Tech

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.

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.

I feel like “migrating to a different static site generator” is the new “installing a new Linux distro.” It’s something nerds do for almost no reason besides curiosity, boredom, and perhaps no small amount of masochism.

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.

The whole article is 🔥 and well worth a read, but this part of the conclusion hits the crux of Musk’s new dillema. The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.

If you haven’t been following the ongoing saga of incredible grift in the so-called web3 space, I highly recommend checking out the work being done by Molly White, whose site Web3 is going just great is a shocking timeline of the various scams and hacks occurring constantly within the broader “crypto” market.

The NYT recently ran a wonderfully in-depth story covering the history of women in coding. The issue of note for the article is that in the beginning of computer science the gender balance among programmers was basically equal.

To succeed with this approach, a useful first step is to remove from your smartphone any apps that make money from your attention. This includes social media, addictive games and newsfeeds that clutter your screen with “breaking” notifications.

OMG, a workflow post! Apps, tools, productivity, oh my! Listen, we all know that no app can make you more productive by itself. Your methods are always more important than your tools.

I struggle with the notion of app-evangelizing. In the past, I was as guilty of it as anyone. I would proudly proclaim such-and-such as the ultimate app for something or other. Part of that is an aspect of nerdy fandom, and another large part of it was learned behavior from other online writers. However, I think we can all agree that such statements are disingenous and certainly not an accurate representation of any given market.

Second Life has always been one the pioneering efforts for Virtual Reality, and its in-sim economy has always been really impressive. Now, it sounds like the folks at Linden Labs are getting ready to prep its platform for integration with gear such as the Oculus Rift.

Elmo Keep’s interview with Mars One applicant Joseph Roche reveals that the program is deeply flawed. Indeed, some elements such as having applicants donate their speaking fees to the program in exchange for points even sounds like a scam.

Outstanding article from Wired on Steward Butterfield, the founder of Flickr and Glitch, and how his business software Slack is growing at an unbelievable rate. We’ve been running a trial of Slack at work for select teams, and it’s an amazing product.

Nik Custodio has put together a wonderfully easy to read primer on Bitcoin titled “ Explain Bitcoin Like I’m Five”. I think there are valid concerns out there about Bitcoin (more of that another time), but it doesn’t stop it from being a remarkable technological achievement, and this article does a good job of explaining it in layman’s terms.

If you give half a damn about which multi-billion-dollar corporation “wins” a totally made-up contest, then you need to drop acid and spend some time in an ashram. — Andy Ihnatko, Pros and Cons, Why I Switched from iPhone to Android

Great piece from Lev Grossman on the radical changes that the codex introduced into reading, specifically the ability to interact with the text in a non-linear manner. He makes a valid point that e-readers make similar interaction a clumsy affair.

This Is Not A Review> This Is Not A Review # I have been using Google+ for a little over a week now, and over the course of that time, I have written several versions of this post you are reading right now.

Loren Feldman of 1938 Media does a great job summarizing many of things going wrong at Techcrunch these days, and it’s an excellent overview of the issues at hand. In particular, Feldman points out a number of important unanswered questions still lingering in the wake of Michael Arrington’s supposed transparency regarding the MacBook Air scandal.

Google Voice is Google’s upgrade to the GrandCentral service they acquired almost two years ago. I’ve had a GrandCentral account for almost as long as the service existed, but I never found a reason to use it, mostly because the feature set was just short of being useful enough for me to want to manage an additional phone service.