Stream

This is a mirror of my tweets in an attempt to follow the indieweb movement.

May 23, 2025

📹 Starred First Update From Dianna (Physics Girl) by Physics Girl

📹 Starred 🌹 Eternal roses – because who says flowers have to wilt? by Ruth Amos

📖 Starred I’m not sure who this is going to help. by Unnecessary Inventions

📖 Starred Familiar by War and Peas

📹 Starred Why Are We Fascinated With Retro Tech? by Janus Cycle

📹 Starred FydeOS - a De-Googled Version of ChromeOS! by Michael MJD

📹 Starred Sometimes you have to take a risk and see where its goes by Ruth Amos

📹 Starred What happened to Shawn? by Kids Invent Stuff

📹 Starred I Built Accurate DOOM SLAYER ARMOR by Emily The Engineer

📹 Starred Rating things I found in my workshop to tie up my hair by Ruth Amos

📖 Starred Dr. Doggy Style by War and Peas

📹 Starred I traveled 8,000 miles to come up with this idea by Simone Giertz

📹 Starred $1 Robot vs $200,000 Robot by the Hacksmith

📹 Starred this is a huge problem for cybersecurity… by Low Level Learning

March 29, 2025

Discord is where the open web goes to die. Why do so many tech projects insist on hiding knowledge inside a walled garden? Discord is private by design.

To illustrate my annoyance, I was searching the web for an ArkType question and found a partial discussion on what appears to be either:

  1. a Discord scraping content farm
  2. an attempt at providing a solution to the Discord problem

Either way, there is clearly knowledge lost to the web inside the ArkType Discord. I don’t mean to pick on ArkType here, it just happens to be my most recent example.

Open source projects are not required to provide “tech support”. Most rely on their users helping one another, sharing knowledge to common problems. Surely it’s best for the project to keep that discussion on the open web?

From Vibe-free SvelteKit for Fun and Profit – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

March 15, 2025

However, these 3rd party tracking scripts were on the prescription pages. The pages that list what medication I’m on.

Facebook and TikTok had been given access to read what medication I’m on by the development team responsible for the Pharmacy2U web site.

If that’s you, sorry-not-sorry, but shame on you.

Take a stand, draw a line, and stick to it. Businesses and capitalism will want to move that line, give it some wiggle room, but fuck that. You’re not a bad person, you’re just doing your job, but as a developer, like I said, you have super powers. Use them. Stop enabling this gross misuse of software.

So, thankfully, I’m protected, but that’s only because I’ve got the super powers too. Mum and Dad aren’t protected in the same way. I’m fairly sure my siblings aren’t either.

It’s a weird situation we’ve gotten ourselves in that we’re having to actively fight to have a safe web.

From Devs: draw your line

March 15, 2025

I was thinking about how to respond to the latest message, too personal to relay here, when a suggested reply, animated in glowing colours to let me know it was “intelligent” popped up: Hang in there!

My thought process was immediately broken as I contemplated what an absolutely obscene thing it would be to send in that moment.

From In the way

March 15, 2025

📖 Starred Abandon all keyboards by Robin Rendle

📖 Starred Crop Circles by War and Peas

📖 Starred Devs: draw your line by Remy Sharp

📖 Starred Decade of blogging by pawelgrzybek.com

📖 Starred Where do you belong, system researchers? by Xuanwo’s Blog

📖 Starred In the way by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred 11 March 2025, 2:52pm by Rach Smith’s digital garden

📖 Starred New App: Googly Eyes by 🦄 Sindre Sorhus’ blog - Medium

📹 Starred We calculated pi with colliding blocks by standupmaths

February 23, 2025

If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own website. A little home on the independent web.

It feels like we’ve lost this decades-old art form; the individuality of design and the uniqueness of content you used to see on these webpages. The notion of experimenting with HTML and CSS without worrying about something looking weird or out of place. The beauty of a website built by a person, because they wanted to.

So, once again my digital call to arms: build your own website. Make it fun. Make it pointless. But most importantly: make it yours.

Damn i could almost quote the entire article. A must read on this times.

From This page is under construction - localghost

February 17, 2025

Screenshot of website

I found this website called Floor796 and its AMAZING, it rememebers me of the good old days on the internet. Amazing, i love it.

February 7, 2025

February 7, 2025

Frameworks are lame. I’m just looking for a few libraries to build a website. Why does everything have to be a lifestyle choice?

Every time I have to run a CLI tool to initialise a framework I cry a little inside. My codebase is 100 megabytes and I’ve yet to write a single line of code. My project’s root directory is littered with JSON, YML, and dot files.

From Framework-mania is running wild! – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)

February 6, 2025

The need for prompt engineering, on the other hand, puts us back on square one of computer use: the pesky old conundrum of a human user having to think like a computer, instead of the other way around.

A modern chess engine can easily outplay even the top ranked chess players of the world. It can be useful for practice and even developing new styles of play, but using one in a chess tournament is considered cheating. Such use is considered cheating for the same reason it’s also considered uninteresting: Humans want to watch human feats. To most people these days, a computer playing chess comes off as an extremely computery activity. Everyone understands that chess is a closed - albeit complex - system. Everyone also realizes that a modern computer can make deeper, faster and better predictions than any human is capable of. It isn’t interesting, impressive or entertaining - at least not the same way a 12 year old human chess prodigy is.

A computer that can detect a certain type of disease is of course more interesting and beneficial than a highly competent chess engine, and is going to be accepted by the vast majority of humanity as something good. It’s not cheating, it’s helping. Yet, it’s not much to hang a bunch of hype on: Like with a chess engine, or halfway decent machine translation, it’s simply a computer finally doing one of the many things we’ve always been told they should be able to. A one trick pony, basically just another piece of medical software, more like Word or Excel than a thinking machine.

This also applies to self-driving cars. Driverless vehicles in closed systems have been in use for a long time. The Copenhagen Metro, for example, has been in operation since 2002 - but like a chess engine, it isn’t “AI”: it’s simply “automated”. Currently available software may very well make human drivers both more comfortable and safe, but the hype has promised completely autonomous cars reliably zipping about in rush hour traffic.

If we’re going to be able to use LLMs to replace certain professions, they must at the very least match the average human, yielding consistent, reliable and reproducible results while making fewer and less costly mistakes. And, they should of course be capable of this without extensive and tedious prompt engineering. The question of responsibility and liability is a pressing one here, too.

I may, of course, be completely wrong. Perhaps we’ll all soon be replaced by a handful of very small shell scripts interfacing with a distant AI’s API. But, deservedly or not, it seems more likely to me that winter is coming.

From Is Winter Coming? | datagubbe.se

February 6, 2025

I’m going to quote Ted Chiang again. He proposes that a more accurate term is applied statistics. I like that. It points to the probabalistic nature of these tools: take an enormous amount of inputs, then generate something that feels similar based on implied correlations.

I like to think of “AI” as a kind of advanced autocomplete. I don’t say that to denigrate it. Quite the opposite. Autocomplete is something that appears mundane on the surface but has an incredible amount of complexity underneath: real-time parsing of input, a massive database of existing language, and on-the-fly predictions of the next most suitable word. Large language models do the same thing, but on a bigger scale.

From Adactio: Articles—“Web3” and “AI”

February 2, 2025