Quotes

A twofer for you on the modern internet. The first paints a grim picture of what the internet has become, and the second gives us a hopeful manifesto for the future.

A truly alarming tale where bad luck in choosing a bucket name resulted in a usage bill of over $1,300. All of it coming from unauthorized requests! So, if I were to open my terminal now and type:

Great piece from Manvir Singh in the New Yorker on how the causes and mechanics of misinformation are often misunderstood. In particular, it covers how the shared belief system that misinformation depends upon requires explicit participation by those that adopt it.

Daniel Solove has published a fascinating paper in the Boston University Law Review examining the current approaches in privacy laws in the U.S. and E.U. and makes a good case for the notion of “consent” being a key flaw in both frameworks.

When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial.

Write the thing you wanna write. You can be strategic and whatever, you can and maybe even should try to figure out what people want to read and what publishers are willing to buy, but at the end of the day, a whole lot of people in and around this industry know almost nothing for certain.

I’ve spent a lot of time working with Finns, and this quote made me smile. I’ve always had a soft spot for Finns. Some claim they’re unfriendly, but every one that I’ve ever met has been quite pleasant, if reserved.

Writing murder mysteries is largely a process of logistics, I think, ensuring that the timelines work and the right evidence gets in the right place at the right time. You essentially become the Jeff Bezos of killing dudes you just made up.

Yes, the fact that people have to choose between writing open source software and affording decent healthcare is a problem deeply rooted in our current implementation of zero-sum capitalism, and not at all a problem that can be laid at the feet of the free software movement.

Rowan Jacobson, in this month’s issue of Scientific American, has written an article that is chock-full of mind-blowing implications for how we understand cognition, memory, and cellular development. I highly encourage you to read the whole thing, but here are just a few examples.

Because we do not live in the Star Trek-inspired rational, humanist world that Altman seems to be hallucinating. We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists.

Ted Chiang has penned an insightful column on trends in A.I. and it’s dangers as an accelerant for the worst elements of late-stage capitalism. His comparison to McKinsey— whose role in corporate policies has been destructive to the middle class —is especially apt.

Erin Kissane has written an insightful post on Bluesky’s closed beta, and more importantly the response from the Mastodon community. In particular, the passage below had me violently nodding in agreement.

A great post from Monte Cook on anxiety for first-time designers. Remember that product that gamers love that includes A, B, and C? A lot of designers will look at that, put A, B, and C in their own product, and then figure they’re done.

I’m personally skeptical that LLMs provide enough benefit to outweigh their potential harm, and so I deeply appreciate those who are attempting to make them work without relying on pixie dust.

The new version of the license is “over 9,000 words long”, and, well, it sounds pretty bad.

This is a great profile from the Washington Post on Devon Henry, the contractor who took on the city of Richmond’s contract to remove their confederate statues, and the challenges he faced along the way.

Some great advice from Chuck Wendig to start your new year. As a writer, everyone wants a piece of you. They treat the act of writing as an unserious endeavor, failing to see it as the result of the three corners of art, craft and work.

Writing for Wired, Vijith Assar raises some excellent points on how bad actors with capital are the most dangerous threat to any system. Capital can kill code. Capital can kill anything.

I am a firm believer that no system is ever “designed” for the consequences of high adoption. This is especially true with regard to Mastodon, as most of our team has never operated a production Mastodon instance before.