ThomasAPowell

Mostly sharing thoughts on #webdev, #softwareengineering, #retrogames and humanistic aspects of tech. Old tech guy, UCSD CSE Lecturer, Author, pint.com founder, and person behind ZingChart and ZingGrid. 🤓

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Last Notes

2026-04-03 22:47:21 UTC

Pondering things after this whole Claude Code source business
I think the problem with the #GenAI for #SoftwareEngineering code production is we have decided that non-functional requirements are now just nice to have. In other words, if the code "works" than that's it, it's good enough.
For end users that won't be enough. In fact that is just be the entry point. For devs over time that's also a rubbish thought unless you just think you re-gen the code aka disposable code is now all code.

2026-03-28 02:27:12 UTC

It's so "fun" use GenAI for coding sometimes. "Oh wait that isn't it. Oh let me do this thing (did it already 3 times). Oh you're right I already did that. Oh the user is saying to do this (proceeds to do something different)"
Yes you CAN be quite productive with it and you can also get into a flipping doom loop just like a real programmer except worse because it doesn't take showers or walks and then figure things out.

2026-03-10 01:13:25 UTC

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Oh, and a satirical vibe coded game to go along with the post because why not. Best on the phone
https://cyberviber.ninja/demos/agentic-chaos/
#AI #shitpost

2026-03-09 23:04:46 UTC

Well, there's one good thing about #AI right now: it is hyperscaling my #shitpost output!
Today's entry is about nonsensical Agentic teams
https://cyberviber.ninja/posts/ai-absurdity-shot-first/
You might enjoy some of the satirical games I've made, especially How Cooked Are You? https://cyberviber.ninja/demos/how-cooked/

2026-03-08 05:34:41 UTC

The tools of the enemy...
https://cyberviber.ninja/posts/luthen-ai/
#AI #ANDOR #SoftwareEngineering #Shitpost

2026-03-06 21:43:08 UTC

Sadly he won’t outwardly won’t care shame as the orange apex social predator teaches the youth going for money or power that shame is weakness. This kid already demonstrated it. The question is will his investors care or will they double down ?
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/116/184/408/559/037/462/original/aa3026352842b913.png

2026-03-05 20:00:23 UTC

Contract-driven programming would be great with LLMs if they didn't just break contracts or "forget" that contracts exist. Tried deterministic guards, small context, etc., always the same result ~80% max & ~50-60% w/o guards. We verified with a reduced case with a web component ZingGrid with a strict schema, markdown docs, contract, hooks, and a huge unit tests. - same max ~8/10. This is the inherent non-deterministic wall.
TL;DR Useful now sure, but not magic.
#GenAI #SoftwareEngineering

2026-03-02 03:27:40 UTC

Who did we invade now ? I haven’t been online for a day.

2026-02-28 04:58:43 UTC

Fuck Sam Altman. That’s the post.
#AI

2026-02-08 04:12:21 UTC

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@nprofile…wuus absolutely but I think that is more a function of a need for precision. Any time code comes in contact with a need for precision any form of YOLO dev be it copy pasta or vibe code will be not allowed or used very carefully. I think frontend / backend work can be that just depends on use. Consider in my space of dataviz the idea of YOLO style viz creation is frankly insane. It does omit data which means bad chart which means wrong insight. Even Excel warns of accuracy with AI

2026-01-12 02:04:29 UTC

Dungeon Crawler Carl series is a good read. I blew through the first two books and am on the third. Escapism wise I am not sure I want to live in his terrible world, but at least once grinding with Carl, Princess Doughnut, and Mongo I can forget our current shit show.

2026-01-08 05:56:08 UTC

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@nprofile…h8rl it is the only way people got upsold and generally folks are just skipping web sites and just installing the lib and coding via LLM tools with no doc visits no awareness of upsell and no commercial licenses. No support means what was a commercial FOSS success falters.

2026-01-08 03:09:10 UTC

Git issue quotes from Tailwind’s creator.
“Tailwind is growing faster than it ever has and is bigger than it ever has been, and our revenue is down close to 80%”
“Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 …”
“I really want to figure out a way to offer LLM-optimized docs that don't make that situation even worse (again we literally had to lay off 75% of the team yesterday)”
Like media outlets under social independent software is getting swallowed whole by LLM tech. #webdev #ai

2025-12-14 05:40:56 UTC

As an older I really wish the 80s / 90s that GenZ and Alpha imagines was what sadly was not this. It echoes but it wasn’t as ideal. I worry how the unlived nostalgic view is common now. As a youth way back few of us were correspondingly 50s / 60s sentimental back then. Our parents were but mostly not us, the youth interest today is telling how messed up our world sadly is. Youth wish vs better times are different things.

2025-11-15 04:08:17 UTC

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@nprofile…cmhq ugh I never want to see anyone validate that baloney spewing platform. Yet to be fair if anyone has the “social media armor” to walk into that thought wasteland and survive maybe even thrive despite it you do Aaron. Give ‘em truth, logic, and sarcasm hell. 😛

2025-10-19 04:25:37 UTC

What a fantastic day. Went to Portland to visit a dear old friend, Portland Retro Game Expo, No Kings protest, then Timbers vs SDFC match in the rain to clinch Western Conference 1st place in our first season. Time for wine and cheese with a fire and friends. Gonna be hard to beat this amount of good times.

2025-10-11 03:05:31 UTC

Heading to the warzone next week I mean Portland for friends, SDFC soccer and a retro video game conference.

2025-04-05 19:28:35 UTC

I have been having some fun in my #SoftwareEngineering class using ideas from Gordon Ramsay to help students see commonalities as well as bad and good behaviors. I have always found distance helpful for learners since, too often, when we think of ourselves doing the good/bad, we can't hear and think clearly.
Anyway, I decided to make some imagery for another time, and lookie #AI can be useful, though I probably killed three sea otters to make it.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/287/005/584/368/555/original/19293ca5af23049e.jpeg

2025-04-05 02:20:58 UTC

Just flip the candidates and it is actually correct. Source: reality
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/282/964/846/644/163/original/5a136c80b9efbbe8.png

2025-04-03 14:58:17 UTC

Blaming Canada was the premise of the South Park movie.
Thanks for reading and now please return to your reality.
#uspol #trump

2025-03-31 18:11:14 UTC

LLMs -> Semantic HTML Gets Hot Again?
“Use Semantic HTML and Clear Tagging: Ensure that headings are marked with <h1>, <h2>, ... tags in logical hierarchy, and use <p> for paragraphs, <code> or <pre> for code examples, and lists for step-by-step guides. Meaningful HTML structure helps crawlers (and by extension LLMs that rely on web data) extract the content hierarchy."
So the far too common #HTML <div> soup considered #AI harmful. Great. Better markup helps #a11y but also… 😬

2025-03-29 13:45:23 UTC

A rewrite of a massive COBOL app critical to the operation of social security with tons of domain specific knowledge in it by people who know nearly nothing about the domain space or the tech.
#Elon: Yeah with #AI we can do this in a few months.
No expertise in #sofwareengineering neeeded to know this absolutely won’t work.
More likely he is gonna “whoops my bad” project management this system to end social security.
Oh right I’ll stop now as I forgot—tech is non-political & neutral 🫠

2025-03-29 04:14:58 UTC

On my dying lips. Han fired first. F Greedo! #StarWars
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/243/776/934/926/016/original/5a48499d743bb3af.mp4

2025-03-27 16:22:00 UTC

We've had a host set-up at Firebase for > 5 years, never exceeded bandwidth. Today docs were down on my libraries because bandwidth limits. Gotta pay more now. Two guesses why and first one doesn't count.
FUCKING. #AI. BOTS.
Even worse per my IT guy fighting it on one customer site, Cloudflare can't solve 100% as some ignore robots.txt & advertise as Chrome on OSX!
Alert #webdev folks AI bros+agents are truly gonna kill the entire #web with everything going behind logins at this rate.

2025-03-15 02:35:11 UTC

Dems just screwed up royally. I am no flaming lib but so done supporting Dem leadership. Jefferies & Schumer have to go & soon. They are just bad at this. Seriously if we are going to lose then go down fighting. You got nothing for this effort.
Put Schiff, Kelly, Wyden anybody with an ability to speak in charge of the Senate. House it's clearly AOC. She has bigger balls than all of leadership put together. Swalwell as her 2nd.
Grr I hate hating on them, but they just suck.
#uspol

2025-03-13 13:03:27 UTC

Even though I am pretty up on societal commentary on Society and BigTech I actually hadn’t heard of the Facebook tell all book Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Now that Meta got some legal win against it I immediately heard about it. Obviously this made me immediately want it. Genius move #Meta — absolutely masterclass application of the Streisand effect.

2025-03-08 05:14:06 UTC

An interesting aspect of LLM coding is how what it returns often contains design decisions that a novice simply wouldn’t see. Doing web component demos with it 9 times out of 10 you get shadow DOM and a fat constructor filled with manipulations. It may work for you right away and then later on you get to enjoy the fruits of your LLM corner cutting.
Seriously now LLMs should not be used for code gen unless you understand what the implications are baked into the code it generates for you.

2025-03-08 02:49:44 UTC

Apparently #Trump never learned the age old lesson that you never kick your actual friends in the nuts.
I wish this were a shit post.

2025-03-06 03:47:15 UTC

Per the dumbest memo I’ve read today so if you are NIH, NSF, Fed worker, etc. and you get DOGEd and now you’re supposed to pass on any foreign company or Govt offering to employ you & just be poor and patriotic? Why?
Consider we in the US exploit such situations ourselves constantly in other countries. My own Dad brought starving ex-Soviet scientists to LLNL for example.
#DOGE people truly are ahistorical dolts who think everything is simple even when it isn’t.

2025-03-04 17:01:02 UTC

Mockery is what one should expect when driving a #CyberTruck
https://www.404media.co/facebook-cybertruck-owners-group-copes-with-relentless-mockery/

2025-03-03 04:23:44 UTC

I gotta admit I must give thanks to Gene Roddenberry. I watched Star Trek TOS so much in childhood via reruns I didn’t buy into omniscient and controlling our world AI from the jump.

2025-03-02 18:18:58 UTC

The private moon lander story has a fun wrinkle I noticed in this CNN piece: a focus on the team taking care, sweating details, and lots and lots of simulating and testing as opposed to the high-velocity fail-iteration cycle that captured engineering thinking because of the relentless PR from the Elon Mythology Industrial Complex which is now scrambling because his illusion is shattering. Pragmatism will become the new hotness…we can hope.
https://www.cnn.com/science/live-news/moon-landing-blue-ghost-03-02-25#cm7ricgzo000u3b6mzdecvvl2

2025-02-24 02:17:56 UTC

Ok my good Sunday is nearly complete. First #LFC over Mancity. Then did a wonderful hike and came back to watch #SDFC play their first game ever in #MLS sadly away and they spanked the MLS Cup champs 2-0. Wow.
Next weekend’s first home game in SD is looking hot. Glad I got those season tix.
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/114/056/460/525/666/729/original/b8d3673346d83b0b.jpeg

2025-02-13 03:51:43 UTC

Filling out a federal student aid form tonight for my daughter who is college bound next year. It is via the DOE who knows it will even matter, but many of these schools are demanding it. Crossing fingers the system works. While I am not stressed because I know we can pay, I am still sad also because I know this Doge bullshit is likely gonna affect many kids who want to go to college.

2025-02-10 22:04:29 UTC

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@nprofile…u0ev like your thought, I’ve talked a bit about disposable development becoming the norm myself. Using an LLM to bash something out and then chucking and redoing it because it gets mangled and easier
just to regen seems where we are sprinting towards. Super wasteful, not sustainable, and burns the world just like plastics. Yet as long as it is convenient to the dev and correct enough to accomplish the task it is hard to imagine they’ll act differently than any other consumer. 😬

2025-02-09 15:52:32 UTC

#Elon sure is good at blowing things up
His past hits include
- SpaceX rockets
- Twitter
- CyberTruck
His current explosions in
progress include
- the US Govt
- Tesla’s sales numbers
Oh and big congrats on the CyberTruck Elon. It is over 10x worse than the Pinto - winning! 🥇
https://fuelarc.com/evs/its-official-the-cybertruck-is-more-explosive-than-the-ford-pinto/

2024-12-06 04:48:44 UTC

Casey Newton is a bit hyped blinded by OpenAI. I wish he saw the duplicity even in their own data. Recently they published charts about their own gains that would make Alberto Cairo of charts that lie fame proud.
The original and the redo here we did at ZingChart are here. Pretty different stories for same data.
#ai #openai #llm #dataviz #chartdeception
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/604/067/680/285/716/original/20491d979b6f3c91.jpeg
https://cdn.fosstodon.org/media_attachments/files/113/604/068/605/032/487/original/3e382c39ce3d6a86.png