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Thomas Broyer on what battles are most worth picking when you want to make software more sustainable:

So, what have we learned so far?

• It's important that end users keep their devices longer,
• we can't do much about networks,
• the location (geographic region and datacenter) of servers matter a lot, more so than how and how much we use them.

(From: Climate-friendly software: don't fight the wrong battle)

The crawlers that collect data to train LLMs on cost sysadmins lots of time, writes Drew DeVault:

instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale

(From: Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face)

Aaron Ross Powell explains he isn't an AI skeptic and that he finds LLMs “powerful tools with real world use cases”, but that the idea that AGI is near or that art can be made with these tools comes down to a misunderstanding on the part of tech bros:

What’s going on is a confluence of two features of Silicon Valley tech bro culture. First, Silicon Valley tech bros believe that they aren’t just skilled at computer programming, but that they are geniuses to a degree that cuts across all disciplines and realms of accomplishment. (…) The second feature is a basic lack of taste.

(From: Why Tech Bros Overestimate AI's Creative Abilities)

Richard wrote about a number of different aspects of AI, including sales people complaining they don't sell, erosion of copyright, design tools and mediocrity, AI as a trick to sack humans and bias:

I read a couple of posts about AI recently, which seemed to hold opposing ideas, but I agreed with them both to some extent. (It’s a radical idea, I know).

(From: Another uncalled-for blog post about the ethics of using AI | Clagnut by Richard Rutter)

Good post, I am glad practitioners continue to share their thoughts beyond the hype.

Tante makes the point that actually, all output of LLMs is a hallucination, the true and the false parts:

If using the term hallucination is useful to describe LLM output it is to illustrate the quality of all output. Everything an LLM generates is a hallucination, some might accidentally be true.

(From: It's all hallucinations)

Who doesn't love RACIs? When it comes to ensuring accessibility of your products, almost all roles in the team can contribute something.

The W3C's Web Accessibility Initiative published a mapping of roles and responsibilities to WCAG Success Criteria.

It's still a “draft”, and feedback is welcomed, but it's been worked on for many years.

They've included:

• 6 role groups: Business, Author (Content), Design, Development, Testing, Admin
• a mapping to WCAG Success Criteria of who is primarily or secondarily responsible, and who can contribute
• what can everyone do? A list of tasks and who can do them
• a decision tree for defining your own responsibility mapping

More info on the project and its aims:
Accessibility Roles and Responsibilities Mapping (ARRM) | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C

In defense of technical writing:

If reading philosophy taught me something, it is that thought can be valuable in any form, provided it’s original. (…) Narrate your failures and your wins. Telling your day-to-day routine might reveal patterns or enlighten those who are new to the field.

(From: Technical writing has a depth issue - passo.uno)

When you use AI, you are probably benefiting from stolen material, explains Toby Walsh, who has been an AI researcher for 40+ years. He calls these tools the “greatest heist in human history”:

I am outraged at the tech companies like OpenAI, Google and Meta for training their AI models, such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Llama, on my copyrighted books without either my consent or offering me or Black Inc any compensation.

The tech companies claim this is “fair use”. I don’t see it this way. Last year, at the Sydney Writers’ festival, I called it the greatest heist in human history. All of human culture is being ingested into these AI models for the profit of a few technology companies.

(From: I have been an AI researcher for 40 years. What tech giants are doing to book publishing is akin to theft | Toby Walsh | The Guardian)

It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.

(From: AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism // New Socialist)

Good post (even if it falsely claims The Hague is the capital of The Netherlands).

Igalia got a grant to work towards shipping a new proposal to solve for cross root ARIA:

we’ll work on all the process to get the Reference Target proposal ready to be shipped in the web rendering engines

(From: Solving Cross-root ARIA Issues in Shadow DOM)