Notices by Sara Joy :happy_pepper: (sarajw@front-end.social), page 2

Didn't get to watch #Eurovision this year. This sums up for me why the UK loses so badly:

"The UK is the best at music all around the world. You have the Beatles and everything. So this is not good enough."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy72e81dp28o

The voters *know* we can do better. Yet we rarely put our best foot forward. Established artists don't want the embarrassment of getting nul points (even if it's only because of geopolitics).

They sense that the British treat it as a joke, and respond accordingly.

@b0rk I know not everyone loves CSS but for such as this I'd recommend using either color-mix() or relative colors to make your own :)

Here's an example with hsl() and relative colors - though I would prefer to use oklch() color space, this is made to match what our designer has access to and has set up in Figma.

RE: https://front-end.social/@sarajw/116431901646262445

Sorry-not-sorry

RE: https://wandering.shop/@beecycling/116375518567457746

Sometimes real life feels like when I used to play the first Sims game without any cheats.

The Sim would come home from work and need to cook, eat, wash, work on their charisma, do a hobby and whatever else - and sometimes the food burned or the sink sprang a leak.

Everything also took way longer than it should, the clock ran too fast. A shower lost me 2 hours.

My character would always end up depressed.

@mhoye didn't know that either.

Honestly man the more I learn about women in computing in history, the madder I am about the state of tech today.

Does anyone have good tips for getting archived messages from Postorius/Hyperkitty/Mailman via an API?

The docs aren't helping me at all, I keep going round in circles. Maybe I keep missing the relevant page.

I don't want to set the thing up, I want to be able to fetch posts from an existing setup, and ideally serve them up elsewhere, i.e. via @astro collections.

Thank you in advance!

So https://cs.sjoy.lol now has 150 members and still a few more to come whose emails I haven't got around to replying to 🫣🫠

Sometimes, traversing the ring can be challenging, finding the page with the webring links to move onto the next site. I think that's part of the fun...

If anyone would like to explore and help me find sites that dropped out without telling me (by disappearing or by removing the webring links), please do go ahead! Then I can fix up any breaks you find in the ring :)

@georgemonbiot.bsky.social if there was going to be one silver lining from all this awfulness, yes, I want this one.

Energy is not at all scarce, just *that* kind is.

Finally put it on today!

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.