Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

It's a bit easy to get discouraged these days, huh?

@datarama I don't think anybody benefits from being in these loops 😝

I'm just grumpy because I used to be a big admirer of this person before they became an LLM cheerleader. I honestly shouldn't have posted anything

Most of the funding for all three major browsers essentially comes from search businesses and much of the rest comes from sources with similar dynamics

Those dynamics are changing. Regulators have come to seeing much of the browser landscape as anti-competitive. Companies are largely in the process of demolishing web media as an industry in an effort to replace them with chatbots, LLM answers, and closed social media silos.

Like others I’m bit worried about the shifting landscape for browser vendors, in terms of the incentives for funding changing. Maintaining and improving a browser engine is a task akin to that of a whole-ass OS. It requires extraordinary funds and I don’t think it’s controversial to say that both WebKit/Safari and Firefox are underfunded

The worst case scenario would be a repeat of the NN4/IE disinvestment duopoly era, a nightmare period after IE had effectively won but before the rise of Firefox where the only browser that wasn’t genuinely outright awful was IE Mac.

Except this time browsers are much more complex software

Now we have a situation where it’s much more cost-effective for tech cos to leverage a cozy relationship with the US administration to shut regulators down, both in the US and globally than it is to either change their platforms to be more consumer-friendly or keep funding open platforms

This means that all of the incentives are lined up to make drastic changes in the browser landscape much more likely over the next 4-5 years

And the conclusion I keep coming to is that the sensible thing to do is to shift hard away from client-side JS except where it’s absolutely essential (e.g. for accessibility reasons). This is despite being a guy whose web dev career for the past decade or so has mostly centred on JS

Obviously none of this needs to happen. Tech cos could demonstrate vision and increase funding as a long term hedge against the also increasing dysfunction of appstores, but that feels unlikely

So, the question on my mind: what’s the best strategy for us small-fry under these circumstances?

It’s clear what a sensible long-term web dev strategy looks like for most of the industry, but much of that same industry is hell-bent on doing the opposite: build bloated software based mostly on a fragile JS-oriented ecosystem, while simultaneously using LLMs as an excuse to both de-skill the industry and shrink the workforce down to a size that can, effectively, be drowned in a bathtub if they so much as dare to attempt collective bargaining

CSS and HTML, even if you assume that they are equally complex as JS, have very different failure modes that make them more resilient. Too much JS is also a big problem in many other ways, such as costs and punishing constrained platforms such as mobile phones

The problem is that the industry does not agree and keeps ratcheting up the average JS payload and keeps hiring based only on skills in React and completely disregarding CSS and HTML

So Ed Zitron has been digging into the numbers behind the AI Bubble and coming away pessimistic and, unusually, I actually think he’s downplaying the risks a bit because much of them are hard to quantify as hard numbers

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

- The only plausible growth story today for the stock market as a whole is magical “AI” productivity growth. What happens to the market when that story fails?

“It is no longer safe to move our governments and societies to US clouds”

https://werd.io/view/67bba568f860f66c1f028082

> many US companies also feel that way about European cloud services, in an effort to avoid having to adhere to the GDPR.

It's not quite a comparable thing. EU co worries:

- extortion by whichever oligarch is currently in favour
- US-based customers lose their freedom or lives because of your data

US co worries:
- Getting fined for abusing their customer's trust

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to draw the conclusion that Microsoft might be employing more than a few fascists at this point.

Microsoft naming their Qubit architecture after a noted fascist (Majorana) reminds me of the time the original version of their “Sparks” AI paper was based largely on references to eugenics-centred racist pseudoscience.

Doing it once might be incompetence, but twice?

https://mastodon.social/@fj/114058565852444444

I can’t believe it needs to be said, but apparently it does: you don’t name products after noted fascists, no matter how notable their eponymic contributions to the field are.

The conversation:

PR: "We're looking for a clever name for our new architecture, any ideas from the field itself?"
Techie: "Majorana Fermions! After physicist Ettore Majorana!"
PR: "So, uh, it says here that he was a noted fascist, antisemite, and a big fan of Hitler, specifically of Hitler's takeover of the German civil service."
Techie: "Exactly! Double win."

This here is a good interview on the whole, but the opening highlight quote from Chappell Roan is the absolute truth for more industries than just show business. In fact, I'd argue that one of the big drivers of modern (mis)management is to expand the abusive practices of show business into other industries.

> In this industry, you really flourish if you don't protect yourself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5UBV_Gpihg

“Apple’s Advanced Data Protection: what’s going on in the UK?”

https://www.ianbetteridge.com/apples-advanced-data-protection-whats-going-on-in-the-uk/

> And the UK law is particularly bad, as it purports to allow the government access to to any account not just in the UK, but anywhere. This means, for example, that the UK could gain access to a US account, and pass that information on to the US government -- effectively circumventing US legal protections on surveillance.

“New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code | N’s Blog”

https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning

JFC. Reading this just as I'm feeling especially discouraged about staying in coding was probably not a good idea.

“Turns Out the “Killer App” of AI—Summarizing Things—Is, Um, Really Bad at Summarizing Things | The Internet Review”

https://theinternet.review/2025/02/15/bad-summaries/

I was pointing this out over a year ago.

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-summaries-unreliable/