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.
This is disgusting, if unsurprising: Google aren’t going to deprecate third-party cookies after all.
Make no mistake, Chrome is not a user agent. It is an agent for the behavioural advertising industry.
After the last decade, where platforms have emerged as a core constituent of the web on which many rely, it may feel like things cannot change. That the giants are so big that there is no other way. Yet, to give into this feeling – that things can’t change – is not necessary. It is the way it is is not true on the web. We can make change. It’s your web.
Number one:
Do things in the most straightforward way possible. It’s easy to fall into the trap of clever solutions, or clever applications of technology, or overbuilding something because you’re anticipating the future. Don’t do it. You will hate yourself for it later when you have to maintain it.
Google search is no friend to the indie web:
Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity.
There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.
Information that you might search for may never appear in Google’s results. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because Google has chosen not to include it.
A lovely choose-your-own-adventure blog post by Robin.
Ethicswishing (in tech) is the belief that if you are committed to being ethical and understand technology, then you are well-equipped to build technology for social good. But the truth is that building tech for social good is a lot like having sex in a bathtub: if you don’t understand the first thing about sex, it won’t help that you’re a world-class expert in bathtubs.
This is a damned fine list.
David is on board. Who else?
Despite all of this hype, all of this media attention, all of this incredible investment, the supposed “innovations” don’t even seem capable of replacing the jobs that they’re meant to — not that I think they should, just that I’m tired of being told that this future is inevitable.
The reality is that generative AI isn’t good at replacing jobs, but commoditizing distinct acts of labor, and, in the process, the early creative jobs that help people build portfolios to advance in their industries.
One of the fundamental misunderstandings of the bosses replacing these workers with generative AI is that you are not just asking for a thing, but outsourcing the risk and responsibility.
Generative AI costs far too much, isn’t getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn’t do enough to justify its existence.
Your teams should be working closer to the web platform with a lot less complex abstractions. We need to relearn what the web is capable of and go back to that.
Let’s be clear, I’m not suggesting this is strictly better and the answer to all of your problems. I’m suggesting this as an intentional business tradeoff that I think provides more value and is less costly in the long run.
Every time you had an industry campaign against an asbestos ban, they used the same rhetoric. They focused on the potential benefits – cheaper spare parts for cars, cheaper water purification – and doing so implicitly assumed that deaths and destroyed lives, were a low price to pay.
This is the same strategy that’s being used by those who today talk about finding productive uses for generative models without even so much as gesturing towards mitigating or preventing the societal or environmental harms.
This is a great move from Cloudflare. I may start using their service.
The mathematics behind the halting problem is interesting enough, but what’s really fascinating is the community that coalesced. A republic of numbers.
Progressive enhancement is a design and development principle where we build in layers which automatically turn themselves on based on the browser’s capabilities.
The idea of progressive enhancement is that everyone gets the perfect experience for them, rather than a pre-determined “perfect” experience from a design and development team.
Everyone’s raving about this great talk by Marcin, and rightly so!
We are building a brand-new browser from scratch, backed by a non-profit.
Not just a new browser, but a new browser engine.
Update: Turns out this project is being made by asshats. Ignore and avoid.
Here’s a nifty demo of popover but it’s not for what we’d traditionally consider a modal dialog.