Stuff I found on the Internet
"Fascism is birthed when lonely people try to speed-run connection and become part of a cresting wave they know to be bigger than themselves.... I cannot unsee how a desire for coherence is an expression of grief."
"Something something … enshittification … blah blah … zero interest rate phenomenon … yadda yadda our incredible journey …"
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I agree with all of the points about enclosure etc., but not with: "The most popular LLMs will experience a feedback loop. More people will use them, which means that they will have more access to up-to-date training data, which means that the quality of their answers will be better." the only data that LLM users regularly supply to LLMs is *questions*. how will that data improve the quality of the LLM's *answers*? at most, the data will include instances where the LLM user happens to have mentioned in the chatbot text that the LLM's code worked, which seems like pretty low-quality data to me
"The marginalisation of local and Indigenous knowledge has long been driven by entrenched power structures. GenAI simply puts this process on steroids."
beautiful font, fun visualization
really cool documentation of a project applying nearest-neighbor search to vectors representing spatial coverage of ascii characters for doing image to ascii rendering. great application of machine learning techniques, typography, experimental iteration
good essay! i'm left wondering about the relationship between legibility and inequity—it seems to me like a good deal of inequity/abuse happens in the course of illegible processes, and that the primary way that organizations address inequity/abuse is by making those processes legible (and thereby subject to analysis, criticism, restoration). you know, DEI. but maybe real solutions require action on both levels. i'm also curious about what alterities within "legible" and "illegible" are being smoothed over by this neat taxonomy
this is a good essay about "AI" overall as a cultural, economic and political phenomenon, but this line from the section about programming stood out: "We all know that programming languages, not natural languages, are the best way to get meaning through to computers. If we’re using an intermediary to get to the programming languages, clearly there’s room for them to be improved. Why are we just giving up instead of interrogating that?"
"From what is visible so far, the National Design Studio isn’t functioning as a civic design program so much as an advertising agency for the administration and its policy goals. If one was feeling less charitable, they might simply call it a digital propaganda department." (see later in the piece for a vicious takedown of the Apple Store as a concept and institution)
"Every social interaction is a whistle commanding you to jump out of the trench and charge into disputed ground, praying your dignity will survive"
"[U]ntil we get a direct chip-to-brain interface, HIG will stay relevant." got it. HIG is all that separates us from full panopticon surveillance fascism
clear, straightforward introduction
"It's one thing for Bari Weiss, when she was just running the Free Press or whatever, to report this. It's another thing for The New York Times to report this. I think they put a stamp of legitimacy on medical falsehoods. They also legitimized anti-trans hate, really." once more for the people in the back: fuuuck the new york times
"[W]e need to acknowledge that young people making speculative bets aren't stupid or weak. They're responding rationally to the world they inherited. The failure isn't theirs. It's ours, for giving them mental models designed for an economy that no longer exists."
"The mistake that every investor, commentator, analyst and member of the media makes about NVIDIA is believing that its sales are an expression of demand for AI compute, when it’s really more of a statement about the availability of debt from banks and private credit."
"The problem with all of us being so much more a hive mind than we realize is that knowledge problems that ripple across our a information ecosystems can become not just threats to individuals with weak character or bad habits, but the equivalent of colony collapse.... Real belief in collective knowledge may also suggest that caring for our own knowledge formation in social systems is a way of caring for the system as a whole."
"Since this is a Master System 2 chipset, it should lack the collision detection bug that impacts ALF when played with the Power Base Converter. I know you were worried."
tired: "What would Jesus do?" wired: "How did Woz do this?"