I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…
Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!
This is a neat project form Dries:
This project is driven by my curiosity about making websites and web hosting more environmentally friendly, even on a small scale. It’s also a chance to explore a local-first approach: to show that hosting a personal website on your own internet connection at home can often be enough for small sites. This aligns with my commitment to both the Open Web and the IndieWeb.
At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web.
The story of Lore Harp McGovern is like something from Halt And Catch Fire.
While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.
A solid detailed in-depth report.
The sheer amount of resources needed to support the current and forecast demand from AI is colossal and unprecedented.
“AI” is heralded (by those who claim it to replace workers as well as those that argue for it as a mere tool) as a thing to drop into your workflows to create whatever gains promised. It’s magic in the literal sense. You learn a few spells/prompts and your problems go poof. But that was already bullshit when we talked about introducing other digital tools into our workflows.
And we’ve been doing this for decades now, with every new technology we spend a lot of money to get a lot of bloody noses for way too little outcome. Because we keep not looking at actual, real problems in front of us – that the people affected by them probably can tell you at least a significant part of the solution to. No we want a magic tool to make the problem disappear. Which is a significantly different thing than solving it.
For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
The human desire to connect with others is very profound, and the desire of technology companies to interject themselves even more into that desire—either by communicating on behalf of humans, or by pretending to be human—works in the opposite direction. These technologies don’t seem to be encouraging connection as much as commoditizing it.
Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.
Number one:
Do things in the most straightforward way possible. It’s easy to fall into the trap of clever solutions, or clever applications of technology, or overbuilding something because you’re anticipating the future. Don’t do it. You will hate yourself for it later when you have to maintain it.
Ethicswishing (in tech) is the belief that if you are committed to being ethical and understand technology, then you are well-equipped to build technology for social good. But the truth is that building tech for social good is a lot like having sex in a bathtub: if you don’t understand the first thing about sex, it won’t help that you’re a world-class expert in bathtubs.
Despite all of this hype, all of this media attention, all of this incredible investment, the supposed “innovations” don’t even seem capable of replacing the jobs that they’re meant to — not that I think they should, just that I’m tired of being told that this future is inevitable.
The reality is that generative AI isn’t good at replacing jobs, but commoditizing distinct acts of labor, and, in the process, the early creative jobs that help people build portfolios to advance in their industries.
One of the fundamental misunderstandings of the bosses replacing these workers with generative AI is that you are not just asking for a thing, but outsourcing the risk and responsibility.
Generative AI costs far too much, isn’t getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn’t do enough to justify its existence.
Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.
Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting this is strictly better and the answer to all of your problems. I’m suggesting this as an intentional business tradeoff that I think provides more value and is less costly in the long run.
Everyone’s raving about this great talk by Marcin, and rightly so!
The fact that writing can be hard is one of the things that makes it meaningful. Removing this difficulty removes that meaning.
There is significant enthusiasm for this attitude inside the companies that produce an distribute media like books, movies, and music for obvious reasons. Removing the expense of humans making art is a real savings to the bottom line.
But the idea of this being an example of democratizing creativity is absurd. Outsourcing is not democratizing. Ideas are not the most important part of creation, execution is.
This is the transcript of a fantastic talk called “The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI.”
Absorb every word!
- Tech is dominated by “true believers” and those who tag along to make money.
- Politicians seem to be forever gullible to the promises of tech.
- Management loves promises of automation and profitable layoffs.
But it seems that the sentiment might be shifting, even among those predisposed to believe in “AI”, at least in part.
My new favourite blog on Tumblr.
AI is steeped in marketing drivel, built upon theft, and intent on replacing our creative output with a depressingly shallow imitation.
This thing that we’ve been doing collectively with our relentless blog posts and pokes and tweets and uploads and news story shares, all 30-odd years of fuck-all pointless human chatterboo, it’s their tuning fork. Like when a guitarist plays a chord on a guitar and compares the sound to a tuner, adjusts the pegs, plays the chord again; that’s what has happened here, that’s what all my words are, what all our words are, a thing to mimic, a mockingbird’s feast.
Every time you ask AI to create words, to generate an answer, it analyzes the words you input and compare those words to the trillions of relations and concepts it has already categorized and then respond with words that match the most likely response. The chatbot is not thinking, but that doesn’t matter: in the moment, it feels like it’s responding to you. It feels like you’re not alone. But you are.