busybee fluffy rambles Notes

Instead of building better business cultures and reinventing our work rhythms to adapt to information overload and an abundance of busywork, the vision here is to let the busywork happen between AI. It’s an office full of ghosts, speaking to each other on our behalf, going to standup meetings with each other just because.

The current fixation on genAI tools means that we basically have AIs talking to AIs for no benefit to the people anymore. We have AI resume builders optimized for AI recruiters who use AI to determine which AI is the best match for the AI-generated position at the AI-dominated company. AI tools for writing a lot of useless scaffolding around our business emails which then get fed through an AI to extract the salient points, when the emails could have just been written with only the salient points to begin with.

It’s so maddening.

As a kid I remember a scene from The Smurfs where one of the Smurfs created a machine as an artistic statement that did nothing but scoop up dirt to fill in a hole that was created by the same machine. At the time it was very much meant as an anti-capitalist metaphor, but today it feels like it’s specifically about AI tools.

At least the Zoom thing highlights the absurdity of meeting-heavy business culture.

I have no idea about the CPU usage but the new post/comment editor is also abysmal. I just want to write Markdown, dangit! But even when it’s in Markdown mode it tries to apply some fancy formatting to things, and gets it wrong.

I really hate how every website now “needs” to be an “app.”

All dimensions are in Imperial units.

I’ve been getting a lot of spammy substack subscriptions that I never asked for, yeah, and it’s super annoying. Substack doesn’t seem to give me any opportunity to flag them as spam, either. It seems like Substack might have some “import followers” functionality that they never actually bothered to secure against spamming.

Does anyone know of/use an HTTP caching proxy, which can read/write cached responses to disk? Trying to reduce the overhead on an external service (during CI/CD) and allowing caching between runs

Squid! It’s good enough for Amazon’s image CDN fleet so it should be good enough for you too.

This search engine seems pretty cool. So far the catalog appears to only have human-submitted feeds, though. I’ve already submitted a couple of mine, and hopefully more folks get on board with it.

I find this video incredibly relatable. I’ve not been formally diagnosed with any version of EDS but I definitely have some sort of hypermobility disorder, and it’s definitely related to my fibromyalgia diagnosis. Everything she shares in her story is super relatable. Including the specific experiences with physiotherapists and being doubted by every doctor, and everyone blaming me being “out of shape” or having a “weak core.”

This is way too real

I have nothing helpful to add here except to say, Javascript’s undefined/null duality continues to be a mistake.

(But also, anything that relies on that duality has also made a mistake.)