dbushell.com freelance

Notes

The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – More Things Have Happened - Scott Shambaugh

The AI attack dog sent after volunteer maintainer Scott Shambaugh is a warning sign of things to come. There are no limits to the harm AI is allowed to do. People are cheering this on. Ars Technica published a now retracted slop piece. Shambaugh’s take should give us all pause for thought.

Journalistic integrity aside, I don’t know how I can give a better example of what’s at stake here. Yesterday I wondered what another agent searching the internet would think about this. Now we already have an example of what by all accounts appears to be another AI reinterpreting this story and hallucinating false information about me. And that interpretation has already been published in a major news outlet, as part of the persistent public record.

Brandolini’s law is referenced. AI adds a multiplier we’ve yet to fully grasp.

The latest UX deceptive pattern I despise:

  1. Enter credit card details
  2. Tab to “continue” button
  3. KAPOW! auto-focus “remember for later” disguised 3rd-party “your privacy is important to us” garbage

It’s probably not new but I’ve been seeing it everywhere lately. This is bad for many reasons. It disrupts and confuses, risking accidental opt-in. It masquerades as a simple convenience when the 3rd-party terms are almost certainly not simple.

Just show the damned form to begin with.

Generated code is rather a lot like fast fashion: it looks all right at first glance but it doesn’t hold up over time, and when you look closer it’s full of holes. Just like fast fashion, it’s often ripped off other people’s designs. And it’s a scourge on the environment.

Stop generating, start thinking - Sophie Koonin

I like this analogy. The whole article is a rare level-headed take on using LLMs for programming. Nice to read someone thinking rationally beyond the hype. Orange site comments are as expected: “You’re prompting it wrong”

A totally normal and not hard quiz about JSON

jsonwtf.org - Jacob Asper

JSON WTF is a fun quiz! I scored 24 from 35 questions. I might have got a few more if I’d thought really hard. JSON is a small and almost perfect standard (should’ve allowed trailing commas). Unlike YAML which is awful. Just awful.

And yet here we are. The worst fact about these tools is that they work. They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months.

We mourn our craft - Nolan Lawson

Poor Nolan here is suffering from a serious case of AI inevitabilism. How many times have we been told “wait six months”? It’s basically a meme now. Nolan doesn’t seem to like AI but is falling for the slopaganda anyway. Senseless!

Use it, don’t use it, but at least make your own choice.

February already! I will be launching a new website design (dbushell.com) soon! I’m keeping my brand intact, only spicing it up a little. The biggest change will be more homepage content. Currently I say “I make websites” — I could be anyone. The new content says something.

As always I have so many ideas for small features. They won’t all arrive at launch. I’m excited! My last big redesign was six years ago. I was still using React back then! Only server-side, of course.

Do users want “AI”? Firefox inadvertently polled users who said “no”. DuckDuckGo polled users and got a bigger “no”. Will they actually listen? Mozilla promised an off switch but AI non-consent is a growing trend.

As Jared White notes:

Due to a freak phenomenon I’ve been calling The End of UX, software companies no longer listen to their users and care about their needs. We are told what we like and what we need, and if we say hell no, we’re accused of being luddites and “behind the times.”

The Results are In: a Whopping 90% of Voters on DuckDuckGo Don’t Want AI - Jared White

This is the AI inevitabilism that’s all too real. The billion dollar brain wash. “AI is here to stay” — until the money runs out.

State of Mozilla is utterly bizarre slopaganda. Warning: flashing graphics and janky movement if you’re sensitive to that. “DO NOT ACCEPT DEFAULT SETTINGS” is rotating on a marquee — I guess they’re talking about Firefox?

Update: I’ve taken to the big blog to cover this.

Sounds like Clownflare was caught telling porkies!

Cloudflare just published a vibe coded blog post claiming they implemented Matrix on cloudflare workers. They didn’t, their post and README is AI generated and the code doesn’t do any of the core parts of matrix that make it secure and interoperable.

Mastodon - @JadedBlueEyes@tech.lgbt

The Mastodon thread is embarrassing for Cloudflare. We may have another legendary commit for the wall of shame. I suspect it might not survive for too long though.

Update: the Matrix blog has weighed in with a diplomatic response and shrewd call for Cloudflare to consider financial support.

Update: “No, Cloudflare’s Matrix server isn’t an earnest project” from Nex gives a thorough review of the situation.

My prediction is that they will introduce complicated and regional pricing structures to extract from each according to their ability to pay.

The Enclosure feedback loop - Michiel Buddingh

Buddingh’s prediction supports his idea that AI companies are building “private knowledge silos” after killing the public forum.

I’ve been talking recently about AI’s financial barrier to entry. Current chatbots are priced for the rich western market and heavily subsidised (especially the coding plans). Will barely disclosed advertisement cover the gap to actual profit? For regional pricing to work, poorer economies must get a worse service.

GOV.uk developers are saints. I just sorted out my taxes and it was a pleasant experience. Good ol’ multi-page accessible HTML forms. No front-end bullshit. No “developer experience” blocking my progress. No design dribbbled with a 10px grey-on-grey font.

Skyreader by Tim Disney is a new RSS app built on the AT Protocol. Looks interesting for those who liked the social aspects of the long dead Google Reader.

Personally I’m anti-social. I’m not interested in publishing my RSS subscriptions publicly. And I don’t fully understand how the AT Protocol works, if I’m honest! But I do like seeing more RSS options. RSS is so back.

Love this TechConf.Directory from Declan Chidlow. It’s an ambitious project but any attempt to improve tech conf/meetup discoverability is a big win for everyone.

Personally my attendance has fallen to zero. When I lived in London — damn that was over ten years ago! — there was an event to attend almost every evening. Often walking distance from my office. Sausage fests at a tech giant HQ were my Friday nights.

Manchester and Lancashire has never been strong on the conference scene. I have to travel back down south, or cross the Pennines into Yorkshire. I’m wording that like it’s an arduous journey. I’m just lazy.

I’ve mentioned Apple’s security theatre a few times but never bothered to provide linkage. Alex Russell’s article Naked Power covers this and more. On the topic of “Frauds and Scams”:

In the narrow conception, the app stores are feckless. Taking a wider view, they’re complicit, if not enabling.

Naked Power - Alex Russell

Recently Apple was found A/B testing new Apple Store design to ensure what you search for is not what you see. It’s all about profit. Lock-in users, double-dip on developer fees. You have to pay so that normal users can open your app without a scary warning. You have to pay again to protect search placement. And then of course, the 30% cut.

YAML is also a monstrosity and should never be used by anyone for any reason. It’s nigh-impossible to write a parser for it and has too many syntactical ambiguities. It has lead to numerous infamous situations such as The Norway Problem

The Only Two Markup Languages - Ginger Bill

Bill is preaching here! The article isn’t about YAML — it’s worth a read if you’re interested in language design — but I’ll never miss an opportunity to quote a fellow YAML hater!

YAML is an irredeemable abomination. Every time I see a project use YAML I cry. YAML exists to remind us that life can be cruel. But seriously, please use anything but YAML.

The Register’s article on OpenSlopware is worrying.

“AI” bros have a non-consent issue that has already been taken to the extreme. Now they’re reportedly harassing critics off the internet who dare try to avoid the AI force-feeding.

Avoiding slopware is impossible. The entire Microsoft ecosystem has pivoted that way. The Linux kernel developers are interested and even Torvalds is vibe-coding. Apple has done a deal with the devil and WebKit has merged slop tooling.

For those of us that find AI to be morally repugnant it’s a bit of a dilemma! I even listed a few sloppy apps in my roundup. Everything is tainted. Is this a sloppery slope to AI-inevitablism? No. LLM progress has already slowed. They’re repackaging old models in a trench coat. I can’t predict when the bubble bursts but I do know it’ll be painful. Only then will common sense return to software development.

It arrived! Check out my self-hosted update for background.

2 port PCIe network card sitting atop the freshly opened box

2 port PCIe network card sitting atop the freshly opened box

The two new ports appear as separate PCI devices in their own IOMMU groups. The onboard port remains active and alone. This is good! Next step is to get OPNsense running and ensure the NIC performs. I won’t bother with high-availability I’ll just manually sync settings.

Mixed news about my new Markdown parser experiment.

On the positive side the codebase is much smaller and tidy despite making no effort to keep it organised. It passes 41 of 47 tests. The six failures are fixable. Once I finish it’ll be pleasant to work with.

On the negative side it’s ever so slightly slower. I benchmarked by parsing all 464 of my blog posts. I haven’t considered optimisation yet but I don’t see any immediate bottlenecks. I had hoped to see bigger gains.

The pros are winning so I’ll keep going!