verandaguy

I haven't done frontend dev in a while, but one thing stands out to me here... they call out using OKLCH colours, which I had to look up. (For the uninitiated, this is a cylindrical projection of the also-new-to-me Oklab colour space, which appears largely unrelated to the older CIE L*a*b* colour space).

Do people actually use this? In particular, before LLMs ate the world, I mean. When I did frontend, it was hex, or if you felt fancy, `rgba(...)` (though at that point named colours had mostly fallen out of style).

Is using these less-intuitive colour encodings made more practical through the use of CSS variables?

CVSS is an imperfect system. Most of the time it gets the idea of how severe an issue is across, but once you go above an 8, maybe an 8.5, there are some perverse incentives at play. Even with newer versions of the framework coming out over the years, there have always been gaps.

Even before AI, there was prestige in being able to say that you (or your team) found a 9.2 in some major piece of software. You could put that on your resume in some specializations.

Now with AI vulnerability scanning being so hyper-commercialized (but not yet fully commoditized), this is cranked way up since there are more monied interests involved, and many of them are probably trying to make a quick buck before LLM-based vulnerability scans are a commodity (for better or worse).

The astronauts on the ISS must be breathing a sigh of relief, I imagine.

In Mike Pondsmith's Cyberpunk universe (the same one as Cyberpunk 2077), there's this point of in-universe history that the Old Net got overrun with rogue, nigh-on sentient AIs that made safe use of the internet as it was known then impossible.

Society's response to that was to build a new Net, walling off the rogue AIs of the Old Net behind the Blackwall and carrying on in a corporate hellscape.

I wonder if we'll see life imitating art on this one.

This is so good! It's even got duplicates of songs with slightly different caps!

I don't have a lot of love for megacorps but I gotta give it to Apple on this one, goddamn.

In my experience, being a parent is unfortunately a poor predictor of caring and being ready to act on climate change or its effects.

The split seems mostly generational; my parents and other parents around their age seem to not really care (there are still dinner table debates about whether Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was a scam or not), but as my other-millennial friends are becoming parents, the vast majority of them do care, because this issue has been so front-of-mind for people my age. We're hyperaware of the fact that my country has more wildfires, milder winters, and hotter summers than it did when we all were growing up.

(There may be selection bias at play here; while I don't go out of my way to avoid them, I don't have many friends who deny the issue of climate change).

Many of us are also tracking the second- and third-order effects of these things; crop failures, droughts, and the migration and public services strain that come as a result of this; most frustrating is that the biggest voter blocs won't enact policy that's responsive to this, so when the inevitable (mass, climate-change-driven migration) grows over the coming decades, we'll be unprepared, and we'll either be overwhelmed by the movement of people, or complicit in one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history (and very possibly both).

It's a tool that promises that you can be lazy. That's, like, the whole schtick. Of course people will be lazy using it, even if they don't intend to.

And in much of the industry, using LLMs is regressing into what I've heard be jokingly called "yes engineering," where you give an LLM-generated plan the lightest of skims (if that) and just hit allow or yes with auto mode or whatever.

Guardrails are one thing, I want to see criminal and civil liability (as appropriate) for these actions. The US has given corporations exceptional latitude over the years, and this has to be rolled back; maybe with their position on the world stage faltering, they'll reconsider what it takes to be a member in good standing of the global community.

No, let's not get comfortable. Let's get angry at the fact that now we have hyperscalers acting with impunity, failing to properly sandbox their testbeds, and increasing the workload imposed on our public services.

Today it's a fake tip to the police and and exploit chain against Huggingface, but soon it could be an attack against a hospital's IT systems that could cost real lives immediately.

We should be locking things down, yes, but a hardened system is still vulnerable to zero day chains, and that's not unprecedented. Until public services have built up the IT defence capacity to deal with this, we cannot normalize this. If a country did this to another country, it should be treated as a war crime in the same way that targeting a hospital or an orphanage or other critical civilian infrastructure would be.

Complacency is a choice and we must not be complacent.

Showing off can be the point. If I did something tricky and creative and got an interesting (possibly even useful!) result, why shouldn't I be proud enough of that to have a "hey, look at this cool shit I did/made" moment?

That aside, I've been lucky enough in my career to work alongside, mostly, people who have a personal interest in using software as a tool, and knowing their toolchains very well, be that a language, a command line, a system architecture, you name it. If you found something cool to do with a tool, you'd share it to disseminate the knowledge. That culture is very quickly dying off, I feel, because LLM-driven work encourages siloing to a degree I don't think gets discussed enough.

Lastly, using LLMs to write code is its own type of exhausting. I thought I could keep up my hobby by mentally checking out of work and working on projects by hand in my free time, but babysitting the LLM, reviewing the massive corpora of code and documentation it puts out (including those put out by colleagues), and the insane volume of context switches this technology encourages in the workplace makes me want to stay the hell away from computers alltogether if I can help it.

Thanks for framing this in a way that I've struggled to phrase.

At every turn it seems like a lot of intellectual pursuits are just being voided by this technology.

I've heard the "one level up" argument in software with the supposition being that the work's still there, it's just becoming more abstract... but even in software, this doesn't really track.

The injection of this technology into not just intellectual but artistic pursuits (since there are now commercial AI image and music generators) should be a red alert.

What is there to live for once everything you once loved to do has been optimized for maximum revenue? Where every time you do something for fun, someone will come out of the woodwork when you show it off to either tell you AI could've done it quicker, or that they made an AI version with a flashier UI or something?

    > Improving on Apple Intelligence is something of value

Not if you didn't use apple intelligence in the first place (and/or aren't interested in using it going forward).

    > as is consumerizing local-first AI

If and only if there is actual demand for it. If most users do not want this, it's a bad feature.

Funny enough I went into this site wondering if inland lighthouses were a thing; there are a few obvious cases, like the Netherlands using them to demarcate shoals and for navigation of inland waterways, but then there's whatever Germany's doing...

Just because it's not considered a problem by people without a technical or security background doesn't mean it isn't one.

We make many UX compromises in the name of security, and this is a place where that is most visible.