#dev 2026-05-11
2026-05-11 UTC
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[tantek] aaronpk, always have been: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_digital_assistant
# [tantek] GWG, it's worse than that. It makes you dumber. See recent WIRED article: https://www.wired.com/story/using-ai-negative-impact-thinking-problem-solving-study/
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simpleauthority paywall :(
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[pcarrier] AI helps me produce product surface so fast… Good luck finding an intern materializing something like http://moo.pcarrier.com in a week.
# [pcarrier] That's a static page
# [pcarrier] The tool doesn't expose itself externally by default
# [pcarrier] And everything is well-authenticated, that's the little I reviewed rather well
# [pcarrier] honestly I see much sloppier code from the average engineer.
# [pcarrier] not to mention, this just wouldn't even begin to exist with a team of average engineers given a similar timeframe
# [pcarrier] I mean this is an AI tool itself, so obviously wouldn't exist without AI, but even https://blit.sh/ would have taken many months not days
# [morgan] I think the main thing Id say is that sometimes the slot machine actually wins. Sometimes the probablistic machine spits out a response thats nice to see. Except many people are not counting all the incredible number of misses for every partial win. Sometimes a backend engineer gets a semi functional front end spat out for them. Sometimes vice versa. To the individual, these experiences can seem amazing, time saving, advancing. In
# [morgan] the wider world we are seeing its not always that way for projects, businesses
# [pcarrier] If that's a slot machine, Shakespeare was a monkey on a typewriter.
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# [social] I use it for small things, but need to keep a good eye on it and review everything. There is only one service I have confidence in for the coding I do (PHP and python). But, I use one other for one off grunt work, like converting PDF to markdown and turning transcripts from text flows to normal punctuation and paragraphs (not changing words).
# [social] I’ve dealt with AI/ML since 2008 and done a lot of automation with scripting. I’ll test process scripting with AI if if it is repeatable and stable I’ll turn it into python scripts and run those. AI tools are slow and computationally expensive (in a lot of ways) and for rote processes python scripting is faster and dead on repeatable, which isn’t a strength of generative AI.
# [social] AI has been incredibly helpful for debugging my own code and suggesting options. I validate everything.
# [social] I also run into what it suggests as being really wrong, but my thinking through why it is wrong gets me on the right path.
# elliotwren ah yeah. ai is in a really weird spot for me honestly. i avoid it for a number of reasons, but especially as someone learning i really want to absorb what i'm learning to the fullest and i know myself well enough to know that i personally can't really learn with ai.
# [morgan] [social] Those sound like really good use cases, with all the integrated features of the ability to generate feedback and debugging info that has value to us. Im at a point now where I could start looking at running an instance of a local on-device model based on linux somehow. Im not fully committed to experimenting with it. Will see where it goes 🙂
# [pcarrier] negative-sum game of pure luck vs productivity multiplier with the right skills.
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nsmsn [edit] Here’s the original article, that launched thousands of redesigns: https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/
# nsmsn [edit] Responsive Web Design (the article) is 15 years old. https://philarcher.org/diary/2025/responsive-web-design/
# Deleted User [edit] https://jamesg.blog/2024/06/05/responsible-web-crawling/
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# superkuh Did advanced machining operators who used to perform all machine setup and operation in an analog way themselves become lazy and dumb when (computer) numerical control took over? Are modern machinists dumb? Or are they just smart in a different domain now that the positioning is actually taken care of? Does showing that the machinists don't want to, and would chose to skip physically positioning of the machine tools every step of the way, mean the
# superkuh y are lazy?
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# superkuh LLM are deterministic too up to the point of the sampler selecting from logits. The actual neural network part will always return the same set of logits for the same input. It's the normal, algorithmic (not neural network style) bolt-ons to chose *not* the most probable logit that introduces indeterminism. But not really because with the same sampler settings you always get the same. Now, corporate hosted services are bad because you have no contr
# superkuh ol of this and it is all opaque and in that sense, indeterminate. But everything corporations do is shady and profit driven. Doesn't mean air is bad just because they breath it too.
# superkuh So, 1. they don't make you dumber. 2. they aren't indeterminate. 3. I'm doing way too off-topic again.
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[capjamesg] tellroboxer I think a lot of people here write their own CSS by hand so they can play more and have more control, but Tailwind is always an option if you would prefer a framework.
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[jeremycherfas] [social] I'm particularly interested in your approach to cleaning up structure, not words, of a transcript. Have you written that up?
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# [jeremycherfas] I used Tailwind for a quick win when I redesigned my site to be more responsive, but after a while I got fed up with all the classes and moved to a simpler setup using thing I learned from everylayout.
# tellroboxer I once tried react with tailwind CSS
# tellroboxer is it even possible to use react on neocities?
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[KevinMarks] Those are both quite large and possible overkill for a personal site - React is built for complex dynamic sites where the api changes by the second, tailwind is a way to micromanange styles.
# tellroboxer yeah I am in the planning stage as I am still figuring out how my site should look and what I need to have on it
# [KevinMarks] If you already know basic HTML you may have more fun using a classless CSS library (ie one that defines how standard elements look). There are examples at https://classless-css-demo.deno.dev/classless.html
# [KevinMarks] You can pick one of those as a baseline and then override elements in your own stylesheet
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# [KevinMarks] The webawesome team (that now runs 11ty) have a variant of this approach that has web components for more complex layouts https://webawesome.com/docs/utilities/native
# [social] [jeremycherfas] I have not written it up. But, it is rather straight forward and always check the results. The big issue is how long the session was as that sort of determines what I use to run the clean-up. If it is 30 minutes or less I do the clean-up locally using Google’s Gemma 4 and either copy and past or give it a text file with the rough transcript. If it is longer I’ll run it through Claude.
# [social] That is it.
# [social] The prompt is the same for both: “This text needs to be converted into normal sentence and paragraph structure. Do not change the words or word order and do not delete or add any works in the text.”
# [social] [KevinMarks]++ this is really helpful
# tellroboxer Would it be possible to make a really authentic 2000's website by using HTML 4 and outdated HTML tags like blink?
# tellroboxer it's how I made my first website
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# [KevinMarks] You'd have to use a blink polyfill though
# tellroboxer [artlung]: I remember that the way websites are built in HTML 4 is very different
# tellroboxer the code is super ugly usually
# tellroboxer [KevinMarks]: I never heard of that
# [KevinMarks] Sorry, that's a but jargony. A polyfill is a implementation of a future standard in existing css/js. You can make things blink with css animation
# tellroboxer [tantek]: Mine was a real mess and I was a kid when I did mine
# [KevinMarks] Here's a verbose example (you don't need all those browser prefixes anymore, Tantek chased them away) https://github.com/yocontra/blink-polyfill
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Loqi Front End Study Hall #051 in 10 days https://events.indieweb.org/TG1XW5SC1mV3
# tellroboxer I still remember some of my first websites that had bright red colours with other clashing colors and text that was hard to read
# Loqi Accessibility is key to designing web sites in an inclusive manner, lowering barriers to information, interaction, and communication, to make the web accessible to people with disabilities, and sometimes a literal site path (/accessibility) for a website accessibility statement; the IndieWeb community encourages both accessible events & personal sites https://indieweb.org/accessibility
# tellroboxer The way I made my first html4 website was with tons of tables to make a layout
# tellroboxer [edit] The way I made my first html4 website was with tons of tables Tr and TD to make a layout
# tellroboxer not a surprise then that the code was very hard to maintain
# Loqi The 1990s was a decade that saw the invention and growth of the web, dominated by independent websites, as well as nascent silos like Geocities, with a particular brightly colored and often translucent design aesthetic that would come to define the era along with under construction graphics, dancing animals, site counters, ornate backgrounds, and guest books https://indieweb.org/90s
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[artlung] I wrote about adapting old table based designs — specifically for the headers from my blog — a few years ago. https://artlung.com/blog/2024/01/09/modernizing-2004-web-design-to-2024/
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# [capjamesg] What is CrowdSec?
# Loqi It looks like we don't have a page for "CrowdSec" yet. Would you like to create it? (Or just say "CrowdSec is ____", a sentence describing the term)
# [capjamesg] Does anyone have any mitigations to block bots that try to look for .env files etc?
# [capjamesg] My server has got a lot of traffic from automated scanning bots and I’d love to block them 😄
# [capjamesg] I already have fail2ban and Cloudflare set up with the default settings.
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# [KevinMarks] Fascinating backend work from [snarfed] here: https://blog.anew.social/bridging-on-a-budget/
# [capjamesg] [snarfed]++ wow!
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# Loqi Front End Study Hall #051 in 9 days https://events.indieweb.org/TG1XW5SC1mV3
# [tantek] some interesting scroll parallax effects happening here maybe worth an exploration? (nevermind the subject material) https://dottxt.ai/
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# ax562 has anyone tried -> https://www.helcim.com/developer-api/ for purchases on their website?
# ax562 looking for a payment gateway/processor
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