Links (29 November 2024)
– Baldur
Bjarnason
Big link post this time on account of there being ten whole days since the last one.
The delay was because I’ve been devoting my writing time to preparing for the release of the second edition of The Intelligence Illusion, which is available with a Black Friday launch discount today and until Monday.
- “Yes, progressive enhancement is a fucking moral argument | Awful Woman”. “I know that progressive enhancement is harder than just jumping straight in and coding your app in whatever your favourite framework is. But guess what? Being a responsible adult is hard.”
- “On Disaster Nationalism & The Climate Crisis”.
- “Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants | CIO”. “Code analysis firm sees no major benefits from AI dev tool when measuring key programming metrics, though others report incremental gains from coding copilots with emphasis on code review.”
- “Elements of creativity - annie’s blog”.
- “CrowdStrike Earnings: Cybersecurity Firm Posts Higher Revenue Amid Swing to Loss - WSJ”. So, I’ve long argued that all of software dev’s dysfunctions can be traced to the fact that business outcomes do not depend on software quality, design, or reliability. As long as this dynamic continues the software we use will only get worse
- “Care work | everything changes”
- “DORA | Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2024”.
- “British television is dying — and Gogglebox won’t save it”.
- “Orange enlists Meta and OpenAI to develop AI language models in Africa | Reuters”.
- “Why We Don’t Know AI’s True Water Footprint | TechPolicy.Press”.
- “Stanford Professor Accused of Using AI to Write Expert Testimony Criticizing Deepfakes”.
- “Teens Are Talking to Pro-Anorexia AI Chatbots That Encourage Disordered Eating”. This industry fundamentally does not care it’s harming people or not.
- “TV Writers Found 139,000 of Their Scripts Trained AI. Hell Broke Loose”.
- “Google is inserting search links into webpages in the Google App now - The Verge”. Oh, joy.
- “The Anti-Woke Culture Police Have Some Weird New Obsessions.”. “Sooner or later it will dawn on these based and redpilled keyboard berserkers that the problem with winning an election and pumping the government full of your goons is that you do not then also get to be the counterculture.”
- “Labelers training AI say they’re overworked, underpaid and exploited by big American tech companies - CBS News”.
- “Britain faces ‘talent drain’ of visual artists as earnings fall by 40% since 2010 | Art | The Guardian”. “One artist interviewed said their rent had risen by 40% in the last four years, forcing them to go on to universal credit, while Arts Council England’s funding has been slashed by 30% since the survey was last conducted in 2010.” Media has for a while now been one of the UK’s most lucrative industries and it was both disproportionally hit by Brexit and was constantly under attack from the Tories. Now you have generative models added to the mix
- “Tech under Trump, part 1 - by Brian Merchant”.
- “Cloudflare Highlights Rising DDoS Attack Threats”.
- “Opinion | Joel Grey: ‘Cabaret’ Was a Warning. It’s Time to Heed It. - The New York Times”.
- “MS Word is Using You to Train AI. How to turn off AI-scraping from your… | by Dr. Casey Lawrence | ILLUMINATION | Nov, 2024 | Medium”. “This privacy statement explicitly states the use of your data to train AI, and their right to share (sell) your data to third parties. ”
- “The rise and fall of peer review - by Adam Mastroianni”.
- “Inescapable AI — TechTonic Justice”.
- “against the dark forest”. “I think our failure to remember that the mega-platforms are just intentionally extractive constructs run by brainmelted but very human weirdos is a failure of accountability, but our failure to remember that it doesn’t have to be this way is a failure not only of imagination, but of nerve.”
- “against the dark forest”. “The dangers of the situation are obvious and real, but it matters that we remember that the world’s big platforms are steered by not by shadowy forces, but by teams of gold-rush-addled dorks whose sometimes-well-meaning employees are stuck frantically LARPing world government on internal forum software.”
- “Rising Tides: Wendy Nather on Resilience, Leadership, and Building a Stronger Cybersecurity Community - SecurityWeek”. “Today we don’t have a manufacturing model of software development; we have a literary model, where everyone gets to make up their own version of what we often already have. Safety is critical for many industries, and you’ll see there that “innovation” is strictly discouraged in favor of what is tried and tested. We may have to go there, at least partially, to reduce risk across the board for humans.”
- “CSS { In Real Life } | Education Needs Teachers, Not More Technology”.
- “ChatGPT Has No Place in the Classroom • Buttondown”.
- “The State of the “Art””. “I think it’s wrong to just look at this shift in storyline as an issue with the technology – that what we’re grappling with here involves explaining what works or doesn’t work technologically.”This entire post is jam-packed with interesting.
- “AI Has Enshittified America’s Advanced Stealth Fighter”. “According to the DOTE report, ALIS keeps telling support staff that things are wrong with individual F-35s when everything is fine. “Efforts to tackle the high false alarm rates have so far not yielded major progress towards meeting threshold requirements,” the report said.”
- “Misinformation expert cites non-existent sources in Minnesota deep fake case • Minnesota Reformer”.
- “Stanford Professor Accused of Using AI to Write Expert Testimony Criticizing Deepfakes”.
- “AI Scams Are the Point | The New Republic”. “Though they set out to deconstruct contemporary myths about artificial intelligence, Narayanan and Kapoor present their own mythology, which shows the industry in a generous light and ignores institutional features born out of its origins and historical developments.”
- “Static Search with Pagefind – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)”.
- “Microsoft 365 Copilot can’t currently handle angle brackets • The Register”.
- “I don’t have time to learn React - Keith Cirkel”. “This isn’t modern UI, it’s UI from 2013 at its inception. I don’t have the time left in my career to pick up UI paradigms that haven’t evolved much beyond from when Barack Obama was in office.”
- “Reid Southen: “If you didn’t know, I was banned by Midjourney 3 times for exposing their infringement and plagiarism. Their AI can very easily recreate stolen training data (even without naming it), so here’s a thread of images you can use to shut AI proponents down. 🧵 spectrum.ieee.org/midjourney-c…” — Bluesky”. In case there was any doubt about the plagiarism risk inherent in image generation models this thread gives you nitty gritty details
- “James O’Brien on LinkedIn: Tech Jobs Have Dried Up—and Aren’t Coming Back Soon | 167 comments”. “However, outstanding students, like those with a 4.0 in-major GPA, are now contacting me worried because they have zero offers. I suspect this trend is irreversible and likely part of the broader trend impacting almost every employment sector. ”
- “Fighting Authoritarianism: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century”. “Do not obey in advance”. This bit is particularly relevant to people who work in tech and who are compulsively eager to obay authoritarians in advance, for the simple reason that most of their execs and managers are outright authoritarians to begin with.
- “On hype, and the unbearable banality of ChatGPT’s poetry”. The study they’re reacting to is marketing at best, propaganda at worst
- “I’m a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive − their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life”.
- “Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties’ - NOEMA”. “The formula in both cases was clear and simple. First, the leader who was trying to preserve the past social order despite economic change and growing violence was replaced by a new leader who was willing to undertake much-needed reforms.”
- “Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties’ - NOEMA”. “As a result, American politics has fallen into a pattern that is characteristic of many developing countries, where one portion of the elite seeks to win support from the working classes not by sharing the wealth or by expanding public services and making sacrifices to increase the common good, but by persuading the working classes that they are beset by enemies who hate them (liberal elites, minorities, illegal immigrants) and want to take away what little they have. This pattern builds polarization and distrust and is strongly associated with civil conflict, violence and democratic decline.”
- “Dreaming awake | A Working Library”.
- “Pokémon Go Players Have Unwittingly Trained AI to Navigate the World”.
- “Microsoft and Google incubated Chinese startups tied to police - Rest of World”. “Documents reviewed by Rest of World show several companies backed by U.S. tech giants provided policing or censorship tools to Chinese law enforcement.”
- “Ludic 🧛: “Every executive (including one…” - Sprawl Club”. “Every executive (including one at a >$2B company) I’ve spoken to so far has told me that I should describe Hermit Tech as an “AI Accelerator” on the company website even if all I want to sell is competent software engineering, which I refuse to do, so I guess I’ll just go fuck myself.” The AI Bubble now thrives on dishonesty.
- “Disney has reportedly pulled a Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur episode for telling a trans-inclusive story - The Verge”. When I wrote about the counterculture switch the other day, this is exactly the sort of shit I expected. Mainstream media is going to be a very hostile environment for minorities and diverse stories
- “mitata - npm”.
- “My Friends Aren’t Reading - by Anne Trubek”. “So what would this mean for the near term future of a press? If we do fewer titles and invest more in marketing, then we would need to cut the budgets for editing, design, and production.”