On the south coast of England…

blessed rain!

Not much, but some 🌧️

Spending an inordinate amount of time writing documentation no-one will ever read.

But enjoying the writing of it

#listening

In the Mastodon web client, if I paste into a post draft text which includes a URL, there’s no event listener ready to parse the URL.

But I infer that pasting any text at all creates a listener, because if I paste the same text, cut the URL, and then re-paste it, the URL does then gets parsed into an embed card

Programming is the modelling of entire landscapes in one’s head:

- terrain right in front of you and under foot
- and terrain obscured by buildings and trees (mostly buildings these days)
- and terrain visible but across a river
- and terrain over the horizon.

A good sense of direction and gradient needed.

LLMs have no sense of direction, though their vendors do, and I don’t want to traverse the denuded landscapes they’re selling

https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/116623150311153409

Ha, just watched a Like evaporate after adding an LLM-sceptical edit 🤭

The best photo of Sid James smoking a pipe while sitting on a Chopper you'll see today.

…Thing is, we’ve always been swimming in shit. It’s just that now we get to know in almost real time.

In 2003, André 3000 sang:

“I know you'd like to think your shit don’t stank, but lean a little bit closer”.

Now, we don’t even need to lean

#enshittification

We’ve gone from people shit in places that end up in rivers to businesses that manage our shit to not go into rivers just pump it directly into rivers for profit.

The same is true of software.

A couple of days ago I decided to embrace Qwant because Waterfox have, and immediately learned that Qwant is kind of in bed with Brave.

How to swim? Where to drink from? The waters are muddy af, and that muddiness is not mud

…In the 80s it took 4 years for me to go from compute doesn’t matter to *I neeeed to get ON this train*.

How long in 2026 until *I neeed to get OFF this train* and get my hands dirty?

Emotionally and psychologically speaking, I’m already there. But I’m old and shackled. People in their 20s are less stuck. Time to pivot youngsters?

…For my college in 1985, students *don’t* need to learn compute seemed obvious.

For colleges in 2026, students need to learn how to live with AI seems essential.

But there’s a new wave coming.

We’ve piled so many short term tech ‘wins’ on top of each other we’re about to ‘win’ massive and persistent losses.

The imperative will be having water and food.

Now that compute is coming for everything has ‘won’, the irresistible force will be *farming is coming for everything*

In the mid 1980s my college course ignored that *compute is coming for everything* and so I’d entered the world of work with no computer skills at all.

But by 1989 it was an irresistible wave and I desperately wanted to surf it. And now here we are: compute is just the water we swim in. So now students are trying to figure out what strokes to swim in what Allison deftly calls the “dario bought all the ram" era.

But, there’s a reversal coming…

@skylark13 @urlyman @ctt I'm using the noai version of DDG, but they still put an AI suggestion on the right of the page on desktop.

Why do they not get it? I don't want to use a summary, I want to see the information in context. Also, if the information is worth stealing, the page is worth visiting.

then again, the bar is pretty low, seeing as how "actually wanting to know whether or not something works, or is true" is considered a hardcore leftist position nowadays

@vowe so weit daneben war das Meme gar nicht. Zumindest ist klar wo die Inspiration her ist und auch wo die Reise hin geht.

#enshittification

What a great post from Christine, eloquently describing the descent into a very dark place, where the “vibe bobsled” incrementally piles up the viral load of “vibe-sickness”.

I love the note that it ends on.

https://dustycloud.org/blog/faulty-towers-vibe-sickness-and-the-vibe-bobsled/

Finally got around to reading @cwebber 's https://dustycloud.org/blog/faulty-towers-vibe-sickness-and-the-vibe-bobsled/
... and yeah, that's exactly what it feels like. I think she nailed it.
😔

So Nauru is changing its name to Naoero. Quite a coincidence that I learned about its existence just a few weeks ago when I read about #Australia's Interment camp in that country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nauru_Regional_Processing_Centre

https://www.amnesty.org.au/nauru-detention-centre-must-be-urgently-evacuated-in-light-of-un-ruling/

…Of course these diagrams are woefully simplistic and inadequate at expressing the complex interplay, including with many factors not mentioned.

But none of them mean I am not *for renewables*. It’s just that the tech is a wholly inadequate lever to pull.

I should make clear that the primary reason for the impossibility of ‘fit’ in the “Renewables-powered future” circles is our *on-going incontinent use of fossil fuels*.

We need #degrowth or we get increasingly unforgiving #postgrowth

…Renewables are currently famously cheaper than fossil fuels at point of consumer use.

But that’s a function of the catastrophically cheap price of fossil fuels (https://mastodon.social/@urlyman/114318199772501074) upon which all the infrastructure to make renewables has been built.

In the coming years, maybe beginning in just a few weeks, the price of fossil fuels will increase dramatically, at which point the price of renewables inflates too, because they are made and deployed with them…

…and when that oil and gas markets misalignment collapses it will to some extent help the even greater public misapprehension converge on reality.

At which point we begin to get into a reality check on affordability, which also seems to be living in fantasy land at present.

So my final diagram for now attempts to address price, which is not the same as biosphere cost.

Some notes follow…