A Kiss with Teeth - Reactor
A good one from one of the cowriters of This is How You Lose the Time War, which came up in book club this week.
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AI isn't useless. But is it worth it?
So many reasons why not to use them.
Any place on the web that incentivizes high-volume, low effort text is being inundated by generated text
If you're using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre, auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or is it just middle-management busywork?
If the internet's enshittification feels worse post-ChatGPT, it's because of the quantity and speed at which this junk is being produced, not because the junk is new.
I'm also not sure that generating a picture of a person with twelve fingers on each hand or text that reads as though written by an endlessly smiling children's television star who's being held hostage is altogether that much more useful than a bitcoin.
Ipodrant
There's something to be said for a device that does one thing really really well.
How the GOP Became the Party of Insurrection
Three years after 1/6, the GOP reembraced the Big Lie out of cowardice and convenience
You have to either believe the election was stolen or pretend to believe it.
A 2024 Plea for Lean Software (with running code) - Bert Hubert's writings
This post is dedicated to the memory of Niklaus Wirth, a computing pioneer who passed away January 1st. In 1995 he wrote an influential article called “A Plea for Lean Software”, and in what follows, I try to make the same case nearly 30 years later, updated for today’s computing horrors.
The really short version: the way we build/ship software these days is mostly ridiculous, leading to 350MB packages that draw graphs, and simple products importing 1600 dependencies of unknown provenance.
Time pressure gradually corrupts an engineer’s standard of quality and perfection.
Game Developers Describe 'Smell of Death' Around Apple Arcade
Some game developers are dissatisfied with Apple Arcade amid concerns about the subscription service's future, a new report claims. Sources...
games with shorter narratives and premium indie titles
Ghost Kitchens Are Advertising AI-Generated Food on DoorDash and Grubhub
Reality bending, AI-generated cheesesteaks and pasta dishes are flooding food delivery services.
considering that the Philly cheesesteak is one of the most commonly ill-prepared and overrated sandwiches in America (feel free to email me if you want to fight about this)
Why Americans Love to Hate Harvard | Harvard Magazine
The president emeritus on elite universities’ academic accomplishments—and a rising tide of antagonism
Careful studies have found that this tendency has not come about primarily through conscious discrimination in hiring professors but is chiefly a result of liberals’ being more attracted than conservatives to academic careers.
Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power
Artificial intelligence, data centers and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s aging power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up.
The type of nuclear plants envisioned, for example, are not yet even operational in the United States. Fusion power does not yet exist.
Models All The Way Down
It contains less about how humans see the world than it does about how search engines see the world. It is a dataset that is powerfully shaped by commercial logics.
Donald Trump’s Trial Is a Rorschach Test
Not a huge case but still interesting to see how someone in his position gets treated for pretty normal white collar crimes.
Can anyone but a tech giant build the next big thing?
It's too hard to be better than the smartphone, and the platform owners don't want to let others integrate at the level that would be needed to be disruptive.
the smartphone has become so central to life that if your product can’t offer deep connections to the smartphone, you’re stuck
Suicide Mission
A bit biased article but still a good summary of how management beat out engineering culture.
Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing
outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments
there is no such thing as an accidental death during the commission of a felony
‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Renewed for Season 4; ‘Lower Decks’ to Conclude With Season 5 (EXCLUSIVE)
Mixed news
Opinion | Many Patients Don’t Survive End-Stage Poverty
Every doctor should be in favor of UBI.
Fake Photos, Real Harm: AOC and the Fight Against AI Porn
I hope the DEFIANCE act passes but it seems like it will be a hard battle and get worse before it gets better. The tools make it too easy right now, and too hard to go after the toolmakers.
When ‘ruthless’ Boeing cut costs, the damage spread
So sad. A once great company brought low by financialization.
transformed GE into a financial conglomerate that incidentally made light bulbs, appliances and jet engines
“People who knew how to build an airplane were viewed as roadblocks. They slowed things down,” said Chandler. “The only word you could speak to executives was ‘yes.'”
Republicans want to use an 1873 law to ban abortion. Congress must overturn that law | Moira Donegan
Of course they're going to try to do something heinous and unpopular and somehow Democrats will still fail at messaging.
Exclusive: official investigation reveals how superconductivity physicist faked blockbuster results
Wow. It was all fake data, and this guy has had pattern of bad behavior for years!
GitHub - carlini/printf-tac-toe: tic-tac-toe in a single call to printf
Clever!
Ten Years Later, ‘Monument Valley’ Is a Monument to Mobile Gaming’s Bygone Era
It is dire. Apple Arcade held so much promise for small premium games.
“It almost feels like a glimpse into a parallel existence,” he says. “One where we didn’t optimize for analytics, monetization, and attention capturing, but one where, somehow, as an industry, we optimized for quality and beauty instead.”
One of the Greatest Children’s Books of All Time Just Got a Sequel. The Author Has Her Reasons.
Hahaha
The ways of fictive 2D bipedal hippos are notoriously mysterious.
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How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide
It could have been so much worse
The fine art of human prompt engineering: How to talk to a person like ChatGPT
There is some unnecessary Star Trek slander in this.
A friendly greeting makes humans more likely to accept future inputs from you.
erroneous outputs presented with confidence—statements such as "Star Trek is better than Star Wars.
“I’m Scared”: Why It’s a Brutal Time to Be a TV Writer
Wow do we need UBI so people don't have to worry when work dries up.
The Rise and Fall of the Trad Wife
Interesting story on one of the early tradwife influencers and how the movement is so closely associated with Trump and the far right in the US.
Colleges Are Facing an Enrollment Nightmare
Of course it uses COBOL in 2024.
Guest Commentary: Traffic Engineers Must Put Safety Over Driver Throughput - Streetsblog San Francisco
We have collective car brain
No other branch of civil engineering tolerates this level of system failure. In any other field
The thing that causes death and injuries on American roads is cars
Models All The Way Down
I knew it was bad but I had no idea how bad even the inputs are models upon models.
The concepts of what is and isn't visually appealing can be influenced in outsized ways by the tastes of a very small group of individuals, and the processes that are chosen by dataset creators to curate the datasets.
The Future of ‘Star Trek’: From ‘Starfleet Academy’ to New Movies and Michelle Yeoh, How the 58-Year-Old Franchise Is Planning for the Next Generation of Fans
Lots of exciting news about ongoing and potential Trek projects. Still feels like Paramount is floating this to help get bought...
At this point, is there a genre that “Strange New Worlds” can’t do? “As long as we’re in storytelling that is cogent and sure handed, I’m not sure there is,” Goldsman says with an impish smile. “Could it do Muppets?
“Visual effects people are a big, big ‘Star Trek’ fandom,” he says. “You naturally just get all these people who go a little bit above and beyond, and you can’t trade that for anything.”