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

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.

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’.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

Why you should ditch social media for a (micro)blog: Yes, I’m a big fan of both the general concept and the specific product Aaron mentions.

Why changes to the block on Elon Musk’s X are driving users away: Musk doesn’t believe block buttons should block.

Online Safety and the “Great Decentralization” – The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media: Is the Fediverse in need of better tooling around moderation?

All What Is Delicious to Man: Today’s implausible vision of superabundance is a lot grimmer than the one that they were promised in the 1830s.

Google moves to end geofence warrants, a surveillance problem it largely created: Geofence warrants require companies to hand over data about everyone that was using a mobile device within a given geographical region - a type of reverse search warrant.

The ‘Internet of Things’ helping to provide key evidence in criminal trials: The Crown Prosecution Service’s take on the utility of our data-gathering gadgets.

Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator: Inevitably the centralisation and lack of encryption around push notifications makes them a useful source of surveillance material.

Governments Are Using Spyware on Citizens. Can They Be Stopped?: Companies like the NSO Group are happy to sell commercial spyware to governments who will predictably use it for bad things.

The Subprime AI Crisis: Ed Zitron worries about what happens when the unprofitability of the current generative AI business becomes unsustainable.

Get Me Out Of Data Hell: The day Nikhil Suresh’s software engineering work pushed him so far into the pain zone that he has to quit there and then.