I don’t think it’s possible for anybody who has read Ursula Franklin’s The Real World of Technology to look at the current state and trajectory of tech and be happy with any of it.
“AI Is Starting to Look Like the Dot Com Bubble”
The similarities have been obvious for months now. The main difference is that the AI bubble comes at the beginning of a near-exponential rise in environmental and political volatility, so whether it improves or not honestly won’t matter that much
“Unions strike to save the world from bad TV and movies | New Scientist”
“Zoom AI Backlash: TOS Update Says No Customer Content Used in Training - Variety”
Must have found out that customers think pinky-swear promises in blog posts are bullshit, esp. when directly contradicted by the ToS
Is it no longer possible to change the crop of image uploads in the micro.blog iOS app? Feels like that used to be possible?
There are those who take photographs arranged beforehand and those who go out to discover the image and seize it. For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to “give a meaning” to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder.
Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Mind’s Eye
I just published “Authorship”
This is a bit of a self-indulgent post where I’m trying to get a handle on just how synthetic much of modern media and software feels.
“AI Causes Real Harm. Let’s Focus on That over the End-of-Humanity Hype - Scientific American”
“LoFi software and inverting our relationship to The Cloud – chadkohalyk.com”
“Negative Space - Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At”
I strongly relate to what Ed is saying here.
“As HashiCorp adopts the BSL, an era of open-source software might be ending”
Relevant to what I wrote the other day about free/open source being in a transition.
The problem I see with using LLMs for large-scale automation is that in a <1% of cases they go catastrophically wrong—describing a shoe as viagra scale of wrong. But if you’re using it at scale that <1% can both become a huge number—catastrophic risk in business terms—and impossible to discover through testing or audits
“Amazon removes books ‘generated by AI’ for sale under author’s name | Books | The Guardian”
The dynamic tech cos are creating is one where the only thing that works to address misbehaviour is a raging mob with pitchforks
Which is just going to result in a lot more raging mobs.
“Forgive The Writers, For We Are So Tired – Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds”
I say this with all the sincerity I can muster: fuck Google.
“Scientists discover new ecosystem underneath hydrothermal vents”
This is very cool.
“How to piss off your entire audience in one simple step”
This. Also, because tech cos broke the social contract with their generative products, the gloves are off and many in the creative industries now see tech as an outright adversary.
“Maðurinn sem fór í leyfisleysi í Surtsey kærður til lögreglu”
Do not fucking set foot on Surtsey without permission. It’s a newly-created volcanic island that is specifically protected so scientists can document the process of how it becomes colonised by flora and fauna. Fucking tiktokkers
“Stop using Brave Browser - by Corbin Davenport”
Another reason to stop using Brave is one you can see from the comments: many of its fans are horrible and vocal crypto nerds
It strikes me that generative models are an existential threat to most tech cos whose core value proposition is aggregation, but those same cos are also perversely keen on the tech.
“Zoom’s Updated Terms of Service Permit Training AI on User Content Without Opt-Out”
“Language Is a Poor Heuristic for Intelligence”
While the human brain may have been the inspiration for the term ‘neural network’, the neural networks we’ve actually built don’t even properly mimic a single type of brain cell, much less an entire human brain