The evolution of software development over the past decade has been very frustrating. Little of it seems to makes sense, even to those of us who are right in the middle of it.
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The components sourced from an intern fixing ChatGPT’s output just enough for it to run and the exhaustively tested ones from a senior developer are equivalent in the eyes of management.
And one is much, much cheaper than the other.
If you’re unlucky enough to have to use any of this garbage we’re shipping and calling ‘software’, now you know why it all feels a bit shit.
If you work as a software developer, it means employers will continue to emphasise frameworks over functionality because that makes you easier to replace. They will sacrifice software security to make your job easier to outsource. They will let their own businesses suffer by shipping substandard software because they believe they can recoup those losses at your expense.
This is what unions were made for
fascinating review of studies on Internet use and cognition — including potentially negative effects on concentration and memory — found by way of an excellent article in Nautilus titled "Viva la library"
“Viva la Library!”
But while few parts of the world remain outside its reach, the internet leaves little room for discovery. Our curiosities in the digital environment are not so much sparked as they are confirmed. The system is designed to say “yes” to us, not challenge us. Over time, even the questions we ask begin to take on the smooth, antiseptic quality it was designed to reward. Digitalization has driven us further into ourselves and sects of the like-minded.
But at Google’s heart was a Faustian bargain. Access to a bottomless well of knowledge would come at the cost of us becoming a thinly anonymized data point, the contents of our searches surveilled and transformed into rocket fuel for Google’s online advertising empire. The longer we linger online and follow links, the more monetizable breadcrumbs we leave, and the more eerily personal the advertisements become.
In a meta analysis called “The Online Brain,” Joseph Firth, a mental health researcher at Australia’s National Institute of Complementary Medicine, and John Torous, who directs the digital psychiatry division at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and other authors, informs us that even “a short‐term engagement with an extensively hyperlinked online environment (i.e., online shopping for 15 minutes)” does a number on our attention spans, compared to reading a magazine, which doesn’t produce the same “deficits.”
Our fractured attention spans are having a clear impact on the way our memory and cognition function, they write. The more we go to Google—or anywhere on the internet—the less likely we are to remember the facts we seek to retrieve. Instead, we remember only where these facts can be found, and consequently become more reliant on the internet for basic recall. Such internet-induced erosions of memory have baleful effects on young adults, the researchers write. They impact the development of a brain region associated with the formation of long-term memory. Come to think of it, I have grown mentally itchy and restless ever since I started Googling things.
As that kid in Iowa City, I was able to plunge deep into books and read for hours on end. But since Google entered my life in my early 30s, I only sink into immersive reading when I travel. Once I’m back on land, and open my laptop, I feel my concentration begin to scatter.
all i want for christmas is CSS support for underlines to extend below SVG pseudoelements 😔 (as in the first image)
huge thanks to Nathan Knowler for suggesting a solution i'm now using, which has replaced my incredibly buggy previous attempt:
a[href^="https://en.wikipedia.org/"]::after
{
background-image: url(/assets/images/wikipedia.svg);
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-size: 0.8em;
content: " ";
white-space: pre-wrap;
background-position: right 0 bottom 40%;
}
One of those little-regarded sections of CDA 230 is part (c)(2)(b), which broadly immunizes anyone who makes a tool that helps internet users block content they don't want to see. Enter the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and their client, Ethan Zuckerman, an internet pioneer turned academic at U Mass Amherst. Knight has filed a lawsuit on Zuckerman's behalf, seeking assurance that Zuckerman (and others) can use browser automation tools to block, unfollow, and otherwise modify the feeds Facebook delivers to its users
The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this. The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort.
I have a new article out today in Businessweek: "The State of Crypto Is Anything But Strong".
I think this is the first time any of my writing has earned its own animated illustrations, which I am just delighted about.
You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly and it says the number is no longer in service.