Stuff I found on the Internet
"[LLM] advocates can’t have it both ways: either LLM coding will be an exclusive club for those who built up the necessary skills, XOR it will be a great democratizer and do away with the need for those skills." cogent, calm, well-sourced
"A visual explorer for Unicode. Browse the character set, discover related glyphs, and learn more about the scripts, symbols, and shapes that make up the standard."
great tool for comparing how hanzi are rendered in different regions
well argued and thoroughly researched
"Le Guin teaches us that legibility isn’t something imposed once by villains. It’s like a totally entropic force. It accretes."
"[L]es IA génératives... détruisent ce lien à l’humain que je perçois dans le code, cette base de raisonnement qui n’existe soudain plus du tout. Je n’ai plus d’autrice pour m’expliquer, je n’ai plus personne à comprendre." The part where she lists friends and acquaintances she learned particular technologies from is very touching
fun history and walkthrough of "the first 'official' (sold in stores) translation of an adventure game." DAISY EST MORTE
i swear i nearly died a dozen times on that / hellish stretch the challenge was exhilarating until / one day suddenly the whole lot had been repaved
"When something goes wrong, we’re as likely as anyone to assume the computer is cursed, has it out for us specifically, or needs to be appeased in some way. And at that moment, the computer does have an interiority that is hidden from us. There certainly is something we haven’t seen or don’t understand! A good programming tool or computer language, though, is a means for us to find and dissect that interiority, stripping away the illusion. AI actively worsens it instead."
"This policy toolkit is primarily geared toward stopping, slowing, and restricting rampant data center development in the US at the local and state level. Our approach recognizes the extractive relationship between data centers and local communities... This toolkit is intended to help organizers and policymakers identify the strongest possible actions."
beautiful comic describing the experience of chronic illness by juxtaposing it with tropes from "survival" reality tv (love the detail of the guy getting noticeably scrawnier over time, and the line work mosaic effect)
"A decolonial critique of technology is not simply 'the internet was always bad.' It is rather: the conditions that made the internet harmful to specific communities were never peripheral to its design; they're an integral part of it. And any politics that aims to restore something like the pre-enshittification internet without reckoning with those conditions is doomed to reproduce them."
"La preuve... ne se résume pas à quelques checklists ou à un vague 'human in the loop.' Elle exige une infrastructure documentaire, une collecte d’artefacts, des procédures de test, des moments de réflexion, bref tout un appareil organisationnel qui ralentit. Ce ralentissement n’est pas un défaut du système, il en est la condition de crédibilité!"
"The pathologies of Seeing Like an Idiot are worse understood, because we haven’t had to think so hard about them. They don’t just involve ineptitude and blunders, but a nearly complete incapacity to see or talk about the much wider set of problems that can’t be expressed via goonposting."
"a cohort-based project that responds to consumerism and the damaging effects of fast fashion. Folks who reside in the Rust Belt Fibershed region (within 250 miles of Cleveland) create an outfit through a soil-to-soil supply chain: fiber and dyes are grown, harvested, and made into a garment, and all garments are able to return to the soil at the end of their life cycle"
" A list of software that has taken steps to reject AI in its development processes."
"But it’s not just ergonomics. One new of anything means more cognitive load. Fluid and natural keyboard use cannot blossom when a system of modifiers and shortcuts is confusing, inconsistent even between platforms that Apple controls, and when any time you use a third-party keyboard, some keys are unavailable, and some menus lie to you."
tutorials on how to do "arithmetic on machines with just binary add, subtract, logical and shift operators, making no use of special hardware support for such complex operations as BCD arithmetic or multiplication and division" very good, very helpful
nicely explained
"The company produces the finest lorem ipsum on the planet, artisanal lorem ipsum... To produce the ipsum the company first runs a standard static generator. Then it employs copyeditors who personally review every word before sending it out to the ipsum-starved masses. But there is a bug in the generator: every thousand or so words has a typo. It’s your job to find and correct the typo. This is a nightmare job. You would lose your mind. But it’s also what we ask our reviewers to do every time we submit a massive LLM-generated PR."