µblog - archive for 2024-02 🏳️‍🌈

🔗 Citation needed: Issue 52 – I am Sam’s low-level culpability

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🔗 Tim Bray: [AI] Money Bubble

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🔗🔭 The Prof says: Tycho was a scientist, not a blunderer and a darn good one too!

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🇸🇪 såg Melodifestivalen 1979 från SVTs Öppet arkiv. Ta tillbaka en omgång och jurygrupperna!

Nu tittar vi på 1985. Vilken skillnad! Det är som en högstadie-revy.

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The diminishing promises of “AI” replacing human work

Like so many other cases, the instantation of a concept locks us into that instantation. Before the plethora of generative AI and large language models, we were free to imagine AI as something that could do anything.

Years ago, I imagined a future where an AI would make the jobs of junior level jurists obsolete. The drafting of routine documents and contracts could be outsourced to machines, putting millions of relatively highly paid professionals out of work. (The same process could be applied to software developers, but I didn’t really believe that at the time, from memory. Maybe it’s because I actually know how to program, but I don’t know anything about law work).

Later, the world was enchanted by the promises of self-driving vehicles. This technology seemed just within our grasp, enabling the elimination of millions of workers from essential functions like goods transport and personal transport. Companies like Uber bet billions that technology would enable them to not have to part with any ridesharing revenue to the pesky humans doing all the work.

But self-driving vehicles turned out to be much harder than anyone imagined, and suddenly all the VC money got funneled into generative AI/LLMs, which promises to replace millions of poorly paid illustrators and copywriters (and programmers, although the jury is very much still out on that).

And like a very apt illustration of pollution, the output of these models is released unfiltered into the same pool from which the data is drawn, virtually guaranteeing that human input will be needed in the future simply to filter out the non-sense the machines are dreaming.

All in all, it feels like the venture capital billions are generating very small returns, and that generative AI is just another bubble. Will all the research lead to “real” AI? Who knows.

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🔗 Mike Chisholm: Absent Friend

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🔗 Sorry We Machines Destroyed Your Civilization in Such a Boring Way

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🔗 Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil

Tolkien meets Lovecraft.

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🇸🇪🚗🔌 pluspoäng till Nacka Forum där man kan betala för laddning via Easypark och inte behöver ladda ner en separat app.

Uppdatering: säg den glädje som varar. Nu har Vattenfall OnCharge (tvi!) hand om laddplatserna och allt är mycket mycket sämre.

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Marvelling that every time JWZ writes a post and explicitely says that if reply guys show up he will cut them, reply guys appear like flies on shit.

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🇸🇪 Gunilla Persson i Mello är typ definitionen av ”skämskudde”

Ändå vidare till andra chansen. Det är skandal.

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🔗🇸🇪 Aina Wifalk

Uppfinnare av rullatorn. Okuvlig vilja.

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🇸🇪📚 nytt på huvudbloggen - en kort recension av Henrik Berggrens Landet utanför

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Oh Wikipedia…

Many writers have used variations on the series title (including using “Rise and Fall” in place of “Decline and Fall”), especially when dealing with a large polity that has imperial characteristics. Notable examples include Jefferson Davis’ The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government, William Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, and David Bowie’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.

(from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire)

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🔗📺🇬🇧 Alice & Jack

General Hux from the Imperial Remnant meets the anti-manic-pixie-dream-girl, and no sorts of hijinks ensue. Intricately constructed UK drama but not too much substance.

The last episode is basically just a clip show, too. Weaksauce.

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🇸🇪 Nån som vet varför ”Pengarna på bordet” floppade? Att döma av brittiska originalet borde det vara underhållande. Var det Paolo Roberto som sänkte den?

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🔗 Block the Bots that Feed “AI” Models by Scraping Your Website

Robots.txt rules for the AI scrapers that bother to advertise themselves as such.

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🔗🖥 1.5+ million PDFs in 25 minutes

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🔗 Rebecca Solnit: In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

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I did not have JWZ stanning The The on today’s bingo card: https://mastodon.social/@jwz/111923860363995834

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🔗 Balancing cube

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🔗📸 The Machine Planet - You deserve each other: generational clash in photo forums

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🇸🇪 Kollar på Graven på SVT streaming, det är inte en bra serie.

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So in the space of less than a decade we have had

• Gemini the buttcoin exchange, run by the Winklevii, currently in big economic trouble
• Gemini the smol web protocol, beavering (gophering?) away, not really setting the world on fire
• Gemini the Google LLM rebrand, which will soon go away once parent company is distracted by the shiny (what iteration of chat services are they up to now?)

I’m excited what next idiocy this term will be attached to.

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🔗 Review: Chris Dixon’s Read Write Own

Delicious evisceration. This book doesn’t deserve the attention.

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🇸🇪 Vår tid är nu prickar många historiska turer rätt, men att vänsterterroristen John (i säsong 3) skulle finna en fristad i Spanien 1971 är inte en av dom.

Och Ethel som jobbar tills hon är typ 90 är ju heller inte särkilt sannolikt.

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🔗📚 J.G. Ballard: My Favorite Books

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🔗🎵 LGM: The living Great American Songbook

I haven’t heard Luke Comb’s cover of Tracey Chapman’s Fast Car much, but it appeared on radio the other day and I was struck by its faithfulness to the original, as well as a queasy feeling that it was a younger white man ripping off the work of an older Black woman. But according to this piece, I’ve misread it totally.

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Bruce Sterling predicted Category 6 storms decades ago in Heavy Weather: Category 6

Right now, every hurricane with maximum sustained wind speeds above 156 miles an hour is considered a Category 5 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale—whether it’s blowing 160 mph, like Hurricane Ian, or roughly 215 mph, like Hurricane Patricia, which struck Mexico in 2015. To distinguish between extreme storms and, well, extremely extreme storms, James Kossin, a distinguished science adviser at the climate nonprofit First Street Foundation, and Michael Wehner, a senior scientist studying extreme weather events at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explored adding a hypothetical sixth step to the scale. Category 6 hurricanes, they write, would encompass winds above 192 miles an hour. By their definition, five hurricanes—all of which occurred in about the previous decade—would have been classified as Category 6.

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The Ember “smart mug” sure missed a trick by not using Java. On the other hand, that could have led to the mugs being used in a botnet. On the third hand, there’s probably only a couple of hundred mugs around.

It’s a dumb product.

Update, Wed 2024-02-07: apparently there are signs that the toothbrush story is a load of bollocks, but it’s pretty funny even if it’s not true

💰The Viral Smart Toothbrush Botnet Story Almost Certainly Isn’t Real

https://infosec.exchange/@reverseics/111891488665606115

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🇸🇪 Intressant vit-tvättning av Hjamar Mehr i Vår tid är nu…

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🔗 JWZ: Hypertext emerges from his well to shame the tech industry

[…] I got to tell the story about the time I met [Ted Nelson] He came to Netscape to, basically, yell at us for fucking up his dream, with our unidirectional hyperlinks, our documents that were not editable by all readers, our complete lack of version control and transclusion. This halfassed abomination we had built, this was no MEMEX. This garbage had set back the dream at least 50 years.

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Björn Gustafsson i Mello är deep-cut fanservice.

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🔗AI Art is The New Stock Image

Someone using an AI-generated hero image (but with a disclaimer that the rest of the content was not AI-generated) got mildly called out for this on lobste.rs and went on an absolute tear on how unfair it was to be called out.

Link via @mikael

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CW: fictional depiction of child abuse and murder.

🔗🚀 Isabel J. Kim: Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole

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I listen to and appreciate the Accidental Tech Podcast, but it’s gonna be a long period in the future where I will aggressively move past chapters where the 3 hosts will be discussing their new VR headsets. I doubt there’s anything less interesting to me than the Vision Pro, and I happen to own both a Mac and an iPhone. Listening to these 3 people trying to make $3,500 proprietary headset, only available in the US a thing will be painful.

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🔗 Techdirt: Sorry Appin, We’re Not Taking Down Our Article About Your Attempts To Silence Reporters

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