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An Entirely Other Day: The Triumph of Triumphalism
Scratch the skin of wild-eyed AI proponents, and a thick syrup oozes out, made up of the blendered remains of Roko’s Basilisk, barely sublimated Christian end-times thinking, and the mis-remembered plot of that one cool science-fiction story they read when they were twelve. This is the basis for the new order, just like the blockchain was a couple of years ago, and a dead-eyed, low-poly, pantsless rendering of Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of years before that.
“You’re going to be left behind” is only the latest version of “Have fun staying poor.” It’s got every ounce of the smug self-satisfaction that it shouldn’t need if the inevitability it promises were actually inevitable.
I Hate Wasting Time on Identifying AI Slop • Buttondown
It’s an annoying cognitive task: detecting weird photo artifacts, bizarre movement in videos, impossible animals and body horror, and reading through reams of anodyne text to determine if the person who prompted the synthetic media machine cared enough to dedicate time and energy to the task of communicating to their audience.
I hate that this is the bleak future which venture capitalists and AI boosters have gleefully laid out for us, that they consider this to be a “democratizing” technology in any real sense of the word. Far from strengthening democracy, these are technologies more apt at propping up scam capitalism and multi-level marketing schemes. I would like my time and mental space back.
The Gist: AI, a talking dog for the 21st Century.
My main problem with AI is not that that it creates ugly, immoral, boring slop (which it does). Nor even that it disenfranchises artists and impoverishes workers, (though it does that too).
No, my main problem with AI is that its current pitch to the public is suffused with so much unsubstantiated bullshit, that I cannot banish from my thoughts the sight of a well-dressed man peddling a miraculous talking dog.
Also, trust:
They’ve also managed to muddy the waters of online information gathering to the point that that even if we scrubbed every trace of those hallucinations from the internet – a likely impossible task - the resulting lack of trust could never quite be purged. Imagine, if you will, the release of a car which was not only dangerous and unusable in and of itself, but which made people think twice before ever entering any car again, by any manufacturer, so long as they lived. How certain were you, five years ago, that an odd ingredient in an online recipe was merely an idiosyncratic choice by a quirky, or incompetent, chef, rather than a fatal addition by a robot? How certain are you now?
Terence Eden’s Blog
A blog post can be a plain text document uploaded to a server. It can be an image hosted on a social network. It can be a voice note shared with your friends.
Title, dates, comments, links, and text are all optional.
No one is policing this.
Papercamp 3 Tickets, Sat 21 Sep 2024 at 11:00 | Eventbrite
Fifteen years after the first one, Papercamp is back this September and the line-up looks good.
Long live the papernet!
theAdhocracy | IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024
An in-depth look at Indie Web Camp Brighton with some suggestions for improving future events. Also, this insightful nugget:
There was something really energising about being with a group of people that had a diverse range of backgrounds, ideas, and interests, but who all shared a specific outlook on one problem space. We definitely didn’t all agree on what the ideal solution to a given problem was, but we were at least approaching topics from a similar starting point, which was great.
Oh Hello Ana - Reflections from IndieWebCamp Brighton
I had a fantastic time and hope it will become a frequent event.
Same!
Plugging into the IndieWeb - Jon’s website
I just attended IndiewebCamp Brighton, where I had a mind-expanding time with a bunch of folks as enthusiastic about the web as I am. It left me with a sense of hope that there are pocks of people keeping the dream of a free and open web alive.
Qubyte Codes - IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024
Mark’s write-up of the excellent Indie Web Camp Brighton that he co-organised with Paul.
Small dents in the IndieWeb · Paul Robert Lloyd
Paul has been doing so much fantastic work with the indie web community, not least of which is co-organising Indie Web Camp Brighton—just ten days away now!
IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024 · Paul Robert Lloyd
This is going to be a fun weekend!
Not got a personal website? Bring your laptop or mobile device, and we’ll help you get setup so that you can publish somewhere you control and can make your own.
Seasoned web developer? Learn about the different open web services, software and technologies that can help empower yourself and others to own their content and online identity.
BarCamp London XII
BarCamp London is back this year, the day after ffconf.
Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift – Another angry woman
On day 1 of your class about behaviour change in a science course, you learn that behaviour change is not a simple matter of information in, behaviour out. Human behaviour, and changing it, is big and complex.
Meanwhile, on your marketing courses, which I have had the misfortune to attend, the model of changing behaviour is pretty much this: information in, behaviour out.
Jeepers Frigging Cripes Crypto and NFTs are so stupid and dumb and bad and I can’t even. I’m out. Goodbye. Burn it down please. - Chris Coyier
Literally every experience I have in this world is gross at best and criminally evil at worst. Who it benefits that actually needs the benfefit is vanishingly few.
Here are some rhetorical questions from Chris:
How many years into this are we with no practical use cases for the world? How many resources have to be burned before this is seen?
TIL: You Can Access A User’s Camera with Just HTML
The capture attribute is pretty nifty—and I just love that you get so much power in a declarative way:
<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture="environment">
The Laboratorium (2d ser.) (I Do Not Think That NFT Means What You Think It…)
The bottom line is that almost everything NFT advocates want to do on a blockchain can be done more easily and efficiently without one, and the legal infrastructure needed to make NFTs work defeats the point of using a blockchain in the first place.
Web3 - creating problems where we need solutions on Vimeo
This is a great talk from Laura that clearly explains what web3 actually is. It pairs nicely with Molly White’s wb3 is going just great (speaking of which, Casey Newton interviewed Molly White about the site recently).
Make Free Stuff | Max Böck
At its very core, the rules of the web are different than those of “real” markets. The idea that ownership fundamentally means that nobody else can have the same thing you have just doesn’t apply here. This is a world where anything can easily be copied a million times and distributed around the globe in a second. If that were possible in the real world, we’d call it Utopia.
It’s not still the early days
If you’re interested in so-called web3, you should definitely follow Molly White.
How long can it possibly be “early days”? How long do we need to wait before someone comes up with an actual application of blockchain technologies that isn’t a transparent attempt to retroactively justify a technology that is inefficient in every sense of the word? How much pollution must we justify pumping into our atmosphere while we wait to get out of the “early days” of proof-of-work blockchains? How many people must be scammed for all they’re worth while technologists talk about just beginning to think about building safeguards into their platforms? How long must the laymen, who are so eagerly hustled into blockchain-based projects that promise to make them millionaires, be scolded as though it is their fault when they are scammed as if they should be capable of auditing smart contracts themselves?
The more you think about it, the more “it’s early days!” begins to sound like the desperate protestations of people with too much money sunk into a pyramid scheme, hoping they can bag a few more suckers and get out with their cash before the whole thing comes crashing down.