“As I’ve been playing with LLMs” - let me stop you right there.

You no longer have anything of value to teach me.

Bye 👋

Many web educators I’ve learned from have watched their businesses dry up over the past couple years, with many of them blaming LLMs.

And having watched most of them write about LLMs as if we should entertain them as a serious technology, I can’t help but wonder how much is self inflicted.

I don’t *want* to learn from someone who espouses LLMs as a good technology. It’s incredibly discrediting, and I’m baffled more educators haven’t grasped that yet.

And it’s recently occurred to me that part of my business going forward has to include an educational component.

Sure, I’ll work with people who want someone to just take care of it all for them.

But the real value is in helping people take proper ownership of their presence on the web. And there’s an unaddressed middle ground between “write all the code yourself” and “be dependent on this platform”.

That’s what I’m trying to find.

Meanwhile, as a freelancer I’ve moved “down market” as they say, and I have conversations like, “I used to dread updating my (Squarespace) website, but you made this so much easier.”

It’s obvious the tech industry is beyond solving problems people actually have. Far more satisfying to work at small scale.

Credit to everyone pushing through it, but it’s obvious the industry is lost. We reinvent the wheel every few years to pump some investor’s portfolio and that’s all.

Not confident I could push through the pointlessness of it all.

My girlfriend works for a US tech company and today I had to close the door during one of her meetings because otherwise my laughter would’ve derailed the whole thing.

Absolutely everything being said felt like a business meme video. Jargony madness for *no clear purpose*.

Could not contain myself.

I really wouldn’t survive a regular tech job again.

Finally have a project to try Pagefind. Pretty excited to play with this 😁

https://pagefind.app/

RE: https://nileane.fr/@nileane/117394260448052556

Lots of excellent improvements coming to TinyStart!! Love it 😁

Thanks @nileane 🎉

I think I’ve figured out that when invoked via Job, 11ty can’t find the config file.

The Artisan command uses Laravel’s Process facade to call `npx eleventy` from the 11ty project’s root. When invoked via CLI, this works.

Doing exactly this same thing in the Job rather than calling the Artisan command appears to run the command in the correct directory, but the build fails again unable to resolve template paths.

This really has me stumped.

#11ty #Laravel

Rolling my own build server for #11ty in Laravel seemed like a good idea until I found myself with Schrödinger’s layout directory…

i.e. my build works invoked manually (via Artisan command), does not work when invoked via Laravel Job.

When invoked via Job, 11ty fails to resolve template layout paths, even though all the job does is trigger the same Artisan command.

😵‍💫

My client’s products aren't appearing on Amazon via search, and I can't find the "Shop Other Stores Directly" section the article references (if someone has a link to this section I'd appreciate it!), so I don’t think their catalogue has been lifted.

But man, this is some horseshit.

Some reporting here:

https://www.smamarketing.net/blog/amazon-ai-scraping-exposed

Today I saw elevated activity on a client's server... Checked the logs, getting hammered by AmazonProductDiscoveryBot... cool, cool.

Turns out, Amazon will, in some cases, list companies on their marketplace automatically, without consent, via information gathered using this bot.

In other words - they'll try to automatically become a middleman between you and your customers.

How the fuck is this even legal?

For example:

Yes you may drive more newsletter sign ups if you have an obnoxious modal constantly getting in someone’s way.

But how’s your unsubscribe rate? Bounce rate?

What do you want: a small but active and engaged audience, or a massive list full of junk data and uninterested people?

A newsletter sign up that quietly exists off to the side will capture your most engaged audience. One that’s constantly in the way will capture people who want you to leave them the fuck alone already.

There are a lot of less obnoxious ways to fulfill the same goals, and if you evaluate success of your marketing initiatives on longterm outcomes rather than short term metrics, the less obnoxious routes tend to win.

Turns out: people regularly and consistently do business with people who respect them.

If your website exhibits disrespect, you’re starting a customer relationship on a sour note *at best*.

RE: https://caneandable.social/@WeirdWriter/117135081145646930

I’m literally attempting to build my entire business on this premise.

I regularly tell clients and prospects that most of what they’ve been told about website “best practices” is bullshit, and actively avoiding many of them is a competitive advantage in our current web landscape.

i.e. a calm website that actually respects its visitors will feel like a breath of fresh air and people will like your website better for it.

“None of this has much to do with my feelings about #AI, and far more to do with basic mathematics. #OpenAI has no economies of scale, it’s horribly-unprofitable, and does not have a stable business.”

https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/

#FuckAI #AIBubble #NoAI

If I wanted to ship some #CSS in an #11ty / #BuildAwesome plugin, how would I do that?

Just include the CSS file in the published plugin, and document different patterns for including it, or should the plugin autoload the CSS somehow? 🤔

Anyone have an example?

#AskFedi #IndieDev

Still haven't gotten around to an about page for this to properly explain it but…

If anyone finds themselves in need of a "shortlist" of examples of the downsides of AI, my collection is up to 392 entries:

https://www.isaigoodyet.com/

#FuckAI #NoAI #PeopleFirst

The self host weekly guy is now a slop code apologist. Cool, cool.