Notices by Sara Joy :happy_pepper: (sarajw@front-end.social)

My youngest dressed up for Fasching (Carnival) today as a firefighter and told me what others wore.

One was Harry Potter, and I was asked "Can we watch the films, are they scary?"

"Umm, the first two films have monsters but you'd probably cope with them. But we'd have to get the films second hand. The writer turned mean, and doesn't need or deserve more money."

"How mean?"

"She's nasty about different people, and friends with other bad people, like Trump in America."

My kids have heard of him already. And the other bad man in Russia. They know Ukrainian children turned up in larger numbers at their school and Kita in the last few years.

They know that Trump is rounding up people who have different skin colours to white. They have met trans friends of mine. They have friends with heritage from all over, lots of different shades of skin.

You can be honest without scaring them or saying anything age-inappropriate.

I realise this hits very differently if you're parenting in a place that isn't so safe, or you're in a demographic that isn't safe.

It must be hard to teach vigilance and values without scaring them. I can't imagine having either of my kids doing active shooter drills, or teach them how to safely respond to police, if they were someone with brown skin.

@leaverou no, indeed. Though you can get LLMs to regurgitate books 😅

Another analogy is car driving - most of us don't go under the hood and then only for very specific brightly labelled tasks like windscreen fluid refill.

Much of driving is 'by wire' through power steering. Some cars even keep you in your lane (to be fair that gives me the ick too!), many brake for you! We're not expected to understand how it all works.

But most of those changes have been pro-safety. LLMs do not feel safe.

@leaverou people are very creative in the way they prompt these things, haha. But it sort of proves the whole works are just floating around in there somehow.

@leaverou As an aside - I think a lot of the pushback you're getting isn't just because people think the output is bloated and inefficient.

A lot of people can't and/or don't want to disentangle the whole LLM/AI industry from the ethical and environmental harms, the political stances of the people who run/prop up the things, the problems induced in some people who get too close to their chatbots.

The ick is strong and while the ick remains strong, there will be pushback.

@leaverou I think what bothers me is the "interpreted" generation, where it's generating a bunch of code by wizardry from a prompt, and that prompt can be very high level; "build an app that does X, Y, Z".

I don't like that the LLM's source data is an internet that is already bloated and somewhat broken, insecure and inaccessible, as that's what they spit out too.

If it eventually becomes another level of programming language, and we can be precise with it, and get safe output, fine with me.

@leaverou from the experience of the person doing the inputting, there's probably very little difference, especially if you don't look at the generated or compiled code and just check the end result.

I do find it interesting and I'm not here to fight - as I've had this train of thought too (though you've obvs done the research).

From the energy use and IP theft side of things, very different, though. I actively feel some guilt when I go ahead and use an LLM.

@leaverou I don't think any of them can really get the nuance and precision sometimes needed on the front end.

People find it difficult - hence already existent is the abstraction built upon abstraction UI libraries (that I also don't like!), the better ones at least bake in some level of accessibility and keep to web standards underneath it all.

Someone still has to build those libraries. Maybe in the end it'll all come out in the wash with LLMs, but it's so very hard to wash off the ick.

@leaverou same, I use them in my work codebase mainly to help me with pernicious little issues like type errors or syntax fixes where the IDE is having a boo because of a missed ; or } somewhere.

What bothers me are ads on normie (non nerd) YouTube, advertising services to build entire apps through natural language. I've heard of some which have been extremely insecure - but people sign up, give personal details to these things, then they leak!

It feels messy. I hope the future is brighter.

Sometimes I just crave cheese. Cheesy music.

Fun fact, I know all the words to American Pie and will sometimes sing it all the way through if someone is playing a piano and I am drunk enough.

It's been a good decade or two since that happened 😆

I can't sing well really but people enjoy the performance and everyone joins in on the chorus 🎶

FINALLY I GOT TO SEE THE AURORA!!!

It wasn't *quite* as bright as the phone camera suggests - but it was all visible to the naked eye.

Hamburg, Germany.

Lol. I feel old. A couple of somewhat younger colleagues didn't recognise the "all your base, your base, base, base, all your base, are belong to us" reference.

Is the best MS Office alternative still Libre Office? If I'm not wanting to use Google docs?

Tooty and Fruity/Frooty (seen the other way around, Fruity on the left, Tooty on the right) wish you a Frohe Weihnachten, God Jul, Happy Christmas Eve, and Merry Christmas for tomorrow.

A present from @hl and I to ourselves. We can't really decide which one should belong to who...

#plushtodon

@skinnylatte awesome! Sadly all I really saw was the factory, my hotel, and the beach - but yuummmmmm. The hotel breakfast alone was a feast.

Oh and we did have Ais Kacang while I was there. Which was pretty bonkers, lolol I did not expect the beans (obvs I don't speak the language!)...

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@skinnylatte/115770564510375050

It's not Singapore, but I once spent a week working in a PCB factory in Penang, Malaysia, overseeing some hardware being manufactured for my company.

The canteen was amazing. It doesn't sound as expansive as Adrianna's school food, but it was simply delicious every day - so many options and flavours. Wonderful.

@inthehands yes yes yes yes this

Very much of the opinion that modern life is far too intense, and those that struggle with the (increasingly narrow) way of being that allows you to thrive in it are seeking help one way or another - be that via diagnosis, medication, therapy, drugs...

"We didn't have that back then!"

Oh yes you did. Was life as expensive, as full of tricks to con you at every turn, as competitive for every job, as precarious?

We are safer than ever, but so very stressed.

@evan I try those but my brain starts racing unfortunately.

I have all the tips I need, body was just working against me for a couple of hours!