look I'll be the first to admit that fedi has problems and that the world is kind of falling apart around us

and it's easy to forget or overlook

but ... we built this place

we don't need Them, we have this place that's For Us, and we fight to keep it that way, and mostly? mostly we fucking win

don't forget what we can do, together

Was reminded of this paper a minute ago, and I just read it again. Damn, Edsger Dijkstra weirdly relevant for a 40 year old paper.

"The question [of whether machines can think] is just as relevant and just as meaningful as the question whether submarines can swim."

"if computers could amplify intelligence, they could amplify stupidity as well."

"The most crazy thing of all this is that, in all the more spectacular cases, the failure has been predicted, quite convincingly and well in advance. Apparently, the lure of the dream is still so strong that people become to deaf for warnings: the computer represents Babbage’s Dream Come True, and no one wants to hear that the Dream has deteriorated into a fully transistorized nightmare."

"I refer to the wide-spread, but in general unchallenged, belief that making something “computer-aided” amounts to making it better. Computer-aided design, computer-aided management, computer-aided composition, computer-aided manufacturing, computer-assisted learning, computerized examinations, you name it. Under no circumstances the dogma of improvement should be accepted without challenge: in no time we would have computerized jurisdiction."

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD867.html

Why do so may designers think that being accessible is not a requirement of their work?!?!

DAMN IT.

Meet https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG22/quickref/#focus-visible and get over yourself.

#a11y #webDev #exhausting

Jack Dorsey (🚩) is launching (🚩🚩) a secure chat app (🚩🚩🚩) that hasn't been reviewed for security (🚩🚩🚩🚩), and a security researcher has already found identity key leak vulnerabilities  
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/09/jack-dorsey-says-his-secure-new-bitchat-app-has-not-been-tested-for-security

My recommendation is to stay the hell away from this and just use Signal.

No, computers won’t replace humans to write code for themselves.

Please stop with this nonsense.

What we will see though is tremendous losses in productivity as deskilled programmers will get less and less education and practice—and take longer and longer to make broken AI-generated code work. Meanwhile, AI models will regress from eating their own generated shit when being trained on.

Eventually AI companies will finally run out of investors to scam—and when they disappear or get so expensive they become unaffordable, “prompt engineers” will be asked to not use AI anymore.

What’s gonna happen then?

We’re losing a whole generation of programmers to this while thought leaders in our field are talking about “inevitability” and are jerking off to sci-fi-nostalgia-fueled fantasies of AGI.

Infinite Mac can now be embedded into any website: https://infinitemac.org/embed

For a demonstration of what this can enable, see @mwichary's amazing "Frame of preference" article: https://aresluna.org/frame-of-preference/

And for a behind the scenes look, there's a blog post: https://blog.persistent.info/2025/07/infinite-mac-embedding.html (spoiler: Marcin was the instigator for all this, conducted over a months-long 100+ message email thread).

Proof-of-work challenges have become the current hotness for defeating AI scrapers. I think it’s great we have these and that they’re getting deployed to great effect. But I’ve also seen a lot of people claim the “AI scrapers” problem is now solved and I’m sorry to tell you this but no it’s not.

The reason it’s solved right now is because most of these scrapers don’t execute JavaScript. But with enough people deploying PoW proxies, the economics around that change enough to make it worthwhile for AI companies to do so. AI companies have more money than you. Yes it’ll cost them, but that cost is worth it to them because otherwise they don’t have a business.

(Also Anubis and other solutions default to only triggering if the User-Agent header contains Mozilla so guess what! It’ll soon need to be enabled regardless of the value of that header because it’s trivial to circumvent. Then the cost goes up for the operator too as more and more users get affected.)

The JS needed for the PoW stuff isn’t complicated. A small JS interpreter can handle that. What mostly remains is then the cost of the hash. Right now most things use SHA256, for which we have CPU extensions and AVX instructions to speed this up. Constantly increasing the PoW rounds doesn’t solve this. Eventually the experience degrades too much for real users, whereas servers literally don’t care. Nobody is sitting there waiting for the output to be rendered. All they want is to get the content to train on.

PoW proxies are a stopgap, and a very useful one. But a stopgap nonetheless. We’re buying ourselves time. But we’re going to need more than this. Including legislation that outlaws some of this shit entirely.

AI is a technology, but the root of the problem we’re facing is a societal and political one. We cannot ignore those aspects and exclude them from a solution.

Please please please don’t impose dark mode on your websites. Honor the user’s system settings.

There are plenty of people with visual impairments as common as astigmatism who can’t read light text on dark background, because it’s like staring at a strong lightbulb in the dark.

And it’s not hard. Just a few lines of CSS.

#accessibility