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🔗 Slack users horrified to discover messages used for AI training
I’d like to avoid jumping on the “I have everything AI” bandwagon, but I agree that Slacks use of private message data to train their LLM is a pretty significant breach of trust. A lot of sensative data runs through their system, and although they may be hosting it, it’s not theirs to do as they please. Maybe they think it’s within their right, what with their EULAs and everything, but if I were a paying customer — of enterprise software, if you remember — I’d make bloody sure that data is the customer and the customer’s own.
It’ll be interesting to see how this will affect me personally. We use Slack at work and I know management is very sensative about IP (and given the domain, I can understand). Maybe I’ll finally get to try Teams out.
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Friday Development Venting Session
Had a great venting session with someone at work about the practices of micro-services, the principals of component driven development, mocking in unit tests, and interfaces in Go. Maybe one day I’ll write all this up, but it was so cathartic to express how we can do better on all these fronts. If anyone is to ask what I think, here it is in brief: Micro-services might be suitable for what you’re building if you’re Amazon or Google, where you have teams of 20 developers working on a single micro-service. Continue reading →
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Flights to Canberra booked. Going to be bird watching again real soon.
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If the macOS devs are looking for something to do: here’s a free idea. Detect when the user is typing on their keyboard, say using keystrokes in the last N seconds, and if it’s greater than some low number, prevent any window from stealing keyboard focus.
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I must agree once again with Manual Morale on his recent post about search and the future of the web:
I think curation, actual human curation, is going to play an important role in the future. In a web filled with generated nonsense, content curated by knowledgeable human beings is going to be incredibly valuable.
Ben Thompson has been arguing this point too: in a world of AI generating undifferentiated “content”, that which has the human element, either in it’s creation or curation, would stand apart. He says he bets his career on this belief. I think it’s a bet worth taking.
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How is it that it’s become so natural to write about stuff here, yet I’m freezing in my boots drafting up an email to a blogger in response to a call for some feedback?
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Love that NetNewsWire has a setting to open links in Safari instead of the built-in WebView. Very useful for articles which require an active login session, which I’m more likely to have in Safari. To enable, go to Settings and turn off “Open Links in NetNewsWire”.
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Never thought I’d be desperate enough for food and money that I’d be forced to learn everything there is to know about authentication, OAuth, and SSO, but here we are. 🤓
P.S. I’m trying to be droll here. Please don’t test me on my knowledge of OAuth or SSO. 😅
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Writing Good Data Migration Scripts
I’m waiting for a data migration to finish, so I’ve naturally got migration scripts on my mind. There’s an art to writing a good migration script. It may seem that simply throwing together a small Python script would be enough; and for the simpler cases, it very well might be. But it’s been my experience that running the script in prod is likely to be very different than doing test runs in dev. Continue reading →
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I appreciate projects like Next.JS put a lot of effort into their guides, but they still need to provide a basic API reference. Knowing about request helpers is fine, but do they return strings or arrays? What if a query parameter’s not set? This is stuff I need to know. 🤷
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Working in the project which is using TypeScript for the code, and Go for the deployment configuration. Wish it was the other way around, where Go is used for the code, and TypeScript… isn’t used at all. 😛
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👨💻 New post on Databases over at the Coding Bits blog: PostgreSQL BIGSERIAL “Type”
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I haven’t gone all in with AI co-pilots or anything with my coding setup yet, but the latest version of GoLand comes with what is essentially a line completion feature that I actually find quite useful. I suspect there’s some ML in there as it seems to understand context and produce suggested line completions that are, more often than not, pretty much what I was going to type out by hand anyway. Many times I could implement most of a new function simply by typing Tab several times. Impressive work, JetBrains.
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On Sharing Too Much About Too Little
Manuel Moreale wrote an interesting post today about sharing stuff online: Life can be joyful and wonderful and marvellous. But it can also be a fucking nightmare. And yes, it’s important to celebrate the victories and to immortalise the glorious moment. But it’s also important to document the failures, the shitty moments, the dark places our minds find themselves stuck in. It’s all part of what makes us unique after all. Continue reading →
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BASIC.HTM
While poking through some old files this morning I came across probably the first bit of HTML I’ve ever written, way back on the 10th April 19961. I think I vaguely remember making these. We were in Castlemaine staying over at my grandparents house and Dad bought along his laptop for us kids to play with (complete with a passive-matrix LCD and 2 hours of battery life). It was the evening and I was mucking around with Netscape Navigator. Continue reading →
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Indexing In UCL
I’ve been thinking a little about how to support indexing in UCL, as in getting elements from a list or keyed values from a map. There already exists an index builtin that does this, but I’m wondering if this can be, or even should be, supported in the language itself. I’ve reserved . for this, and it’ll be relatively easy to make use of it to get map fields. But I do have some concerns with supporting list element dereferencing using square brackets. Continue reading →
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🔗 Goodbye to Apple’s Smart Keyboard Folio, the best iPad Pro accessory
I’ve never considered hoarding accessories before, but I might start. The Smart Keyboard Folio is perfect for how I use the iPad: a great stand and decent enough keyboard that doesn’t get in the way when I just want to read.
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Free idea for anyone interested in making a mockumentary: a band that specialises in “Musak,” the type of music you hear in lifts or dental offices. They’re trying to make it to the big leagues — a well known department store, like a Myer or Macies — and they’re up against other bands getting better gigs, the Musak industry “big-wigs,” and their own shortcomings. Sort of like “Spinal Tap” meets the doctors waiting room.
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It’s ironic to think that part of my job is to make sure that the nice artwork that I see on our 500 and 404 error pages are never seen by anyone else.
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It’s always fascinating browsing the early methods and properties of the DOM. It feels a bit like an archeologist shifting through strata uncovering facts about some long lost civilisation. “Oh, they didn’t call them query parameters back then. Instead, they were known as search strings.”
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One other skill I wish I had was good audio mastering skills. Been going through some more tapes last night and it would be so sweet to be able to remove the loud hiss some of them have. I know what I need to do in principal, but translating that into an FX chain in Logic Pro is where my gap lie.
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Browsing some of the WeblogPoMo posts on Mastodon the past few days. A lot of great posts, plus some really talented web designers out there. Wish I had their artistic or web-design skills.
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Of course I deployed something that broke other services because of dodgy permissions. So…
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My second favourite word to write in a Jira ticket, after augment, is “decommission”. I’m basically using it as an euphemism for “rip this unused code out”. To have made a few tickets with this word today feels glorious. 😊
