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heydon

@[email protected]

With apologies to CERN. Doing creative and accessible stuff with web technologies. Writer, programmer, font designer, video producer. Enbie/agender.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. View on remote instance

@bleuje@mathstodon.xyz avatar bleuje , to random French
heydon ,
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@bleuje Gorgeous

@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

The easiest way to detect an AI video is to determine if it's worth watching.

The next time you're watching a Youtube short of a monkey escaping a zoo on a space hopper, stop asking questions like, "did his middle and index fingers switch places at 00:21?"

Instead ask: "what the fuck am I doing with my life?"

@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

Sometimes I'll start dunking on people and ripping into their shit technologies. And liberals will be like "that's harsh, what have they actually done to harm people?" and INVARIABLY they end up being fascists or adjacent. The thing is, I can tell FROM the tech. The way tech is architected betrays the ideological zealotry that begat it. Tailwind is essentially Brexit for fucking CSS. "CSS is made by standards beaurocrats, let's destroy it" https://indieweb.social/@jaredwhite/115265962274406839

heydon OP ,
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@tante I was planning a video but it became quite depressing to write LOL

@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

If you hate the idea of your job becoming about cleaning up horrendous "vibe coded" output, spare a thought for accessibility specialists. They've been doing that all along.

@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

Turning Point USA is a pro-gun and anti-vax propaganda machine.

Its founders are both dead: Bill Montgomery from Covid and Charlie Kirk from gun violence.

I'm just stating facts.

@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

Remembering Adolf Hitler: a family man and dog lover.

He expressed ardent opinions about certain demographics, but is not known to have harmed any of them with his own hands.

After suffering many assassination attempts by leftists, he was ultimately killed by an extremist antisemite.

heydon OP ,
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@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

If you want to make your mark in a meeting but have nothing to contribute to the ongoing discussion, try one of these:

"What about AI?"
"Can AI help here?"
"Will this support AI?"
"Is this AI ready?"
"Could AI solve this instead?"

This will make you come across as technically savvy and forward thinking, not as an embarrassing waste of space.

@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

Looking into Github alternatives and just read (from the horse’s mouth) that Gitlab “has native AI at every step”.

NEXT!

heydon OP ,
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@ilovecomputers @Codeberg No private repositories on Codeberg, right?

heydon OP ,
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@yatil @ilovecomputers @Codeberg Thanks. Then their wording is misleading.

heydon OP ,
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@Codeberg @a40yostudent @ilovecomputers Thanks, just applied for membership.

heydon OP ,
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@Codeberg @yatil @ilovecomputers So, if I understand correctly, my €48 yearly contribution will not allow me to host HTML custom elements privately?

@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

This shit is straight out of Shindler's List. https://mastodon.social/@DrALJONES/115008924413004677

@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random
@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

Back to the hospital for the fourth time this week. CT scan.

heydon OP ,
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It was the appendix all along!! And we're having it out.

@heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

Every warning from an AI leader about a danger of AI is actually an advert for the capabilities of that AI. Advanced sociopathy.

vkc , to random

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    heydon ,
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    @vkc I fully relate. Except my videos are, like, 5mins 😭😭😭

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    How did we get to the point of letting sociopaths define art, humanity? https://mastodon.social/@Richard_Littler/114812310185894563

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    What's the state-of-the-art for Github graphical clients? I use the command line but I have a friend who's looking for a GUI.

    @aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar aral , to random

    Oskar Kalbag,
    December 9, 2011 - June 28, 2025.

    You will live on in our hearts forever, my dearest couch buddy, incorrigible treat fiend, fluffy cuddle bundle, and best boy ever.

    Thank you for all the joy you brought to our lives every single day and night.

    Sleep tight, my sweet prince.

    ❤️

    Oskar (Osky), a brown and white huskamute wearing a harness, sitting in a field of flowers, looking off camera. Photo by Laura Kalbag.
    ALT
    heydon ,
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    @aral Much love to you and Laura. I'm so sorry, it really is hard.

    @tante@tldr.nettime.org avatar tante , to random

    Looked at @creativecommons 's Signals page (https://creativecommons.org/ai-and-the-commons/cc-signals/) again.

    I think this subheading is basically the smoking gun:
    "If everyone blocks access, everyone loses. How can we avoid this path?"

    This fully falls into the "there is no alternative to AI" camp and from that assumption there really are not many paths to take. Question is: Why take that stance?

    heydon ,
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    @tante @creativecommons JUst another thing for AI vendors to ignore. Completely futile.

    @aral@mastodon.ar.al avatar aral , to random
    heydon ,
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    @aral Satan's hat!

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    Looking for some good, ethical hosting for a static site (no backend; just JS on the front). Sick of Netlify and its bandwidth limits / threats. No CI needed, I don't think. Just drag and drop the folder into place?

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    Been working on some monochrome gear and this came to me out of nowhere. Thoughts?

    The trans am logo (with phoenix) but it says Am Trans.
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    @kandid@chaos.social avatar kandid , to random

    Just like an eye.

    The algorithm creates a shape associated with an eye.
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    heydon ,
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    @kandid Would make a great album cover.

    heydon ,
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    @kandid Very cool!!

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    The reason it's considered (by many) acceptable to churn/sling/vibe code using AI is, in no small part, due to how we frame development in respect to design. We consider design thinking as both innately human and a non-technical code-free occupation. We think of developers as machines who only encode design.

    If developers get replaced by AI, it's only because we dehumanised them already. And the development itself will get worse. Because the best developers actually think about their work.

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    It's concerning to me that this """ethical dilemma""" comes up so frequently regarding self-driving cars. Does self-driving mean never slows or stops? Are self-driving cars all designed after the bus in Speed?

    Should a self-driving car kill the baby or the grandma? Depends where you're from. Picture of a car hurtling towards both parties.
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    @baldur@toot.cafe avatar baldur , to random

    The massive adoption of “AI” by the tech “moderate” tells me that most of them only objected to the scam portion of cryptocoins not the fact that the tech itself was built on a dysfunctional libertarian worldview and designed from the ground to bypass or destroy our existing financial infrastructure

    heydon ,
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    @baldur Fucken liberals 😞

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    I write to learn. Using an LLM would entirely negate that. https://mastodon.design/@adrian/114465562685994698

    @Gargron@mastodon.social avatar Gargron , to random

    Still baffled by the sheer irresponsibility of unleashing the Convincing Lie Generator on the general public. I don’t think there’s a historic precedent save for only maybe the release of teflon into the environment.

    heydon ,
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    @Gargron I think the more recent one is unleashing advertising-deferential social interaction on society (i.e. social media).

    @kandid@chaos.social avatar kandid , to random
    heydon ,
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    @kandid yes!

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    "This AI output is highly inaccurate."
    "Nah, you're just prompting it wrong."
    "How do I go about prompting it the right way?"
    "You really need to know the subject you're asking about. Then you can help it avoid making mistakes."
    "If I know the subject deeply myself, why am I asking an AI about it?"
    "It helps to train the AI."

    @_elena@mastodon.social avatar _elena , to random

    I just watched the most brilliant TED Talk by Carole Cadwalladr "This is what a digital coup looks like"

    🔗: https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_this_is_what_a_digital_coup_looks_like

    It's filled with memorable, superb quotes about the broligarchy. A must see, to be shared widely.

    But then I looked up Cadwalladr's online activity. She uses Bluesky for social and Substack for publishing. This is impossibly incongruous after her incendiary TED talk.

    Honestly, it made me sad. One place is owned by crypto bros, the other is funded by A16Z...

    heydon ,
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    @_elena WordPress is run by a techbro asshole as well.

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    I had no idea the guitar sample in Voodoo People, by The Prodigy, was Very Ape by Nirvana!

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    📝 New Blog Post: Poisoning Well

    I have started publishing nonsense content on my blog, to mess with LLM crawlers.

    Here is the article, all about it: https://heydonworks.com/article/poisoning-well/

    And here is the nonsense companion article, all about whatever: https://heydonworks.com/nonsense/poisoning-well/

    heydon OP ,
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    @vkc Thanks, Veronica!

    @tante@tldr.nettime.org avatar tante , to random

    Recently rediscovered At The Drive-In's "Relationship of Command". What an excellent album. Aged brilliantly.

    heydon ,
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    @tante A unique record, in both sound and energy.

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    I am 43 today. My wish is for everyone to reply with a new conjugation of the word “cunt”.

    I’ll start us off:

    — cuntesque
    — cuntible
    — ...

    heydon OP ,
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    @tante Thanks!

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random
    YouTube comment on my What Is React video: Damn, I was just searching for beginner tutorials for using React. Now I'm left with not touching it LOL.
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    @Daojoan@mastodon.social avatar Daojoan , to random

    The media has more empathy for white Trump voters burned by Trump than they will ever have for the transgender folks, Black people and immigrants these voters knew they were going to hurt.

    heydon ,
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    @Daojoan Is that a surprise?

    heydon ,
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    @Daojoan It's not really news unless it's new. We've had decades of this shit. Pointing it out doesn't achieve anything. I want to hear about how this can be curtailed/stopped/revenged. Saying "Aha! These people are bad" is useless. They know they're bad. We Know they're bad. They like being bad; we can't shame them. Sorry, I'm in a bad mood.

    @heydon@front-end.social avatar heydon , to random

    From the people who brought you React. https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113790220085063594

    vkc , to random

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    heydon ,
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    @vkc @thejikz @Kiloku I spoke to someone once who contested that JavaScript is not a programming language... but Node is. They were not joking.