death of the internet, film at 11

 

AI is killing the web. Can anything save it? - first off - I LOVE the instantly recognizable Windows 95 art:

The TLDR: AI conversations and Google AI summaries are further removing people clicking through the root articles, and so people making that content have no chance at seeing ad revenue.

The article probably pushes a little too hard going all the way back to "1989" - the fundamental idea of the web - an addressing and protocol setup such that anyone can put up stuff that anyone else can get to - is still alive and well.

Discoverabilty - at its height in the early Google era - is back to being a problem, of course, and the AI status quo threatens anyone trying to make a living via content, so I don't want to underestimate the threat AI makes (And I mean there's this sense of overharvesting; at some point information services are cutting off their seed corn.)

Still proud to be part of the "indie web". It's great to be able to hang a shingle off of the information superhighway, to mix a metaphor or two.

React by Default is a Bad Default

React Won by Default – And It's Killing Frontend Innovation. 

when combined with reports of the security attacks on the npm chain... I still think steps backward might be steps forward.

Improving DX with small AI-produced tools

For my current project at work, we have a set of staging servers, test data, and supporting info, such that our test URLs are complicated conglomerations. 

After 6 months or so of relying on a notes file with common starting URLs and manually hacking variants together, a sometimes fraught process, I realized I could have CoPilot generate a very simple start page url builder:

You can see the sanitized version of it in action here.

It's just funny - obviously not hard to pull off, like 5 minutes of LLM work, but no one on my team thought to do it, and it definitely improves all of our "quality of life"s.

LLMs like ChatGPT synergize really well with some of my graybeard tendencies from Web 1.0; the idea that simple programming feats can still be useful - you don't need to stand up a whole little server, static HTML and in browser JS can meet a bunch of tasks. I haven't yet messed with Claude or other specialty bots more geared at larger projects, but as a companion / second pair of eyes / Jr dev who might lose the thread but has a great memory for a lot of the details, ChatGPT and even the CoPilot I have at work are huge benefits.

Also it synergizes with how I can trivially deploy to my cheap rented VPS  it doesn't matter in this case, it's just a local static .html file, but I wouldn't have to put down a credit card when I want to make something available to any browser.