Ryan McCuaig

There’s an archetypal blog post going around right now, a sort of apologia in which a techie programmer man is talking himself into embracing generative AI tools despite his initial skepticism, various ways in which it's unreasonable to expect him to think of himself as a bad person despite the externalities, pointing out that it sometimes works to a startling degree and so we have no choice now but to embrace it, etc, etc.

These posts often have some appeal to authority, where the author says that he was convinced to set his skepticism aside and give our AI zeitgeist a fair chance by ‘some of the smartest people I know,’ or some similar phrasing.

I feel it's worth noting that I don't think I've yet seen anyone argue he was convinced by any of the wisest people he knows.

Amazon, GCP and Azure really should give me some way to report IP addresses that are asking for any .php URL at all, since the accounts behind those IPs could be terminated for malicious activity with zero false positives.

I wish it wasn’t so low-grade depressing to watch Apple revert to the mean.

Listening to a radio piece with a tech author being interviewed about her (the author's) own system prompt for ChatGPT and it's an air-quotes life coach that she (the author) is clearly proud of and she (the author) doesn't seem like she (the author) is completely in the cult but keeps referring to her (the author's) air quotes life coach slash imaginary friend as "her" and "she" and I'm having a lot of trouble squaring this with the idea that she (the author, not the enormous pile of linear algebra) not seeming completely in the cult.

I decided to install the new version of iOS with this 'liquid glass' jazz. Apple gave its design rationale as getting out of the way of 'your content.' In a WWDC video an Apple designer breaks down how complex and subtle the transition animations are when floating controls shift from light mode to dark mode, to blend in with 'content' as I scroll.

I can see how someone could talk themselves into thinking this is a good idea. In practice, though, scrolling high contrast images can make the fixed-position controls shimmer as various blend transitions trigger and the controls try to keep up. This triggers those hunter-seeing-prey instincts and does the opposite of getting out of the way of (ugh) 'my content.'

The graphic design of Medium is coming to signify for me: “3-10x more words than necessary from a person who has never encountered a fad before trying to become THE thought leader on a new fad.”

This sounds boneheaded and obvious in the way that eventual epiphanies sometimes do: I've had a realization about construction numbers as data. I think something about computer brain makes me, by reflex, model things like horizontal attachment spacing as integer numbers of inches.

But they're not integers. They'd be far better modelled as an enumeration type until shown otherwise: they have to line up to a conventional grid derived from stud spacing: 16", 24", or 32", with no valid values in between. Far better to use keywords like :h-16, :h-24 or :h-32. Then I wouldn't have annoying buggy misses on equality checks where 16 doesn't equal 16.0000004 (thanks JavaScript), or fat-fingerings that I can't even see for a while like a vertical spacing of 32" (should be 36", ie. :v-36).

Many of the pathologies around our 'data-driven' zeitgeist feel to me like they're pathologies around how rigid computers are. My speculation is that there's a deep link to categorization there someplace. And categorization is very squishy when we apply it to the real world, eg. the theoretically yes/no question "is the Pope a bachelor" is unanswerable: you have to answer the question with other questions about the context in which we care about the answer. I'm half-hoping some sort of cognitive earthquake around "data," something at the same level of upsetting as seeing quantum mechanics or Gödel's Theorem for the first time.

I'm trying to shift as much hosting off the US tech giants as possible because . So far it's been an odd consumer experience: really I'm looking for commodity virtual private servers so I can run a Nomad cluster. But all the Canadian hosting providers so far seem to want to add some custom layer of differentiation on top and call it something just novel enough that it takes me a while to figure out if it's Heroku-esque, or just managed Wordpress, or actullly a virtual private server but entirely managed through a web interface and no API is available, etc. etc. It reminds me of mattress shopping, where I'll never, ever find the same model number twice.

Free Clojure macro idea: (tap-> ,,,) and (tap->> ,,,). They're like -> and ->>, but they run tap> between every step in the thread, so you can observe the progression of transform into something like portal.