Mastodawn

@blogdiva You do the thinking in practice. The rehearsals are to commit it to an automatic place. Performance time, you BETTER not be thinking about it at all, or you'll probably fuck up. As a musician, you should be listening at that point. That goes doubly so for improvisational music.

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Dawn Ahukanna 3h ago

“So much this. If the aim is to ship stuff, then the bots can already outship us. If the aim is to grow a next generation of thinkers then the bots don't help.”

- https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/

Tom Czarniecki (@[email protected])

So much this. If the aim is to ship stuff, then the bots can already outship us. If the aim is to grow a next generation of thinkers then the bots don't help. "The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding. Who know what buttons to press but not why those buttons exist. Who can get a paper through peer review but can't sit in a room with a colleague and explain, from the ground up, why the third term in their expansion has the sign that it does." https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/

Hachyderm.io

Dawn Ahukanna 3h ago

Tom Czarniecki 12h ago

So much this. If the aim is to ship stuff, then the bots can already outship us. If the aim is to grow a next generation of thinkers then the bots don't help.

"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding. Who know what buttons to press but not why those buttons exist. Who can get a paper through peer review but can't sit in a room with a colleague and explain, from the ground up, why the third term in their expansion has the sign that it does."

https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/

The machines are fine. I'm worried about us.

On AI agents, grunt work, and the part of science that isn't replaceable.

Dawn Ahukanna 4h ago

Trond Hjorteland Jan 14, 2025

#Sociotechnical principle of the day:

Deliberations – sequence of exchanges and communication

In the 80s, Calvin Pava felt that STS needed updating to keep pace with change and accommodate non-linear and non-routine knowledge work. He proposed extending the design practice with two patterns,
https://stsroundtable.com/wp-content/uploads/Pava-Redesigning-STS-Design.1986.pdf

Dawn Ahukanna 5h ago

Roni Kaufman 7h ago

🧽

Made with Flexflex:
https://ronikaufman.github.io/flexflex

Dawn Ahukanna 5h ago

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David O'Brien 7h ago

Only anecdotally, but yes, I've noticed this.

It strikes me as a sticking plaster approach. A bit like publishing FAQs instead of doing the hard work to understand why those questions are asked so frequently and addressing the underlying problem.

It often feels like a short-term fix to say, “we did something,” instead of addressing the real accessibility issues in design, code, and content. Maybe it’s a temporary measure while teams work on long-term improvements?

@AccessibilityLU published a study in 2024 showing something quite interesting: the presence of such accessibility menus, actually correlated with lower accessibility scores.

Full study: https://accessibilite.public.lu/en/news/2025-03-18-menus.html
https://accessibilite.public.lu/en/news/2025-03-18-menus.html

The Accessibility Menu, a Friend to Eschew?

During our 2024 audit campaign, we discovered that more and more websites are implementing an "accessibility menu." In 2024, 20% of the sites for which we conducted a simplified audit had one. Here's an analysis of the impact of these menus on the accessibility of sites that use this technology.

Digital accessibility portal of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg

Dawn Ahukanna 6h ago

Piccalilli 8h ago

A fun colour recognition game that gets really quite hard as you go through it!

https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/whats-my-jnd/

What's My JND?

Find your Just Noticeable Difference in colour perception. How small a colour difference can you actually see?

Dawn Ahukanna 6h ago

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BashStKid 7h ago

@baldur I was struck with the similarity to Boeing (amongst others).
Reality won’t withstand ever-accumulating technical debt without increasingly severe failures.
It’s impossible to scale ‘fixing the problems in post’, the firefighting engineers end up in customer production systems, playing Maxwell’s Demon against a million faults.

Dawn Ahukanna 7h ago

Baldur Bjarnason 9h ago

This six part series (link goes to the first part), written by a former core Azure engineer, is mind-boggling. Microsoft sounds like a dysfunctional company whose software is dangerously unreliable

(I mean, more so than it has been historically)

https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion

How Microsoft Vaporized a Trillion Dollars

Inside the complacency and decisions that eroded trust in Azure—from a former Azure Core engineer.

Axel’s Substack