Weeknotes 105

“MDN can now automatically lie to people seeking technical information”

MDN’s new ‘ai explain’ button on code blocks generates human-like text that may be correct by happenstance, or may contain convincing falsehoods. this is a strange decision for a technical reference.

It does seem like a very odd thing to do.

A delightfully short work week so that I could attend Brighton Ruby on Friday. Including this year I’ve attended all 8 times since the very beginning. Time flies. Anecdotally, there seemed to be a more diverse spectrum of attendees this year too, which is encouraging.

I’m glad that it was back in the Brighton Dome. Last year’s was held elsewhere as it was the first one post COVID and I’m assuming there was some trepidation about the appetite for in-person conferences. The Dome is just so much nicer and more spacious. It was well attended – Ruby and Rails apparently still has some life left after all these years being dead.

For me, it was all about meeting up with friends and colleagues rather than the talks themselves. It was great to see old and new work colleagues in-person after years of remote working through the pandemic.

Saying that, I really enjoyed Paul Battley’s “Back in my day …” lightning talk which was very well delivered and interesting.

This describes the modification of a program while travelling back in time from Ruby 3.2.2 (2023) to Ruby 1.6.8

The lightning talks are always the best talks.

Oh, and there were socks!

I wanted to create a database diagram this week so I went Googling for tools. I don’t create them very often so I don’t have a go-to tool for the job, but I did remember using dbdiagram.io before when it appeared in my searches.

It uses an easily learnt special syntax to define your diagram instead of being GUI-driven so you don’t get side-tracked lining up boxes, changing colours, and generally not thinking about your database design.

I like it.

I heard about Kagi this week so started using it to see what it’s like. I set it as default in Arc and Safari on iOS. Too early to comment on how effective it is yet, but first impressions are good. I would pay for search.

Apollo is finally a goner. It’s too early to tell exactly how this will affect my Reddit usage. However, I won’t be able to supply the Neovim content you crave without /r/neovim so I’ve subscribed to that Subreddit using RSS.

I think pushing ALL TEH THINGS to RSS is the way forward.

Miguel de Icaza tooted this from @antirez

Twitter is in desperate decline. And social media, in general, is in terrible shape. That’s our fault, dear friends. To exchange messages and pictures is a trivial internet function, not unicorn worth: we killed IRC and NNTP, dismissed RSS, and now that’s the world we get.

I have some sympathy for this argument. But consider IRC, the reason we have Slack and Discord is because IRC is a cryptic magic box that is hard to use.

My iOS Home Screen needs some re-organisation, but I genuinely can’t face the massively frustrating hold-wiggle-drag dance that is still, somehow, required in 2023.