Technology

2024-11-19

Bluesky, decentralisation, and the distribution of power: How decentralised Bluesky is depends on what exactly you mean by decentralisation.

On Bluesky: Regarding its vibes and its technology.

2024-11-19: I now believe the Bluesky mass migration is for real, having learned that even dril made the leap.

What I want from Mozilla: To fulfil their stated mission by ‘fostering an ecosystem of open, accessible software that promotes user independence, privacy, and safety’.

2024-11-12: Google receives its biggest fine yet. $20 decillion. A decillion is a one with 33 zeroes after it. …

2024-11-10: OpenAI released their web search engine - at least to paid subscribers. Looks to be integrated into …

2024-11-10

Introducing ChatGPT search: OpenAI releases its search engine.

2024-11-10: RSS as a method of subscribing to your favourite online content is not dead, and thanks to its open …

2024-11-03

Google CEO says over 25% of new Google code is generated by AI: Their computer programmers are turning into code reviewers.

2024-10-30

Why I Am (Still) a Liberal (For Now): ‘Thin’ vs ‘thick’ liberalism, and the Cruelty Culture of 2022-era Twitter.

Yelling at clouds: ‘The Cloud’ might feel like magic but we must remember that it has a real material footprint and consequent impact.

2024-10-28: Vox's take on "Is AI the new nuclear weapons?"

2024-10-28

The AI-nuclear weapons analogy, explained : Vox catalogues some similarities and differences between the two technologies.

The Doc Web: A deep dive into the dynamics of publishing to the web via Google Docs.

2024-10-27

A woman, blogging: this is a political act: Blogging can be empowering, especially for people who otherwise might not have a voice - but it’s not without risk.

Smarter than ‘Ctrl+F’: Linking Directly to Web Page Content: I didn’t realise URLs already let you link to and highlight any specific piece of text on a webpage.

Ban LLMs Using First-Person Pronouns: Maybe we shouldn’t allow AI chatbots to refer to themselves as ‘I’.

2024-10-27: 🎥 Watched Oppenheimer.

2024-10-26

Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it’s haunted: Consider your URL haunted ‘when something in its past gives it a poor reputation among search engines’.

2024-10-24

The web and I: Ben Werdmuller on growing up during the time when the web-as-we-know it - with its ‘spirit of magic and possibility’ - was being born.

Intentional web: A name for the parts of the web you proactively choose to interact with.

2024-10-23

Ed Newton-Rex, who organised the recent anti AI ingesting everyone’s work for free statement that artists of all sorts of fame levels are signing makes a good point.

There are three key resources that generative AI companies need to build AI models: people, compute, and data. They spend vast sums on the first two - sometimes a million dollars per engineer, and up to a billion dollars per model. But they expect to take the third - training data - for free.

Big tech AI companies aren’t stingy with their money for everything. That’s one reason why they’re so unprofitable. It’s just that magic third ingredient that often attracts the $0 compensation rate.

Thom Yorke and Julianne Moore join thousands of creatives in AI warning: Even superstars are concerned about AI companies shovelling up the artistic output of humanity without constraint or compensation.

2024-10-22

It’s not just you, Google Search really has gotten worse: Researchers find that search engines are getting ever more flooded with nasty SEO product spam sites despite their best efforts.

2024-10-22: Currently trying out a combo of FreshRSS and NetNewsWire to experience the joy (?) of aggregating, …