Links and photos (9 September 2024)
– Baldur
Bjarnason
- “Shady Firms Say They’re Already Manipulating Chatbots to Say Nice Things About Their Clients”
- “Going Buildless | Max Böck”
- “AI Gobbled A Record Share Of Startup Funding This Year”. “So far this year, 35% of U.S. startup investment has gone to AI-related companies, per Crunchbase data. That appears to be the highest percentage on record, besting even 2023, when OpenAI secured its $10 billion Microsoft-backed financing.”
- “Security Writer :verified: :donor:: “I’ve had a week of Microsoft C…” - Infosec Exchange”. “And let me tell you, I’m coining it now, we’re going to be left with years of ‘Accuracy Debt’ when we see more organisations adopt it.”
- “Threads is trading trust for growth”. Threads sounds exactly as unpleasant as I imagined a Twitter clone made by the Instagram team to be.
- “DOJ, Nvidia, and why we restrict monopolies | Ian Betteridge”. “What’s perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.” Ian explains, in a nutshell, the underlying principle of antitrust action
- “To forget is an ethical act - Emily F. Gorcenski”. “I tried Mastodon for a year, but I found it unbearingly sweltering. Mastodon is not a fun social network. You cannot have fun there without an endless army of pedants dissecting your every post endlessly in your mentions. Its operating model is inscrutable, its moderation metadrama impenetrable, and its product strategy nonexistant.” I think Mastodon has enough good points to continue to post there, but damn does it feel like a chore for all of the reasons Emily outlines
- “AI worse than humans at summarising information, trial finds”. “The reviewers’ overall feedback was that they felt AI summaries may be counterproductive and create further work because of the need to fact-check and refer to original submissions which communicated the message better and more concisely.” I’m shocked, shocked, etc etc
- “Canva says its AI features are worth the 300 percent price increase - The Verge”. “Read through a few discussion threads where Canva customers were reacting to the price hike and, surprisingly, they didn’t think AI features were a transformative revolution well worth 300% price hike. Terms like “useless” and “waste of time” were bandied about.”
- “Sanding UI - Jim Nielsen’s Blog”. “But I like to think of it as being more akin to woodworking. You have a plank of wood and you run it through the belt sander to get all the big, coarse stuff smoothed down. Then you pull out the hand sander, sand a spot, run your hand over it, feel for splinters, sand it some more, over and over until you’re satisfied with the result.” Coming out of art, media, and design, we used to call this polishing. IME it’s generally the first thing managers ask you to stop doing. (Regular testing is usually a close second.)
- “Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model? • The Register”. “In other words, the stronger claims of AI builders fall down on the assumption that language itself is ever complete. The researchers argue the second assumption – that language is captured by a corpus of text – is also false by the same means.”
- “Why “AI” projects fail”. “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.”
Photos #
Went on a walk yesterday to the geothermal area behind the local horticultural school and it’s clear that this was once a tourist destination but has since been abandoned. (See the now blank signs.)
Didn’t realise why until I came to the rickety “bridge” over a steaming geothermal stream: it was probably impossible to tourist-proof it without disrupting a protected area.
One of the local commercial greenhouses grows strawberries and has a self-serve booth where you can buy flowers and strawberries.
