“You Are What You Read, Even If You Don’t Always Remember It - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”
This is the truth
... works as a web developer in Hveragerði, Iceland, and writes about the web, digital publishing, and web/product development
These are his notes
“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
“The Assist @ Things Of Interest”
AI coding assistance seems like an addition, but it actually removes the human from a part of the process where the human was actually extremely valuable
“Can Using a Grammar Checker Set Off AI-Detection Software? | EdSurge News”
“AI” checkers don’t work. And grammar checkers don’t work (much of the advice is outright incorrect). Combine the two to make disasters.
“Thoughts on embedding alternative text metadata into images – Eric Bailey”
Seeing so many people who I previously considered smart and sensible convince themselves that a glorified excel spreadsheet is conscious—the latest iteration is that “consciousness is an illusion anyway”
All I can say is that I thought you were better than this and it saddens me that you’re not
Just saw somebody on a mailing list describe “AI” sceptics as performative contrarians and I guess they mean people like me. 🤷♂️
“Doing their hype for them • Buttondown”
The central claim of the tech companies selling LLMs is that any work that people do that results in text artifacts is just “text in-text out” and can therefore be replaced by their synthetic text-extruding machines.
And all too many people I know buy this line from them
“The most beautiful word in the world is ‘No’ — Chocolate and Vodka”
This whole post is very relatable. Esp. the bit about feeling like a financial failure 😅
“This inherently bad technology whose consequences are overwhelmingly negative has affected me, but I still actively pretend that the positive and negative are roughly equal because I’m smack-dab in the middle of a tech bubble” is a genre of blog post that should have died off years ago and yet…
“DHS report rips Microsoft for ‘cascade’ of errors in China hack - The Washington Post”
Microsoft has a long, long, long history of being the absolute worst at security and yet it has zero effect on its business because software quality genuinely does not matter one jot
“Jon Stewart Confirms Apple Wouldn’t Let Him Do Show on AI With FTC Chair”
‘Tech co doesn’t let contractor talk to FTC’ is always going to be a bad look, no matter the context
“Substack Is Setting Writers Up For A Twitter-Style Implosion – Home With The Armadillo”
“How we’re approaching theming with modern CSS - Piccalilli”
“You Are All On The Hobbyists Maintainers’ Turf Now”
I’ve been saying for a while that commercial software today is fundamentally about extracting value from OSS (I leave out the “F” intentionally). Most code in the software people interact with, even on closed platforms, is open
“’I’m not a cynic, I’m disappointed’ – the ‘Software Crisis’ Easter Sale – Baldur Bjarnason”
Last day for the ebook Easter sale. $10 USD discount code for every ebook. And, yeah, that means that you can get the two $10 USD ebooks I have for free with the discount code.
“Don’t modernize your code just for the heck of it | Go Make Things”
This. “Modernising” a code base is quite often a prelude to some of the worst software disasters you’ll ever see. It requires much greater expertise than just writing for a new project
Once I realised that quite a few people not only don’t enjoy reading or writing, many actually resent it and consider one, the other, or both to be the biggest chore at work, a lot of things clicked into place about both generative models and how people read