FeedCity

new and exciting ways to write buggy code

Towards the end of last year, I got the delightful opportunity to talk to Scott Carey for the Priority Zero podcast from LeadDev. LeadDev is such a wonderfully thoughtful community for people who think about how people create with code, and who manage teams who create technology at scale.

It's a wide-ranging conversation, and Scott was incredibly kind to indulge us covering so many topics, but I was particularly grateful to get to have the discussion at about 49:10 of the ways so many leaders in industry are trying to shirk responsibility, and I tried to articulate how those efforts ignore the awful, often immoral level of power that's vested in the hands of business leaders. We unfortunately can see exactly how that's being abused very plainly in every aspect of our society today.

Towards the end of last year, I got the delightful opportunity to talk to Scott Carey for the Priority Zero podcast from LeadDev. LeadDev is such a wonderfully thoughtful community for people who think about how people create with code, and who manage teams who create technology at scale.

It's a wide-ranging conversation, and Scott was incredibly kind to indulge us covering so many topics, but I was particularly grateful to get to have the discussion at about 49:10 of the ways so many leaders in industry are trying to shirk responsibility, and I tried to articulate how those efforts ignore the awful, often immoral level of power that's vested in the hands of business leaders. We unfortunately can see exactly how that's being abused very plainly in every aspect of our society today.

I recently spoke to a developer who tried blogging but gave up because nobody was reading his posts. I checked out his blog, and it was immediately obvious why he didn’t have any readers.

The developer had interesting insights, but he made so many mistakes in presenting his ideas that he was driving everyone away. The tragedy was that these errors were easy to fix. Once you learn to recognize them, they feel obvious, but some bloggers make these mistakes for years.

molecules and chaos

Adam Silver has an article titled “Do you trust design advice from ChatGPT?” wherein he prompted the LLM: How do you add hint text to radio buttons? It gave various suggestions, each of which Adam breaks down. Here’s an an example response from ChatGPT: If you want the h...

Scraper bots are destroying the commons to feed the machine

Google is usually criticized for its relentless collection of personal data. It's an important and widely discussed topic, but I’m surprised there isn’t another common criticism: its responsibility for UI & UX design and its consequences. Any large company that creates p...

Missed the news last week? We announced two new PebbleOS watches - read the announcement post . Pre-order now at store.rePebble.com…

Stand-up comedy about having a homelab.

Ik moet ook nog even wennen aan het idee, maar “motie Cloud Kootwijk” is aangenomen (al heet ‘ie anders): "Motie van het lid Kathmann over een aanbesteding voor een rijkscloud in volledig Nederlands beheer" Deze motie kreeg van de regering de appreciatie Oordeel kamer (“👍”), en vervolgens stemden alle partijen behalve PVV er ook nog voor. Overigens legde het kabinet uit dat ze in plaats van ‘aanbesteden’ het oppakken als ‘het initiatief nemen tot’, wat ook prima is.

I recently finished Carlo Rovelli’s book “The Order of Time” and, of course, had a few web-adjacent thoughts come to mind. Who says lessons from physics can’t be applied to making software? (I know, nobody is actually dying on that hill.) A Weakness of Being Data-Driven Bei...

In the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart started investigating how computers could augment human intelligence: "If, in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer display backed up by a computer that was alive for you all day and was instantly resp...

I used AI with success 5 minutes ago. Just five minutes ago, I was writing a piece of software and relied on AI for assistance. Yet, here I am, starting this blog post by telling you that artificial intelligence, so far, has proven somewhat useless. How can I make such a sta...

Web developers have been waiting years for traction in styling HTML form controls. Is it possible the day has come? Here’s Jen Simmons on Mastodon: My team is working on a solution — you’ll apply appearance: base and switch to a new interoperable, consistent controls with e...

I get it. I disagree with it, but I get it. The tech industry is throwing obscene amounts of money at LLMs. VCs are salivating over AI startups. The big important executives are regularly bleating about how “we should integrate ChatGPT into our game” because they read some Medium article about the future of interactive entertainment.

But as narrative designers, we need to call this what it is: a massive distraction from what makes game characters work.

Heydon Pickering has an intriguing video dealing with the question: “Why is everything binary?” The gist of the video, to me, distills to this insight: The idea that [everything] belongs to one of two archetypes is seductive in its simplicity, so we base everything that we ...

Do we need new incentives for creating information?

Update (2025-05-15): Turns out the CPU was faulty! See My 2025 high-end Linux PC for a new article on this build, now with a working CPU. Update (2025-09-07): The rep...

Almost two years ago, Twitter launched encrypted direct messages. I wrote about their technical implementation at the time, and to the best of my knowledge nothing has changed. The short story is that the actual encryption primitives used are entirely normal and fine - messag...