Finnian Anderson

🇬🇧 in 🇳🇿 software engineer, speaker, sailor. Made @colorisebot, @sandflymap

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

This did not just happen. The guy who saved the NHS just tried out @colorisebot #win #honoured https://t.co/vuU4ac6Pbd

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

@nateberkopec @_swanson @BilalBudhani I came across maybe_later the other day. Seems neat and builds on top of Rack’s after_reply feature.

https://t.co/6Q01m0oQxW

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

@sebChapman @SandflyMap Originally this app was a PWA but it had a worse UX. I have emails for users who signed up, but we have a fair amount of guest users.
Are you having issues with Google Play Store or Apple App Store?

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

My Google Play Developer account was closed due to inactivity (I neglected the warning email).

The account wasn’t inactive though, it had a published app which is being used (@SandflyMap).

Now it’s pulled from the Play Store, I can’t publish updates or reactivate the account.

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

I can’t help but feel this is pretty aggressive and has screwed me royally.
Even more frustratingly, I did try and act upon the notification email but the process wouldn’t accept an NZ phone number, so I gave up.

Do I know anyone who could help me with this?

#googledeveloper

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

The new criteria includes a newish Android device. I don’t have one as I built the app a couple of years ago using a nexus 6. That phone can’t run the latest version of the play store console app, so I can’t verify it to pass that criteria.

I also need 20 beta users?!

[Ryan Jones @rjonesy]

Flighty 3.0 tomorrow! “Friends for flying” finally done right. 🥳

Our biggest release, risk, and lift yet. Nervous. Excited. Ready…

[Tim McNamara @timClicks]

ANNOUNCING https://t.co/BmmC0lwmVE

Your source learning Rust creatively - videos, tutorials, coaching and more. Check it out!

[Kyle McDonald @kcimc]

yep, it works. here is an example of extracting structured data from an LAPD newsroom article. seems like it needs fewer tokens to get the same quality of results. https://t.co/vvQSiVzGWb left: input, right: output

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

@gitlab This is a personal repo so I’m talking to myself, but I felt it was justified.

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

@brianleroux It shouldn’t be “resorting to JavaScript”, it should be “JavaScript as a last resort” 😅

[William Kennedy @_williamkennedy]

I'm so passionate about Single Page Applications that I wrote this massive blog post about it. I share this in the hope of connecting with like-minded folks out there.🙏

https://t.co/1wNFm5fz0r

[f4mi ‼️ @f4micom]

https://t.co/1lgtOSXLS2

this tool lets you extract text from an audio recording of keyboard strokes, right now, for free

i am not making this shit up, you can potentially steal a password from an audio recording in an office

[Peter Nixey @peternixey]

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.

Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.

A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.

StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.

It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.

But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.

What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?

When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on?

This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies.

Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default.

Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer.

Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go?

We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done).

So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions.

None of which you'll find on StackOverflow.

(I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

[Armin Ronacher ⇌ @mitsuhiko]

Today in timezone madness: Lebanon had a last minute announcement of DST postponement. The Olson database complied. Now there is a dispute if it happens, and *parts* of the government reversed it. The country now has two timezones concurrently depending on who you ask.

[Andrea 👨‍🍳 @itsameandrea]

🌶️ Hotwire tip 18/30
🪄 Markdown editor with live preview

When I started learning Vue, one of the first tiny projects I tried making was a live markdown editor. I just realised I never tried replicating that with Hotwire.

Turns out it's just as easy. This is how to do it👇

[Tyler Kron @TylerKron]

"Well-managed software is quiet. Software that is dramatic, where shipping is a big event, is poorly managed. Well-managed software is boring. Nothing exciting happens in it because the changes are small, well-observed, and frequent. It’s as uneventful and routine as a heartbeat”

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

It's pretty neat that with zero code modifications, the app can run on macOS too. Probably not that relevant for this app (for now?) and would need some work WRT navigation etc, but cool nonetheless.

[Finnian Anderson @developius]

The right to be forgotten.

From Jun 30 '22, all new apps submitted to the App Store allowing users to create accounts must also offer the option to delete them.

I'm adding this to @SandflyMap now (yep, I'm a bit late) to support my users best interests. Here's the confirmation.

[Marques Brownlee @MKBHD]

A Rare iPhone Environmental W