Thudfactor

Interested in setting aside the magical prompter and learning some web standards skills the old fashioned way? You can sign up for my online Web Components course for free until Oct 31 with the code markitzero. If you find it useful, please consider letting folks know! 🎃

”Death Sport” was an excellent MST3K episode, but it was also interesting as its own movie. Sure, it’s ridiculous and the swords are extra stupid-looking. But the fantasy-adjacent long-haired bro hero was *not* smug and witty. We need more “hero is neither smug not witty” movies.

. 📸 ©️ Love Chefchaouen (@love_chefchaouen) .

This is gross.

Won't someone please think of all the bespoke habit tracker apps that we will leave behind if we budget logically for AI usage?!

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Just as I thought, the money just goes in a hole. newrepublic.com/article/2163...

I think this is a great idea! It's far too easy to use AI to create mounds and mounds of total garbage that looks like work. A tight AI budget encourages thoughtful use and keeps output at a level actual humans can use.

If you're really curious about what's going on with PHP, this is an excellent explanation. (And I really hope you're not responsible for updating PHP yourself, sounds like this sucks.)

The PHP thing yesterday have me y2k flashbacks because now everyone who doesn't know wtf they are talking about is acting like "oh it turned out to be a big nothing burger" while people that actually did understand the ramifications were fixing shit instead of sitting around all thumb-in-ass

Email sign-in links defeat the purpose of having a different password for each web site, because an attacker with access to your email account suddenly has access to a ton of other logins. I wish sites would stop using those.

At least four Trump merchandise stores have closed this year. Store owners say with Trump in his final term, there isn't as much to fire up his consumer fan base and sales have softened. n.pr/4Bm45o5

The corner Trump store is usually covered in political banners this close to an election, but today there is only one. A Trump banner that says “The only President to TEE OFF both parties while keeping his promises to the PEOPLE”

It would be lovely if the video games industry would let the people who make the games buy food

Back in the 1930s we were OK with a bunch more dead people.

‘Coyote vs. Acme’ has officially surpassed ‘Supergirl’ ($126M) worldwide, making it the summer’s highest-grossing film produced by Warner Bros. But it’s distributor Ketchup Entertainment benefiting from its theatrical release.

I suspect the runaway demand for software engineers in 2020 was more or less due to the Bigs trying to gobble up developer resources — they certainly don’t seem to have had an idea what to do with that labor. Now they are doing it with GPUs. This is not a functioning capitalist market.

One thing that bothers me about the hardcore anti-AI-webdev crowd is that their preferred tools are boycott and shaming. This feels like a labor organization issue. People who put their livelihood on the line need to be part of a support network and feel like folks have their backs.

I've been left to my own devices, more or less, to figure out how using AI while coding helps me do my job better. And since I rarely think that "faster" means "better," I've been making different decisions than the billionaires would maybe like. #webdev #ai thudfactor.com/posts/notan/

I feel like one of us is being stupid here. The data profiles themselves aren't what require the hyperscale infrastructure that disrupts communities. It's the imposition of making platforms that want instantenous access, processing, and analysis.

The new Street Fighter movie was great fun, but that preview for “The Rescue” -- eesh. Is it "Cowboy Taken" or "Benji: The Dark Mutt" ?

I've been left to my own devices, more or less, to figure out how using AI while coding helps me do my job better. And since I rarely think that "faster" means "better," I've been making different decisions than the billionaires would maybe like. thudfactor.com/posts/notan/

Should we really allow ourselves to be engulfed by a demonic holiday that invokes Hell? Alas, I’m afraid we’re stuck with Christmas, but at least we’ll have the happy memory of Halloween to help us make it through the season.

as we get further from covid - and as attacks from trump et al on mail-in voting ramp up, and voters worry he’ll fuck with their mail ballots - I expect we’ll continue to see a switch back to in-person voting

I recently watched a video on this interesting art exercise and wanted to do it, but it involves scissors (ouch) and gluesticks (yuck) so I made one of my own. This is very prototypish at the moment, so I'd love feedback. "Expanding the Square" Notan exercise: thudfactor.github.io/expanding-no...

Last week’s lyrics game had 8/10 songs identified across three players. This week’s skews quite a bit older, but that’s partly because so many of the popular versions of the songs were covers of much older tunes. thudfactor.com/lyrics/do-ri... #blog #music

I’ve already picked the songs for tomorrow’s lyrics game. The list includes *three* songs that are decades older than I thought they were before fact-checking the clues.

I was a member of the Internat'l Thespians (maybe? I don't know if our teacher filed the paperwork or just handed us a pin from a bag in her desk and called it a day), so it's awesome to learn they post statements of support for students on their site for seemingly EVERY canceled high school play.

Voted today, and marked my ballot using my mother’s pen she carried with her since before I was born. She passed away earlier this year, but devoted much of her retirement to political organizing and the process of running elections.

it turns out that “optimize for engagement” and “optimize for societal best outcomes” are opposing goals and if you look at the entire history of the tech industry you can see which of those two wins out

One of the key practices of a highly effective organization is that everybody works at a "sustainable pace." That term has been twisted around, but what it really means is that everybody comes into work every day rested, relaxed, and able to do their best work, and they stop when those 1/5

"I will not touch anything with ai-generated code" is going to mean, in pretty short order, "I will not touch software" this is just functionally what software development is now and it's only going to accelerate from here

Thanks, but I have that covered.

I’m conflicted.

It’s wrong to execute someone on a livestream. It’s also wrong to execute someone in a hidden private room in some shameful little ritual. Tbh it’s wrong to kill people in general, seems like there should be a rule about that somewhere, maybe in religion.

Tired of people who aren't actively caregiving for or going through cancer talking about cancer tbh