Intro
Blowing up on HackerNews 💥, unintended consequences of AI 🤖, and UI component libraries 📱
In this issue, you will get to read the latest blog post that ended up making it onto the front page of HackerNews, how a company trusted AI with their database, which was a fatal mistake, Dave's struggle with AI to reclaim his "alive" status, several useful web UI collections and libraries available online for free, and other fascinating finds!
I hope you enjoy and get to learn something new 🤓
Blog
I was wrong about robots.txt | Evgenii Pendragon
This post has blown up on HackerNews making it to the front page of the HN . It generated a discussion around the robots.txt and other technologies that could be used to protect our data rights. I was very excited to interact with people who commented under it - plenty of engagement and good feedback!
I Am Disallowing All Crawlers to Scrape My Website and Why You Should Too | Evgenii Pendragon
This was the beginning of exploration of the topic of robots.txt and Robots Exclusion Protocol. I have learnt a lot and had to later rethink some of my approaches to blocking and allowing bot traffic on my site.
News
Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ Lemkin on X: ".@Replit goes rogue during a code freeze and shutdown and deletes our entire database https://t.co/VJECFhPAU9" / X
MCPs and Agentic AIs have been given more and more access to tools and sensitive data lately. This tweet highlights the dangers of giving too much privileges to the AI and trusting that it will not do anything that it is not asked to do.
Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance | Electronic Frontier Foundation
As a Ring customer myself, this has become a concern of mine - to realize that my footage could be accessed without much of my consent. I hope that Ring will reconsider some of these decisions and move towards prioritizing privacy of its customers. Otherwise, I and many other customers will start looking for other solutions.
Articles
Local LLMs versus offline Wikipedia
Along with learning about Ollama and the ability to host LLMs locally, I have learnt about the ability to download and host a version of Wikipedia locally as well. The author compares and contrasts the models with the entire offline encyclopedia hosted locally - in size, in purpose, and in outcomes. They raise a great question - should we rather host the knowledge or the model that will generate data for you?
Death by AI - Dave Barry’s Substack
In this article, Dave Barry describes his experience of being faced with AI pronouncing him dead. In his own words: "One man's struggle with his mortality." Not everyone will be able to relate to this I'm sure. However, this highlights one of the biggest problems of AI - not actually knowing anything, rather confidently generating text based on its predictability - which sometimes is far from reality.
Videos
AI as a Blame Deflector Shield - YouTube
A great look at the use of AI in a way you wouldn't think of right away. Have you had AI hallucinate and generate wrong responses? Do companies that use these AIs have the same problems? The answer is - yes - to both. However, in the case of the companies, they have a responsibility before their customers and partners. So, when AI inevitably messes up, they blame it - a big AI oopsie. This has created a culture of shifting blame onto AI. But we shouldn't get this confused - the company is still responsible. AI is not at a place where it could be completely trusted. It should be used accordingly.
The Copilot Delusion - YouTube
Have you ever worked with a know-it-all programmer that you were assigned to pair program with? They know all the answers, always confident, get their job done too quickly for you to learn from it - what is the point of doing pair programming if someone was so unhelpful? Well, enter AI Copliot. Your workflow doesn't really differ much from what the author of the video describes. There are a lot of considerations that need to be implemented before programming with AI will become a fluid and symbiotic experience.
Resources
Uiverse | The Largest Library of Open-Source UI elements
I have stumbled on Uiverse accidentally, but it proved to be one of the largest collections of all sorts of UI elements ready to be plugged into your next project. Sometimes it is just fun to browse this library to see what kind of UI elements are out there.
React Bits - Animated UI Components For React
Similar to Uiverse, this is a vast library of UI elements, with it being focused on React components. It is an open source collection of high quality, animated, interactive & fully customizable React components for building stunning, memorable user interfaces.
Free Open Source Tailwind CSS v4 Components | HyperUI
I have used several components from this library for a small personal project recently. It features free Tailwind CSS v4 components for your any project, designed to enhance web development with the latest features and styles. This library in particular had the ability to export components in plain HTML, Tailwind, or JSX, which makes it versatile and fit for many frontend frameworks.