... works as a web developer in Hveragerði, Iceland, and writes about the web, digital publishing, and web/product development
These are his notes
“Phil vs. LLMs - Funranium Labs”
As I said back during the whole “use generative models to identify which wild mushrooms are safe” thing, and again during the “let’s use generative models for primary healthcare”, these things will literally kill people, if they haven’t already
Kinda weird to see the resources I made and posts I wrote last year on generative models finally do the rounds
The research is all still good and it’s nice to see it being useful to people, but it‘a still an odd feeling
Posting “Here’s what ChatGPT has to say about your blog post” in a reply that mentions me is an automatic mute or, if I haven’t had my coffee, a block
That is all.
“More collegiate FOMO • Buttondown”
AI Hype is Warping How Universities See Themselves
“I want to elevate more people with Piccalilli Links - Piccalilli”
“Five Things: April 11, 2024 — As in guillotine…”
Every comics publisher, platform, or service that prominently mentions “IP” anywhere in their About copy is fundamentally a predator
This is a perennial truth
“Robin Rendle — Good and useful writing”
The most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.
Yeah. 100%.
If you have the right to vote in Iceland, then this might be of interest island.is/undirskri…
Made the mistake of reading through a discussion between publishing types on an “AI”-adjacent topic (rumours about tech cos contemplating buying Simon & Schuster). I’ve rarely seen so much concentrated ignorance on so many topics bundled together in a single thread 🙄
“Toward inquiry | A Working Library”
I want to reinforce that phrasing—moving away from decree and toward inquiry.
The important point: behavioural ads aren’t actually more effective than the rest.
It took micro.blog over three hours to publish the posts I made this morning. And it seems to have skipped cross-posting many of them.
Now we’re up to an hour of half a dozen micro.blog posts being stuck. They look published in the “Posts” but don’t appear anywhere else
And of course all of this shit will get released simultanously at some point, flooding everything
I don’t want to abandon the micro.blog community but… 🤷🏻♂️
WTF? micro.blog suddenly stopped publishing my posts?
I really do like the community on micro.blog, I really do. But the service itself keeps adding features while leaving core functionality broken
“Intel is oddly enthusiast about AI replacing everyone’s jobs”
“Oddly”? This is the point and purpose of “AI”. It’s anti-labour. Replacing everybody’s jobs—or at least replacing skilled staff that has leverage with lower-paid “AI wranglers” with no bargaining power—is what it’s for
“You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”
This is the truth
“Apple Annie’s Weblog · Owning your content is owning yourself.”
Yup
Last one for today:
Generative models, like bitcoin, are radical political projects seeking to reshape the socioeconomic landscape. Anybody working on these systems is effectively engaging in political activism
This isn’t like working on a compiler or web framework.
It’s almost as if tech industry discourse is being purpose-tailored for needling me into commenting on generative models 😑
“Hang on, no that’s not correct. The scale of the models means—ah, fuck. I happened again” 😝
Trying a new thing with the newsletter this week. Instead of bundling everything in the newsletter into a single digest-style blog post, I’m instead breaking the topics up into their own blog posts. The newsletter digest format doesn’t really work for blogs, IMO.
That’s the theory anyway
So far, AI hasn’t been profitable for Big Tech | Ars Technica
the cost to Microsoft exceeds $20 a month per user on average, according to a person familiar with the matter. In some cases, individual power users have cost the company as much as $80 a month.
That feeling when the Icelandic spelling of a word leaks into your English writing.
(The letters ‘C’ and ‘Z’ aren’t in the Icelandic alphabet and when words that include them are adopted into Icelandic the letters get replaced with ‘K’ and ‘S’, respectively.)
“Critics keep talking as if it’s useles, but it isn’t. It’s cheap and even though it has some flaws, is extraordinarily effective at some of its use cases.”
“So, what? Are we supposed to accept all the downsides of LLMs just because it’s occasionally useful?”
“LLMs? No I’m talking about asbestos.”
“Inconsistency is a feature, not a bug – Terence Eden’s Blog”
The thing that makes Google’s later icons extraordinarily incompetent is that the old icons were consistent in terms of style, colours, shading, etc. The new icons are worse because they are less identifiable