Posts in "Links"

πŸ”— Pixel Envy: The Future of British Television in a U.S. Streaming World

The BBC has problems, but it matters to people. If a country values its domestic media β€” particularly public broadcasting β€” it should watch the future of British media closely and figure out what is worth emulating to stay relevant. The CBC is worth it, too.

I’d add that the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Cooperation) and SBS are worth it too. Culturally speaking, it’d be a sad day if those were to go away.

πŸ”— NY Mag: Rampant AI Cheating Is Ruining Education Alarmingly Fast

Two thoughts on this. The first is that I think these kids are doing a disservice to themselves. I’m not someone who’s going to say β€œdon’t use AI ever,” but the only way I can really understanding something is working through it, either by writing it myself or spending lots of time on it. I find this even in my job: it’s hard for me to know of the existence of some feature in a library I haven’t touched myself, much less how to use it correctly. Offloading your thinking to AI may work when you’re plowing through boring coding tasks, but when it comes to designing something new, or working through a Sev-1, it helps to know the system your working on like the back of your hand.

Second thought: TikTok is like some sort of wraith, sucking the lifeblood of all who touches it, and needs to die in fire.

Via: Sharp Tech

πŸ”— How to Work Better

Sage advice from Kev Quirk. I feel like I’m struggling a little at work recently, like things are slipping. Like Kev I can’t multitask, and I know I’ve got to get better at doing a single thing at a time. But unlike Kev, I need to care more about making an effort.

πŸ”— Prefer Numbered Lists to Bullets

Good arguments for using numbered listed instead of bullets in chat communication. I don’t disagree with any of them. I will say that tend to preferred bulleted lists simply because the chat apps I use tend to make using numbered lists more difficult than it should be. Slack, for example, only starts a “real” numbered list when it detects you type 1.. And once you’ve started, there’s no way to skip ordinals within the same numbered list.

Auto-generated description: A chat message from Leon Mika lists items with different numbers and includes a section to jot something down.
Note that "1. This" the only "real" numbered list, and has a different appearance.

Even Obsidian’s implementation is not perfect. Despite making it easy to start a numbered list at an arbitrary ordinal, it’s still not possible to skip ordinals.

It’d be simpler if they didn’t try to automatically make “real” numbered lists at all.

Via: Jim Nielsen

πŸ”— We are destroying software

We are destroying software telling new programmers: β€œDon’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels.

Wheels are not the same. If I need a wheel for a wheelbarrow, I don’t want to use a wheel for a tractor just because it exists. The same is true for software. If all I want to do is minify some JS without all the transpiling crap that comes from using React or Typescript, why not eschew Webpack for my own handwritten build scripts?

Via: Simon Willison

πŸ”— Mastodon Bookmark RSS

Generates an RSS feed of all the toots you bookmark. I’ve been using it these past couple of weeks and it’s been fantastic. Mastodon bookmarks are front and centre now, thanks to them being in my feed reader.

Via Robb Knight

πŸ”— We Don’t Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.

Liked this piece by Joan Westenberg. I occasionally see this cynicism myself, which is frustrating as they usually come from builders. Surely they know how hard it is to come up with a solution to a problem, only have it torn down. Granted, there might be some ego involved in these feelings.

Via Pixel Envy.