Tag: Tech

  • Thin skin is in

    I more-or-less quit Facebook after realizing I was being pulled into too many pointless arguments on there, and my life has been better since. Social media pushes people to indulge their worst instincts. Tristan Harris may be smarmy, but he’s not wrong.  I read two pieces yesterday and for some reason didn’t post, about a…

  • You can’t just be the most powerful observer in the world for two decades and not deeply warp what you are looking at.

    It’s taken me all day to read this, but it’s worth it. In The Verge, Amanda Chicago Lewis does a deep dive into SEO – the scammers, honest brokers and how (whether?) Google has gotten mostly useless these days (hint: it’s less about AI than you may think.) I’ve run web design and dev teams…

  • …the world isn’t nearly on fire as we think.

    A small lifehack fixed my perception of the world and helped me reclaim a joy lost for two decades: keeping my phone out of my bedroom. by Emily Gorcenski (via Kottke) This is the rule in our house, for everyone, and has been since I had one of these for work. As cool as nightstand…

  • Your favorite artist could be taken down any day.

    Chris Dalla Riva: Nothing is Forever on the Internet. Eventually, profits dry up. Costs must be cut. Some servers will be shut off and the recordings of your high school band will go with them, along with the photos of your grandparents and the video of your daughter walking for the first time. This morning,…

  • Will ChatGPT’s hallucinations be allowed to ruin your life?

    From Ars Technica, this article goes to some very interesting places. Can an AI defame someone? AI companies watching this case play out might think they can get by doing as OpenAI did. Rather than building perfect chatbots that never defame users, they could simply warn users that content may be inaccurate, wait for content takedown…

  • Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill

    Another banger from the FT Business Book of the Year longlist. The preface of this book reads like a pilot episode of a thriller series or good John Grisham novel. The story of how Hill’s investigation of Clearview AI began is enough to inspire a whole generation of new journalists. The rest of the book…

  • “…she’s interacting with the potential of an audience”

    This video from CJ the X came out a couple of years ago, in response to Bo Burnham’s Inside (which is incredible), and The Social Dilemma (which I did not like at all) It’s 2.5 hours long, but I’ve thought about it regularly since I watched it in 2021. There is so much to think…

  • Your time at Yapper has come to an end.

    The Techdirt team put out a game that I suck at: Trust and Safety Tycoon. I’ve been told by others that you can get rich off the IPO or sued by the DOJ, but I’ve been fired every time I’ve tried it. This is surely inspired in part by Masnick’s instant classic Hey Elon: Let…

  • “Oh, have we decided it’s 1993 again? I guess I didn’t get the memo.”

    Dave Karpf with a thoughtful response to the silly a16z manifesto from a few days ago. Andreessen’s mid-life crisis? A response to the crypto bubble bursting? Higher interest rates making leverage investing more difficult? Or just the tedium of a sector entering the mature phase of the lifecycle? The piece is worth reading even if…

  • Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant

    This is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read. It’s an impressive feat of research: Merchant writes about the beginning of the Industrial Revolution with incredible detail, balancing very dense storytelling with short, focused chapters to keep it from overwhelming. The story itself is rich and almost impossible to believe: Lord Byron, Frankenstein, Walter…