go look at Anthrophic's uptime which is public via Statuspage. I was surprised that they aren't even hitting three nines (99.9) mostly more like two 99.[1-8] and have on occasion been 98 level on some monitored things over the last year. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell The numbers here are so amazingly bad there is simply no way this can last. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦52zc he claims the winner called him and said he should have won it and accepted on his behalf. https://www.nbcnews.com/video/shorts/trump-reacts-to-not-winning-the-nobel-peace-prize-249671237901 npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦lv69 heroes come in many stripes Scott. āDoes anyone know HTML tables!?!ā Springs into action! npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Heading to the warzone next week I mean Portland for friends, SDFC soccer and a retro video game conference. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell So how does one join this Antifa? Did I miss the sign up form? I have no idea where the meeting is and how I get a Soros check as I could use the extra cash. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Reading a study on data formats for AI accuracy of extracting data in JSON, CSV, YAML, Markdown, etc. The winner was a Markdown variant at an /sarcasm amazing 60.7% /sarcasm result. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Trying to understand if people with misshapen biceps flexing and showing off watches or other bling is real or AI. Apparently TikTok has many of these and are posted to BlueSky and beyond. I enjoy weird internet for sure but I clearly feel I am in the old person camp now. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell You know vanilla web dev with HTML, CSS, JS using platform APIs is neutral and non spicy as it has no owners to do or say stupid or faschi š© . Yet I get the distinct impression given trends itās soon going to be considered the Antifa stack. I wish this were completely a shit post but sadly it is not. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell The South Park this week was mostly about #ChatGPT glazing. Brutal. OpenAi is really having a bad run. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Gavin Newsom clearly has employed some world class shit posters. Gotta respect. š«” #USPolitics npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦uxgg @nprofileā¦d2a6 @nprofileā¦7klc npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦50af they are just special ones. What can we say we are just classy in that cheezy Ron Burgundy way. Seriously I mean we actually wanted this https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/03/28/521810071/footy-mcfooty-face-is-stomping-competition-in-vote-for-mls-team-name but alas we got SDFC which is a great team but it could have been even more glorious. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦d2a6 @nprofileā¦7klc not surprising they suck. Also in CA so Iāll share my fun story that ~ 8 years ago I attempted to put a pots line back in my rebuilt house as a backup. AT&T simply couldnāt figure out how to do it. I had the wires to the house, they couldnāt place the order & didnāt have people who know even what to do. Yet most of my elderly neighbors have working lines. Post Pacbell the system rots like a Dharma Initiative station from Lost still working somehow but mostly abandoned. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Fun with LLMs part 97 out of Infinity npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell OpenAIās bar chart is an accurate representation of the improvements you should expect with #AI based software engineering. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell #ChatGPT5 is kind of mid. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Given modern #webdev I get why this tool exists today to clean up a crufty code base - https://knip.dev/ but can we talk about the elephant in the room? How did we get to a place where this is such an essential tool? npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell So we're all about major mistakes from classic SciFi and implementing them? npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell The hotest new #AI #SWE strategy is you have one AI agent do a big design up front spec for another AI agent to code. A third AI writes the test cases to keep the second in line & a fourth AI runs devops. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Your semi-annual reminder that 3rd-party link shorteners aren't good for long-term web health. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Choose your generation dev rant. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Welp, South Park is back...and not a moment too soon. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell There is a preservation of software complexity law lurking under here. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell From tool to methods to ceremony itās always āthis will solve everything!ā Has been a common goal npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Software Engineering is about the whole enchilada so to speak not just the piece of the development puzzle you are most comfortable with or pays the best. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell It should be evident to all that in today's software engineering space, economic forces profoundly shape decision-making on all sides, from developers' career planning influencing approach to product managers' consideration of a system or feature. Sadly, we rarely discuss these influences adequately in SWE academic settings, so it is no wonder that hustle-bro economic thought patterns dominate the conversation. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Now that "delve" is actually back into human comms broadly because of ChatGPT I wonder if people are thinking that it could be used to spread euphemisms and various double speak ideas as well? Think of words as being used to control and shape thought in Orwell's 1984, but instead of the broadcast doing the word shifting, it is the weighted training of an AI shifting thoughts by word selection. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Are you *really* writing āmodernā #HTML if you arenāt using a metric shit ton of <div> tags? npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell I am not sure what I think of people seeing that a #ChatGPT hallucination is a type of user research for missing features. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦mkyr you nicely kind of doubled it up for me there as I was indeed alluding to FastCGI and there was one other by my brain is fried from that time. You are 100% right on PHP being both module and CGI as well. I think a few other script engines were as well. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦ssyg From my personal recollection not really sure that historical take is 100% all that it was. Yes CGI got ditched, but it wasn't all start up time related there were plenty of approaches that at least tried to deal with that. I'd say that the dev ergonomics of parsed script solutions (ex. PHP, ASP, CFM) also really help kill it. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell History really does rhyme at times. Musk appears to be adopting a Ross Perot like role. He's different obviously, but the reasoning and generally hubris involved absolutely isn't. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Today some devs love the challenge of coming up with a port of Doom to load onto a toothbrush screen while other devs apparently enjoy crippling a medium priced Android phone with the most complex implementation of a static web page they can muster using vibe coding. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell When I read about vibe coding & compare to npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Japan modern #retrotech delivers! Akihabara and Shibuya for some cassettes and a Walkman like player. It has Bluetooth but I am doing wired right now to keep retro legit. City Pop, early 80s, late 80s and 90s. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Reading AI answers on a makeup take home test because students bombed the in class test is my own personal hell. I finished but sticking needles in my eyes might have been less painful. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Oh my what a retro rebound day. My neighbor bought my old BMW from 2003 off me maybe 12 years ago and I had installed an iPod in it with one of BMWs first integrations. He sold it but kept the iPod and returned it to me. It still works. He changed a lot of the music but still! npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell When talking about #AI, #LLMs, Effects on #SoftwareEngineering & the state of dev jobs I really believe that you shouldnāt come of like you are on Ketamine nor communicate in a style like Joni Ernst, Trump or Elon. While people may indeed talk about you, Iām pretty confident this isnāt a winning strategy. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Not sure what to make of the movie Mountainhead on Max. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell If Blockchain's ideal case up until know is for financial fraud, I think I think we can see a parallel that up until know the ideal case for LLMs is for a type of intellectual fraud. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Software eating the world seems to have become more literal than the folks who coined the idea probably expected. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell āThe state of web publishing looks increasingly grim. Dotdash Meredith, which publishes sites including People and Food & Wine, said on its most recent earnings call that traffic from Google is now roughly half what it was four years ago. Business Insider said on Thursday that it was laying off 21% of its staff, saying the business āmust be structured to endure extreme traffic drops outside of our control.ā npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell ChatGPT is to information š§ what Velvetta is to cheese. š§ npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell So I have figured it out. If you vibe code when you are buzzed you are more productive than by hand coding buzzed. Otherwise vibe coding is plain annoying, a bug ridden dumpster fire, or both. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦4tpe @nprofileā¦vg60 npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦4tpe yep great observation. One of the numerous software ilities is portability. In the webdev case there are oddities. I think many webdevs have become too accustomed to modern framework limits esp framework + hosting plays (vercel / Next side eye) means you must accept limited or no portability as the price of admission. Itās like a roach motel or Hotel California philosophy - devs can check in but they canāt check out. The weird part is many seem just fine with that!?! npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell @nprofileā¦vehu DeAGOSTINI STAR WARS Starships & Vehicles Collection 73 FONDOA HAULCRAFT npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Bought a die-cast of Luthen Rael's Fondor Haulcraft from #Andor on eBay from a seller in Japan. I just found out I get to pay a whole other $25 on the package from DHL beyond what was already paid on Japan side otherwise sent back. The model is around $50. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell The idea of "Don't make them thinkā to keep UI easy for improving efficiency and satisfaction has changed in the modern, monetized web of user surveillance. Today, I'd say it has expanded to npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell A return to late 90s WYSIWYG #webdev ala Frontpage or Dreamweaver that Figma sites push with their ridiculous non-semantic <div> soup is oddly worse for LLMs than semantic markup. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Code in software is like the core of the planet. Very important and drives the whole thing in a fundamental way, but it is far from the whole and not where users live. An embrace of the whole is what I try to do in my courses, sadly itās not easy and often straight rejected. Avoidance and rejection of this holistic view doesnāt make it less true. Oddly vibe coding may cause such people to question their beliefs. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell On Reddit I saw the Anthropic Claude private prompt content. npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell #webdev debates be like npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Letās go back to the web site! Strong Bad and Homestar Runner are back https://youtu.be/2z7kVH9xePM?si=eV8pToQsUgzVBSTk npub10ewr692fqqp2u36w2pkzj82y7gm9uj27nrudlunx8e54u4xtj54shjm7y8 ThomasAPowell Question for techie overlords - If one is in 100s of group chats posting non stop how does one do any actual meaningful deep or quality work?
