This observation seems intuitively obvious in Europe and pearl-clutchingly shocking in America:
What’s perfectly acceptable behaviour when you are a relatively small company becomes outright illegal (and rightly so) when you become dominant in an industry.
For many archivists, alarm bells are ringing. Across the world, they are scraping up defunct websites or at-risk data collections to save as much of our digital lives as possible. Others are working on ways to store that data in formats that will last hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of years.
Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.
Everyone’s raving about this great talk by Marcin, and rightly so!
This is kind of about art direction and kind of about design systems.
There is beauty in trying to express something specific; there is beauty too in finding compromises to create something epic and collective.
My only concern is whether we are considering the question at all.
From Ada Lovelace to Nicola Pellow.
This is the transcript of a fantastic talk called “The Tools We Still Need to Build with AI.”
Absorb every word!
This thing that we’ve been doing collectively with our relentless blog posts and pokes and tweets and uploads and news story shares, all 30-odd years of fuck-all pointless human chatterboo, it’s their tuning fork. Like when a guitarist plays a chord on a guitar and compares the sound to a tuner, adjusts the pegs, plays the chord again; that’s what has happened here, that’s what all my words are, what all our words are, a thing to mimic, a mockingbird’s feast.
Every time you ask AI to create words, to generate an answer, it analyzes the words you input and compare those words to the trillions of relations and concepts it has already categorized and then respond with words that match the most likely response. The chatbot is not thinking, but that doesn’t matter: in the moment, it feels like it’s responding to you. It feels like you’re not alone. But you are.
Kelly has made a beautiful book:
Experience the lives of the first Japanese Americans in the Pacific Northwest through the cartoons and illustrations by Sam Goto
The rise of dot-com companies was pitched as a no consequences gold rush. We were on the precipice of a fictional future where everyone would be cashing in on the web. The reality was quite a bit more slow, and boring. Business on the web consolidated, as we now know, and left most people holding the bag. There’s no knowing exactly what will happen with AI technologies, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect something far more boring and centralized than what’s being promised.
All this has happened before. All this will happen again.
Each of these cycles has been larger and lasted longer than the last, and I want to be clear: each cycle has produced genuinely useful technology. It’s just that each follows the progress of a sigmoid curve that everyone mistakes for an exponential one. There is an initial burst of rapid improvement, followed by gradual improvement, followed by a plateau. Initial promises imply or even state outright “if we pour more {compute, RAM, training data, money} into this, we’ll get improvements forever!” The reality is always that these strategies inevitably have a limit, usually one that does not take too long to find.
If you liked David Grann’s book The Wager, here’s another shipwreck tale, this time from the other side of the world.
Primer was a film about a start-up …and time travel. This is a short story about big tech …and time travel.
A fascinating in-depth look at the maintenance of undersea cables:
The industry responsible for this crucial work traces its origins back far beyond the internet, past even the telephone, to the early days of telegraphy. It’s invisible, underappreciated, analog.
It’s a truism that people don’t think about infrastructure until it breaks, but they tend not to think about the fixing of it, either.
Owning your own piece of the Internet (to borrow a recent phrase from Anil Dash) is itself a radical act. Linking to others at will is subversive all on its own. Or as Jeremy Keith once put it, “it sounds positively disruptive to even suggest that you should have your own website.” The web still exists for everyone. And beneath this increasingly desiccated surface, there is plenty of creators still simply creating.
People create these sites simply so that they exist. They are not fed to an algorithm, or informed by any trends. It is quieter and slower, meant to tether us to a more mechanical framework of the web.
This is the analog web.
The arc of the web is long and bends towards flexibility.
As a self-initiated learner, being able to view source brought to mind the experience of a slow walk through someone else’s map.
This ability to “observe” software makes HTML special to work with.
You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant.
The thoughts of our ancestors, locked in mud and ash for 2000 years, hidden in darkness — now, with the light of a worldwide effort shining upon them, finally seen again.
An impressive piece of work from three coders to try to read the contents of a Herculanean scroll without unfurling (and thereby destroying) it.
Scholars might call it a philosophical treatise. But it seems familiar to us, and we can’t escape the feeling that the first text we’ve uncovered is a 2000-year-old blog post about how to enjoy life.
I remember Jon telling me this lovely story when we first met in person. I love the idea that we had already met in a style sheet.
I also love the idea of hosting your own little internet archive—that Bill Oddie site still looks pretty great to me!
It’s a lot like an embarrassing family photo, but I’m owning it!