Regardless of one’s opinion on AI’s “soul” or whatever, it’s actually pretty on-brand as a species for humans to try to create an artificial version of something (consciousness) before we bothered to understand how it works.
AI has been very useful to me as a developer, especially if you count the number of times I go to type my problem and, in the process of doing so, figure out the solution.
Admittedly I have not watched baseball in we’ll politely say a decade, but why do all the players have 70s facial hair?
Fun fact #1: Alexa devices no longer use on-device processing
Fun fact #2: Even disconnected, Alexas remember alarms
Fun fact #3: If you set an alarm and the internet goes out, you literally can’t make it stop short of unplugging the device because Alexa can’t process “stop”
Those warring feelings when you start a new book: “Oh! This is good! I’m gonna read it all I one sitting!” And “Oh! This is good! I need to savor it because you can only read it for the first time once!”
How do all of my uber rides end in me giving AI lectures? I swear I’m not doing it because I WANT to, but the general public views all technological progress as an inevitable escalation of magic.
They just let their cool products and amazing services do the talking for them.
I love that so many vendors at #PHP conferences (among them the fantastic PHP consultancies Tighten and Vehikl) show up to celebrate the community and give something to those in attendance - good vibes and swag - without the heavy sales pitch.
I don't know if it's the attention economy or what, but we've gotten so used to being the thing consumed that people seem genuinely surprised when we say, “No, no, we're just here to find people to hire!”
#Laracon day 1 was an absolute blast! Super looking forward to day 2!!
I’ve been to many conferences before as a speaker, but this is my first go-round as a vendor. It's funny, I didn't realize the hardest part would be trying to convince people we're not selling anything!
Dear every coworking space: PLEASE prioritize ergonomics over aesthetic. So tired of half-height non-adjustable chairs.
As a die-hard "own your media" person, the last few months have seen me do more and more listening on Spotify as the discovery algorithms are excellent. However, all that ground and more are being lost as it starts throwing more and more AI-generated garbage into my playlists.
The decisions of others should absolutely inform ours. On the recent Supreme Court ruling:
kait.dev/posts/decisi...
I want to say that an email sending service taking 5 minutes to send me the 2FA code over email is ironic, but mostly it's just intensely annoying.
TIL that if you run out of hard drive space Mac OS will ... shut off your external monitors through DisplayLink? Sure, yes, I definitely needed to empty trash, but weird that "no more external displays" was the first warning.
Ngl, rarely have I felt smarter than correcting the AI on a bug it introduced in a regular expression.
A screenshot of an email, reading "From: Kait. To: Michael@cursor.so. Subject: Re: Here to help. Hi, Cursor wound up spitting out code with some bugs, which it a) wasn't great at finding, and b) chewed up all my credits failing to fix them. I had much better luck with a different tool (slower, but more methodical), so I went with that. Also, creepy telemetry is creepy. All the best, Kait"
Nothing is ever so important to bad SaaS companies as getting the customer to pay them money.
Good companies, by contrast, focus on the user loving the app enough to want to pay them.
kait.dev/posts/but-he...
But in this (personalized, targeted) case, it’s a catastrophic failure of the $500 billion adtech industry. And unless you know how much work goes into all of this, you don’t see how bad these apps and processes and systems
actually are at their supposed purpose.
A podcast delivered me an ad for trucking insurance - which seems like a small thing! I see ads on terrestrial TV that aren’t relevant all the time!
One reason non-tech people are so in awe of AI is they don’t see the everyday systemic tech malfunctions.
I was too young to appreciate it at the time, but after years of wisdom accumulation I can officially endorse the McAllisters’ HOME ALONE plan of “adults in first class, kids in coach” as a true Pro Baller Move.
I feel like maybe we're still not diverse enough as software engineers when the blurring algorithm on Google Meet is completely baffled by my cold-shoulder top and chooses to blur out my shoulders like a Victorian newspaper baron scandalized by a brazenly uncovered ankle.
I have a hard time finding any general websites I want to pay for anymore. Somehow it seems more useful to me to pay $5/month for a specific creator than, say, Vox.
The Verge has me for at least a year. We’ll see how it turns out.
www.theverge.com/nintendo/…
I paid $300 for what amounted to a Mario Kart player and I’ll probably pay $500 for the Mario Kart World player, but man is my appetite for buying more of the same thing waning.
As someone who just flew through Newark, trust me when I say you don’t want this.
www.theverge.com/planes/67…
I love actually useful command line named programs/parameters: ouch https://github.com/ouch-org/ouch
An image of the New York City skyline at night
A film canister with the logo for “Only Murders in the Building” sits atop a Scrabble board on a desk.
A view of the New York City skyline from across the river through window blinds.
A tray of various liquids in containers on a hospital side table
Unplanned: https://kait.dev/2025/05/20/unplanned/
I am mystified by low-information voters who are supposedly charting their political course based almost solely on their subjective lived experience/vibes and somehow are not clocking a dramatic decline in services of almost every sort... https://kait.dev/2025/05/11/i-am-mystified-by-lowinformation/
Generative AI has helped me to understand why, in Star Wars, the droids seem to have personalities but are generally bad at whatever they're supposed to be programmed to do, and everyone is tired of their shit and constantly tells them to shut up
Oooh, I like this analogy: Using LLMs to cheat through any kind of educational opportunity is like taking a forklift to the gym: Yes, you’ve technically moved weights around, but you’re going to realize the shortcomings of the approach the first time you need to use your muscles.
