Adding "digital blackface" to the list of horrifying outcomes being facilitated by #AI.
Remote
Mike McCaffrey
@mikemccaffrey@drupal.community
mastodon 4.7.2Senior Architect building Drupal sites for more years than I care to count, with a strong focus on accessibility and best practices. Trying very hard to convince people that the AI craze is a pyramid scheme that is going to crash the entire economy. Opinions expressed do not represent those held by my employer or coworkers; they are totally into AI as well, which makes meetings very awkward.
276 Followers
214 Following
50 Posts
Joined January 03, 2023
Pronouns:
he/him
D.o profile:
Work profile:
Replying to
@ultimike@drupal.community I am with @dries@indieweb.social about how Drupal is much better than common consensus, but the pivot to AI takes us further away from what sets Drupal apart from other frameworks and platforms.
If the goal is to ask an AI to make a nice looking page, it doesn't matter at all what the backend of your site is, and there is no reason for people to choose Drupal.
Drupal is best at structured data, strong and configurable user permissions, clear and capable workflows, and other best practices baked in.
Who the hell in the #Drupal community thought that it was a good idea that when a field is removed, any view that happened to reference it is automatically disabled? And not just a view display; the entire view.
Wow, this is the worst #CookieBanner that I have ever seen. There is no simple reject button, and instead there is a button to pay them money to escape tracking. And if you do go into the settings, it says that for free access you need to consent to be tracked, and if you want to reject the trackers they have 193 services listed out individually!
https://www.heise.de/
We are in the bright #AI future where workers need to poison pill their own tools so they can't be effectively used to replace them.
https://leehanchung.github.io/blogs/2026/04/05/the-ai-great-leap-forward/
This guy is completely right about #OpenAI going bust, but #AI isn't going away completely, as nice as that would be.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXLonuEAEEA/
It will collapse into niches that actually make sense and then grow from there.
Sometimes I feel like I have don't enough gibberish scrolling across my screen to look like a futuristic hacker, and sometimes a user pastes a base 64 encoded png into a text area and it takes out my local database on import.
Gave my devs the tasks of replacing #jQuery syntax with vanilla #javascript. Rather than a one to one conversion, they handed the entire file to #Claude, and it rewrote absolutely everything.
Since I don't have the capacity to review every line of code that has been change in the next 24 hours, we have to decide between pulling the changes from this release or putting out a bunch of #AI slop.
I hate the world right now.
Another day, another presentation on achieving excellence through average word machines.
One of the best thing about #Drupal's implementation of #Twig for templating is that it is so forgiving of things like type mismatches and non-existent array keys, except apparently if you try to run |clean_id on an array, where it behaves like the rest of modern engineer-focused Drupal and whitescreens the entire page out of principle.
Bananas that #Apple would launch subscriptions with un-cancellable 12 month commitments mere days after #Adobe settled a lawsuit claiming its practices around subscriptions just like that were unlawful. I guess $75 million in store credit wasn't enough of a deterrent to keep others companies from doing the same things.
Damn, getting more goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, and pigeons would actually make me enjoy using #GenerativeCoding tools more.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-really-wants-codex-to-shut-up-about-goblins/
There are so many huge problems that #SamAltman, #OpenAI, and #GenerativeAI in general are causing in the world, but I think there might be another technology that is more directly contributing to the problem of #GunViolence in our society: Guns.
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/sam-altman-shooting-apology
My coworkers used #Rovo in #Jira to create a summary of the work we have done for a client, and it confidently came up with the randomest collection of odd items and inaccuracies, which is especially crazy since the work on this project has been so significant that it has been adapted into SEVEN different contributed modules for #Drupal.
Well, once again my wife and her coworkers exchanged more #covid than knowledge at their on-site meeting.
Well, if nothing else, the Iran War is a great analogy for how it can be easy to get over 90% of a #WebDevelopment project done and then completely bogged down on one problematic task.
From now on, when someone is planning on using an opinionated library to build a custom feature, because they will get so much progress right out of the box, I'm going to say "Good luck opening the Strait of Hormuz!"
Replying to
"The hype in 2021 was really something. Wall Street threw itself into the project with the enthusiasm of a man who's just been handed a laser gun and a goat."
That has to be one of the greatest callbacks within a video of all time.
I submitted my session proposal for the #PNWDrupalSummit with hours to spare!
If you are going to (stupidly) ask #AI to shoot someone, please don't have it use a voice that sounds like a young black man.
This video is about #AI art, but what he says about the process leading you somewhere different and often better is just as valid with #WebDevelopment.
https://youtu.be/WeCSzEtZcUw?t=318
When even #Texas conservatives are against #AI data centers, we surely must be close to the end of the #AIBubble.
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/texas-slams-on-the-breaks-for-1-800-data-centers-power-grid-requirements-are-five-times-higher-than-peak-record-demand-474-gigawatts-of-power-requests-are-now-subject-to-new-moratorium
Replying to
@spirillen@matrix.rocks That doesn't seem like the intent of the law, but I am not sure whether people actually wait for you to accept before sending tracking cookies.
I am going to be replacing my old router as soon as I get home from this trip.
Replying to
@martinsdahl@ohai.social It would be annoying, but perhaps the solution is to not allow you to delete a field until you remove it from all the dependencies.
Replying to
If you want to see what kind of accessibility-related content I will be posting at the new instance, my profile at a11y.social is still up, even if I can't post more to it:
@mikemccaffrey@a11y.social
Don't worry, I reserve all of my griping about AI for my drupal.community account.
An #AIRebound? In this economy?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXJyEh9jk6l/
I think this is completely wrong. Companies are just going to stick with delivering poor quality products until after the market finally collapses and we hopefully return to basing investment decisions and capitalization on some shred of reality.
Wow, the #AIBubble might be helping the #StockMarket completely ignore dangers like the Iran War, along with the general entitlement of thinking they are always going to be rescued, no matter what happens.
An interesting and accessible look at #OpenClaw and #AIAgents by #HannahFry.
I only wish she:
1. Changed her SMTP server to not actually spam everyone.
2. Referred to the agent as "it" instead of "her".
3. Didn't end with "these things are getting better fast" when nothing is being done about the fundamental underlying flaws with this entire methodology.
Why AI Agents are either the best or worst thing we’ve ever built
I'm glad I've reached the point of my career when completely unreasonable people are just a humorous nuisance instead of an existential threat to my continued employment.
Seeing how inefficient, unsustainable, and generally doomed the hyperscale #AI business model is, it can be difficult to remember that #LearningModels don't need to be so resource intensive (if you don't have a business valuation to inflate).
https://youtu.be/8enXRDlWguU?t=3860
This #KarenHao interview from 8 months ago still feels evergreen.
Replying to
@martinsdahl@ohai.social But it doesn't seem like a hard dependency, because you can re-enable the view without complaint, and then when you go to the fields, the deleted one is just gone.
Hey #AI companies. Ask your super-smart computers what caching is. We don't need bespoke answers to every prompt.
"The use case for #AI is work that should not be done."
https://youtu.be/wAgecpbLYkI?t=102
#DavidGerald #TheTechReport #PivotToAI
Companies are killing themselves with AI | David Gerard
Ugh, are we still stuck writing an alter function just to enable the select dropdown for entity reference fields view filters?
https://gorannikolovski.com/feature-peek/new-entityreference-filter-for-drupal-views
Yesterday, I found myself credulously reading the #GoogleAI search summary about how many gingko nuts you can eat before their neurotoxin will poison you, until I suddenly realized what I was doing and exclaimed "oh no".
#GenerativeAI #UrbanForaging
Been sitting here waiting for three years for the #AIBubble to collapse.
Replying to
@gary_alderson@infosec.exchange @Gogs@mas.to Perhaps he is right.
The #AI industry is powerful, but as they try to build more #DataCenters, they are discovering they are nothing compared to the power of good old fashioned American #NIMBYism.
I guess counter-culture #zines are now just an aesthetic for #GenerativeAI to regurgitate.
https://stateless-zine.netlify.app/
Replying to
@sushee Yes, now PHP is rigid and object oriented like all these other languages out there and there is no reason to use it instead of one of them.
"I was just enthralled by it. The idea that you could actually type something into a machine and then it would respond by typing back something, and then you could have this interaction."
Funny how talking to computers isn't a concept that was invented with LLMs.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/K2gFNfNejVU
Replying to
@mhoye@cosocial.ca The fact that the article says "this is the agent on the record, in writing" means that they still don't understand that these systems don't actually know things and are just endlessly guessing about what you might want to hear next.
Wow, crazy to hear that regular folks in China are even more anxious about "falling behind" in #AI adoption than in the US.
https://youtu.be/fEGUlvR9gvY?t=1069
I have no idea what to do with this pull request that I got from a coworker. It has variable setting and checks for null values that would absolutely be needed if you were writing #PHP code, but are completely superfluous when writing #Twig for #Drupal. If you access a null value, null happens.
Should we be encouraging formal programming practices in twig, or boil all of those lines of code down to just this?
{% set para_id = title|first['#object'].id() %}