... works as a web developer in Hveragerði, Iceland, and writes about the web, digital publishing, and web/product development
These are his notes
The thing to do when you go out for a walk with only a funky antique lens on our camera like I did yesterday is to try and have a bit of fun with it. Like the redwings in the geothermal park here in Hveragerði in the first picture and the starlings in the second picture.
“Creative Good: Big Tech’s corruption was 25 years in the making”
Mistreating customers, exploiting workers, chasing the latest fads, hyping products with no lasting value: it’s all so unimaginative.
We all know how crap generative images are but machine translation seems to be outright declining. Google Translate now thinks “skógarþröstur” in Icelandic means “woodpecker”
“Joe Russo: Artificial Intelligence Will Create Movies in Two Years”
AI will be able to “actually create” a movie, Russo predicted: “Two years.”
This was published a year ago.
These I felt worked a bit better in black and white.
Took my camera with an “antique” lens (70s/80s is antique now, right?) out on my “clear my head of anxiety” walk. This might have been a mistake since a funky manual lens isn’t the best for birds and landscapes, but you make do 🙂
“Back up everything: corps don’t care about your data but you should”
This. Back up your stuff.
For today’s #caturday post, another batch of photos from my sister of her cat Kolka, a black-and-white rescue who has gone from semi-feral to “hey, people give scritches!”
Consultancy that has spent the past year hyping up “AI” solutions as the next big thing, up to and including its founder outright claiming that it made working on accessibility obsolete:
“Nevermind. It doesn’t work. LOL”
“Google Contract Shows Deal With Israel Defense Ministry | TIME”
“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