mercury_craze

With duchamgpt-v2.3 you can generate as many images of banana and banana-esq items affixed to surfaces as you can imagine, or, rather, not imagine.

So much of the media we consume has been focus-grouped, sanded down, moderated, de-fanged and otherwise diluted into bland corporate mush that it makes sense that we'd want to be able to skip the creative process altogether.

Generating images through software hooked up to statistical models trained on enormous amounts of other people's intellectual property is a cool trick, but it's not art.

My wife's floristry business has been blocked from being able to access facebook advertising and permanently restricted in how she is able to interact with her customers in part because a bot flagged and suspended her for trading in trading exotic animals. The exotic animal she was accused of trading? Aphelandra Squarrosa - The zebra leaf plant.

There's no way of getting this ban reversed, there's no way of invoking any human to perform a manual review on the ban. It is a permanent restriction that impacts her ability to communicate with her customer base.

I'll stick my head above the parapet and say that as a content consumer I really like Instagram and it genuinely is my favourite social media platform. I'm probably an atypical user but now that I'm well out of my 20's the friends I still connect with online I have real connections with so it's a joy to see what they're up to. My interests (food, 70's sci-fi, cats, modern art) are well catered to and I've done a good job of curating the accounts I follow to get a good mix of interesting content. Even my promoted posts are mostly local restaurants and businessess so I've never really felt aggrieved that I'm getting controlled by big corporates. I've also found my experience mostly apolitical with the advantage that because commenting is so tacked on I don't feel the urge to interact with anything beyond liking images or sharing the ocasional post with my friends and family

I understand it's mindless, but I dont want it to be anything else. It's a toy platform for looking at device sized images and short videos on my mobile and that's all I want it to be.

Facebook was doing this for a while on business pages, but it looks like they've backed out of it now. Around 2 years ago you were only permitted to see content 'above the fold'. Scroll down to the second page of content and you saw an undismissable modal covering the entire page. Happily(!) you now have the option to dismiss the modal and continue scrolling, but the modal is shown for every new business page you visit.

That series has always been a joy to read. Whenever I want to know what the established wisdom in making a classic dish are I'll check to see whether she's covered it first and use that as my starting point.

It never seemed important to the CEO of a previous company I worked for that we had something to say, only that we gave off the impression that we had something to say. We hired an outsourced blog writing service to fill our wordpress instance with generic, inoffensive platitudes and listicles poorly cribbed from Wikipedia and the ONS. Squint a little bit and you could convince yourself there was value to it, but nobody with any experience in the problem space would treat it as anything more than marketing fluff. His hope was always that one day we would get rewarded by the great Google algorithm and appear on the first page for search terms we were convinced our users were looking for, but the end result was that our blog was largely designed to be read by robots.

It's the same thing as the tweaks you have to perform for SEO optimisation, some have questionable value to the end user but you jump through the hoops anyway because it's what is done, by pleasing the robots you're rewarded with a higher search position.

Yes, you're out of touch. Access to the internet is seen as a luxury when you're relying on charitable donations to put food on the table.

This isn't totally related to infrastructure but figuring out what you should build, from what you could build is something I've struggled with as I've moved about the engineering management ladder. My current role is a stone’s throw from solo developer (only developer at 4 person start-up) and while I've got total autonomy in the work I complete and the approach I take, it’s a terrible feeling discovering that you're not super-human and you need constraints like almost every engineer that's come before you.

Like the author there's been a number of times where I've felt self-satisfied completing a piece of technical work, only to scratch my head a week later and wonder whether it was worth it. I can say with certainty that having a solid CI/CD pipeline has saved my bacon a few times so I'd probably recommend that as an early investment to make, internal tooling for some of the customer registration was a bit of a mistake and not as critical as I thought it would be which now feels like a waste of 3 weeks.

I am yet to come up with any meaningful advice to pass on to developers in the same position. With time you get better at spotting when you can get away with hacking solutions together and when to put the time in, having a forward vision for a product really helps on focusing your thought and attention and time spent on making things visible to the rest of the business is rarely time wasted. Awareness of what’s going on with the rest of the industry is useful, but don’t obsess over the new hotness, build with what you know works and save your innovation tokens for a rainy day.

I've not encountered this format before, it looks really interesting, certainly much more human friendly than JSON. Thanks for sharing.

The story I've heard a few times is that students who are expected to perform poorly in their GCSE's or A-Levels get expelled for minor behavioural infractions prior to their final exams so their poor grades don't risk bringing down the average.

Seems fine to me. As this has been encouraged but not mandated by your organisation it seems pretty benign. From what I understand about this sort of initiative it's about creating an environment where people feel comfortable sharing their preferred pronouns and helping, (e.g.) non cisgender people to feel like an outlier for doing so.

I enjoyed playing around with this and I got real value out of it as a discovery tool when I filtered to showing aclaimed fiction. I know its survivor bias, but I dont want to waste my time on something both terribly written and outside my echo chamber.

One usability tweak based on how I interacted with it would be to add a 'I already like this' button to suggested books to save me from re-adding them. It also suggested another H.P. Lovecraft novel despite me already marking At the Mountains of Madness as a liked book, I'm pretty sure that if you like one Lovecraft book, you'd like the rest.

The one recommendation I had a strong negative reaction to was by Jeffrey Archer which I guess means that its the book I should read next.

Fair point, overwhelmingly white was poorly chosen - should have left it as problem with diversity.