Scott Boehmer

Category: Technology

  • Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Time Zones

    What if event organizers could share a link that would do the work for you? If someone clicked on mytime.at/5pm/EST, they would see their local version of that time. It sounded simple enough.

    I began coding.

    I knew trying to manage time is a fool’s errand, but that’s what datetime libraries are for. I would merely build an extra time zone conversion layer on top.

    Surely that couldn’t be complicated

    …Right?

    I soon discovered just how wrong I was. One after another, I kept learning the falsehood of yet another “fact” that had seemed obviously true. Eventually my original vision became literally impossible to pull off without making serious compromises.

    Zain Rizvi

    Falsehoods programmers believe about time zones (Zain Rizvi)

  • Tricked by A.I.

    A good video by a content creator who accidentally included some AI generated footage in one of their recent videos. It takes a look at how it ended up there and how the internet is getting filled with generated slop that you need to be increasingly vigilant for if you want to avoid it.

    I do try to be thorough. So how didn’t I spot the molten nonsense coins, so obvious to the viewer? Well, brains are funny. Eyes too. What we see depends a great deal on what we expect to see.

    Pillar of Garbage

    I Was Tricked by A.I. (And It’s Big Tech’s Fault) (Pillar of Garbage)

  • Stop Using Generative AI as a Search Engine

    I know people are sick of talking about glue on pizza, but I find the large-scale degradation of our information environment that has already taken place shocking. (Just search Amazon if you want to see what I mean.) This happens in small ways, like Google’s AI wrongly saying that male foxes mate for life, and big ones, like spreading false information around a major news event. What good is an answer machine that nobody can trust?

    Elizabeth Lopatto

    Stop using generative AI as a search engine (The Verge)

  • You Should Have a Website

    When you post on social media, you are subject to the whims of whoever runs it. If you get banned, no one knows how to find you. If the website gets sold to someone who sucks, you cannot transfer your identity somewhere else. If the main algorithm that people use to find your posts starts suppressing your posts, you have no backup plan.

    Social media leaves you bouncing from one enshittified, corporate-owned app to another.

    …

    When your favorite social media website gets bought by some asshole with more money than sense, you are going to be left holding the bag. If you have a website, you can link your social media profiles on the website, and build up a reputation as having that website so people know where to find you if your current social media implodes.

    Nora Reed

    You should have a website (Nora Zone)

  • Storing Times for Human Events

    What’s wrong with calculating the exact UTC time the event is starting and storing only that?

    The problem is that we are losing crucial details about the event creator’s original intent.

    …

    My strong recommendation here is that the most important thing to record is the original user’s intent. If they said the event is happening at 6pm, store that! Make sure that when they go to edit their event later they see the same editable time that they entered when they first created it.

    Simon Willison

    Storing times for human events (Simon Willison’s Weblog)

  • The Cryptocurrency Industry’s Unprecedented Election Spending

    The cryptocurrency industry spent almost $200 million to influence the outcomes of the 2024 United States elections. This unprecedented degree of corporate spending from a relatively small industry had a major effect — but probably not in the way you think.

    Let’s talk about where the money came from, where it went, what the cryptocurrency industry’s goals are in politics, and what to do now.

    Molly White

  • Killer robots hiding in plain sight

    As more and more decisions about human fates are made by algorithms, a lack of accountability and transparency will elevate heartless treatment driven by efficiency devoid of empathy. Humans become mere data shadows.

    Per Axbom

    Killer robots hiding in plain sight (Axbom)

  • Lost in the Future

    Modern existence has become engulfed in sludge, the institutions that exist to cut through it bouncing between the ignorance of their masters and a misplaced duty in objectivity, our mechanisms for exploring and enjoying the world interfered with by powerful forces that are too-often left unchecked. Opening our devices is willfully subjecting us to attack after attack from applications, websites and devices that are built to make us do things rather than operate with the dignity and freedom that much of the internet was founded upon.

    Ed Zitron

    Lost In The Future (Where’s Your Ed At)

  • Information literacy and chatbots as search

    If someone uses an LLM as a replacement for search, and the output they get is correct, this is just by chance. Furthermore, a system that is right 95% of the time is arguably more dangerous than one that is right 50% of the time. People will be more likely to trust the output, and likely less able to fact check the 5%.

    But even if the chatbots on offer were built around something other than LLMs, something that could reliably get the right answer, they’d still be a terrible technology for information access.

    Professor Emily Bender

    Information literacy and chatbots as search (Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000)