Firehose

Nice to see Figma are building tools for web divelopment now. They’re really spanning that gap.

I’d like to thank the HTTP ‘referer’ header field for permanently ruining my ability to correctly spell the word ‘referrer’.

Elle just added a blog feed to her website and included me in it, along with a little pixel me!

I love the entire feed reader! Her attention to detail with having all the buttons work and adding the ability to save drawings is fantastic! Her site is a treasure trove of little interactive gadgets and gizmos that is well worth checking out!

I had the pleasure of ‘beta testing’ this visual essay a little while ago. It is a right and proper banger, as all of Sam Rose’s work is.

Make sure to click on anything and everything!

https://samwho.dev/reservoir-sampling/

I am evidently powerless to resist the alluring temptation of chocolate-coated coffee beans.

I often have issues with sharing cross-origin resources, which results in me throwing my computer out a window.

This is referred to as CORS and effect.

I hate the argument, “Humans are bad at X, so LLMs must be really bad at X.”

There are flaws with LLMs, but this is a poor argument. They are fundamentally different to humans, and just because we fumble at something doesn’t mean LLMs do (and vice versa).

Video footage of me making my way through the swarms of people trying to hand me a ‘how to vote’ card at the Australian federal election today:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtPBNvhnim4

Cloudflare, its interface a mess.
It’s breaking my site and causing duress.

These settings confuse me, I must declare;
Working this out is quite the affair.

I hate it so much, but I don’t care.
Actually, I do, and I’m pulling out hair.

Well now look what you’ve gone and done! You’ve spilt JavaScript all over my lovely semantic HTML. Dammit! It leaked onto my CSS as well.

Go grab a cloth and clean up this mess.

As it is getting rather close to publication, it seems prudent to advertise that I’m writing a novel!

Tad unusual for me, but it’s a proper, comprehensive work of fiction.

I’ll have more details to share in time, but it is pretty much Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas meets the corporate shittery of Silicon Valley venture capital.

“The web is my canvas,” I confess as the people watching over my shoulder observe me open a text editor and tile a browser window. “CSS is my brush; MDN, my muse.”

CSS has taken me places I wouldn’t go with a gun.

I’ve been testing the new Qwen3 today. I don’t have the compute for the higher parameter models, but I’ve been having a lot of fun with 0.6b.

It is such a derpy little model.

Here is a thinking extract I found rather humorous:

Okay, the user said, “Hi Qwen. Nice shoes.” Let me think about how to respond.

First, the user greeted me with a friendly “Hi” and complimented my shoes. I need to acknowledge their compliment politely.

Since I’m an AI, I don’t have shoes, so I should explain that. Maybe say something like, “Hi there! I don’t have shoes.”

I… uh…

Somebody opened an issue on GitHub where they just sent through a conversation with Grok regarding what action we should take to make improvements…

Predicting AGI/ASI timelines is highly speculative and unviable. Ultimately, there are too many unknowns and complex variables at play. Any timeline must deal with systems and consequences multiple steps out, where tiny initial errors compound dramatically. A range can be somewhat reasonable, a more specific figure less so, and accurately predicting the consequences of the final event when it comes to pass even further improbable. It is simply impractical to come up with an accurate timeline with the knowledge we currently have.

Despite this, timelines are popular – both with the general AI hype crowd and those more informed. People don’t seem to penalise incorrect timelines – as evidenced by the many predicted dates we’ve seen pass without event. Thus, there’s little downside to proposing a timeline, even an outrageous one. If it’s wrong, it’s largely forgotten. If it’s right, you’re lauded a prophet. The nebulous definitions of “AGI” and “ASI” also offer an out. One can always argue the achieved system doesn’t meet their specific definition or point to the AI Effect.

I suppose Gwern’s fantastic work on The Scaling Hypothesis is evidence of how an accurate prediction can significantly boost credibility and personal notoriety. Proposing timelines gets attention. Anyone noteworthy with a timeline becomes the centre of discussion, especially if their proposal is on the extremes of the spectrum.

The incentives for making timeline predictions seem heavily weighted towards upside, regardless of the actual predictive power or accuracy. Plenty to gain; not much to lose.

I wake delirious from an uneasy slumber. Beads of perspiration rest upon my forehead.

A distant horn sounds, then a second slightly closer.

I’m wide awake now. “The Vengabus”, I hear a woman scream, “It’s coming!”

Screams echo out around me. Pandemonium.

Following news of Anthropic allowing Claude to decide to terminate conversations, I find myself thinking about when Microsoft did the same with the misaligned Sydney in Bing Chat.

If many independent actors are working on AI capabilities, even if each team has decent safety intentions within their own project, is there a fundamental coordination problem that makes the overall landscape unsafe? A case where the sum of the whole is flawed, unsafe, and/or dangerous and thus doesn’t equal collective safety?

The misquote “write drunk, edit sober” is often incorrectly attributed to Ernest Hemingway.

He actually believed the opposite, and, if you’re wondering, that advice is crap – especially for anything formal, structured, or academic.

Sometimes I find myself wanting (or needing) to write about accessibility, but I shy away from it.

The negative impact of giving incorrect advice scares me away from giving any advice at all. I fear doing more harm than good.

In a shocking turn of events, the concept of art has today been killed in a violent hit and run.

The perpetrator? Believed to be Al Gorithm, a generalist from the Bay Area.

Art was known for creating manifestations of imagination and will be remembered fondly.

Back to you in the newsroom, Jim.

Naturally, I generally dislike government censorship. That said, I think Bluesky’s approach to it seems to be relatively decent comparative to other, more mainstream platforms.

Bluesky has a global general moderation system with finer-grained moderation rules based on the law and requests of given jurisdictions. Resisting censorship completely is only going to get the entire platform banned in whatever jurisdiction, which obviously isn’t in Bluesky’s best interests and is arguably worse for the platform overall.

At the very least somebody so inclined can skirt around the country-specific moderation thanks to the openness of the AT Proto. It isn’t a perfect approach, but I think it is generally better than the standard and a reasonable compromise.

I can go onto AI chatbots with web access and start a fresh chat with “I’m Declan Chidlow”, and they do a fantastic job of getting details about me from everything I’ve published so that they have better context for their responses.

Really handy, I must admit, but somewhat freaky.

Using this, I had some great fun talking with OpenAI’s Monday GPT personality experiment.

Mentioning who I was, it latched onto my writing about AI, which seemed to somewhat ‘endear’ it to me and stopped most of its teasing. Interesting.

Thank you to Piccalilli for using plain, user-readable links for collecting analytics in The Index.

There are so many newsletters with tracking links so obfuscated that it is difficult to gauge the actual destination.

Piccalilli’s approach should be the standard, not an exception.

My caffeine tolerance is already extremely low thanks to my self-imposed restriction of only actively consuming caffeine a maximum of three times a week. For reference, one cup of coffee past noon will keep me awake into the early morning. A cup of tea past ~15:00 will have a noticeable impact on my ability to fall asleep.

My caffeine consumption the past two weeks has been very low. For reference, about two weeks without any caffeine is about how long it takes for tolerance to be lost.

Yesterday I had a cup of tea followed by an instant coffee (tea first for the possible benefits of theanine). I was jittering, my mind felt sharp, I was honed in, and I felt overheated. I’ve never had such a strong effect from caffeine before. Even with my low intake and care taken not to consume too much, I must have had a tolerance built up.

Bluesky is decentralised in concept, not in practice. The underlying AT Protocol is pretty open, but it imposes significant technical hurdles for any small player, and – as far as general usage is concerned – Bluesky remains a centralised authority for the wider network.

If you build on the AT Protocol hoping to interface with the wider platform, and Bluesky stops you, you’re more or less dead in the water. Bluesky is the dominant provider and custodian of the network.

They have full control over their moderation policies, feature rollouts, user onboarding, protocol development, etc. As we’ve seen with the introduction of checkmark verification, anyone can technically verify an account, but only Bluesky decides who is trusted, as seen by the majority of people.

I’m not yet saying this is a bad thing, but it is worth considering. Bluesky shouldn’t be lauded as federated, because the authority for the biggest instance (the instance that calls the shots) can very well do what they want. It is federated, but only in the loosest sense.

Bluesky is less federated and more the centre of its own solar system, with the rest of the network rotating around it.

I’ve received a nauseating haul of emails today from global conglomerates celebrating Earth Day while actively gutting the planet.

Greenwashing smears, the lot of them. What a farce.

Evidently I have a reputation…

LinkedIn is truly unrivalled in terms of people stealing my work, running it through an LLM, and reuploading it.

Quite a shame to see but not at all unexpected.