hi hi and also yesterday I read their complete contributions to the iNat forums and apparently they turned up a few weeks ago out of nowhere and started demanding iNat change their entire UI in order to uprank ficus. Also to make it easier to downvote incorrectly identified ficus. Also change the forum policy to allow them to link to specific bad identications of ficus so they can mock bad ficus-identifiers.

But even though a few weeks is being left to drown:

“d” asked me to send him pics and i was like “nope”. when he finally sees the tree in person it’s going to blow his scholarly socks off. he’s gonna really regret not seeing it sooner. and i’d be surprised if he didn’t write an article about it

I mean, don't get me wrong, I love me a single-minded gardener, but even when I am obsessively uploading pictures of the lifecycle of the swallowtail caterpillar eating my parsley, I'm not trying to turn a citizen science site into Polymarket.

every single bathroom bill requires that the most masc, bearded trans guys legally have to use the women's toilets because they were AFAB. It has never not boggled my mind.

(Except that what it actually means, obviously, is that those trans guys are prohibited from peeing and perforce existing in public, because anywhere with bathroom bills is somewhere where a trans guy is sure as hell putting his life at risk by using the women's toilets. Goddammit.)

(Edited to add: I know this is obvious to everyone. But it's still enraging.)

Remember when our industry cared about loading times?

One of the things that happened during the Great Low Interest Rates Decades is that it seems like anyone who fit a certain profile (millennial white guy with american citizenship, a computer, and at least a modicum of what passes for charm among the nerd elite) could convince both VCs and the US government that there was tons of money in disrupting the delivery of some legacy sector of society. Sometimes they were correct (eg. buying stuff without going to a retail establishment), sometimes it seems like they should have been correct and yet somehow have failed to make money anyway (Uber), mostly they were comical (Juicero). But the ones that are the most excruciating are all the places where you really, really can't frictionlessly deliver at scale, because large-scale human intervention is necessary: education, health care, customer service.

The promise of the American tech boom is massive online delivery without people. Employers hate their employees, and government is always willing to be told that doing without employees is industrial progress.

But betting? There’s being an insider and then there’s profiting, and aren’t most journalists prohibited from trading or betting on their covered areas?

when you do not yet have (1) customers, (B) unit tests, (ג) developers who can write their own code, or (IV) exception handling, the term-of-art that comes to mind for doing anything besides auto-incrementing primary keys is YAGNI. (Especially because nobody who is making thoughtful, careful database tuning decisions is using chat-gippity to convert their models. And more to the point, they aren't using SQLAlchemy of all things to make large, distributed applications that need UUID primary keys.)

It’s okay to copy/paste your basic model structure for SQLAlchemy classes, but copy and paste from the SQLAlchemy docs. Sweet suffering stack overflow, did nobody even look at the docs ever, or did they only trust ChatGPT? SQLAlchemy‘s simple for basic use cases.

Also here is such a nutshell of everything wrong with YC: jackhole prompt fondlers with no tests, no paying customers, who turn on the most important new feature in prod at the end of the day (jesus wept), and yet with all that clown show,

We had eight ECS tasks on AWS, all running five instances of our backend (overkill, yes we know, but to be fair we had AWS credits).

What the actual fuck.

Tired: bragging about how you always knew the true face of evil because you’re just more tuned in than other folks.

Wired: Sharing valuable, documented, normie news stories about how crypto is tied into crime and grossness at every level.

Inspired: Mocking an extreme-fasting, psychedelic-chugging weirdo for giving millions to a fascist fan of a dead guy who believed there’s aborted fetal material in pepsi and who was an AIDS and Covid denier who died of, shock, Covid.

(for mastodon users who don't get the image: it's Andrew Lawrence's "you know the ones" tweet)

I suspect Elon's pretty comfortable with his political ideology and ego, tbh. But I agree with the second part.

The accessibility community is pretty divided on AI hype in general and this feature is no exception. Making it easier to add alt is good. But even if the image recognition tech were good enough—and it’s not, yet—good alt is context dependent and must be human created.

Even if it’s just OCR folks are ambivalent. Many assistive techs have native OCR they’ll do automatically, and it’s better, usually. But not all, and many AT users don’t know how to access the text recognition them when they have it.

Personally I’d rather improve the ML functionality and UX on the assistive tech side, while improving the “create accessible content” user experiences on the authoring tool side. (Ie. Improve the braille display & screen reader ability to describe the image by putting the ML tech there, but also make it much easier for humans to craft good alt, or video captions, etc.)

At the risk of being sincere in the snark pit, hugs. Good for you for taking care of yourself.