This will be the 30th Long-Links outing. I’m 100% sure that there does not live a human
being who has looked at all those Links, but my logfiles say that quite a few of you, Dear Readers, at least take the time to
open one occasionally. All aboard!
Sadly, more than half the Long Links, this time out, are about AI. I almost decided to bury the piece but, whatever you or I
think, the subject matters. And the ones I posted are a tiny fraction of those I read (or tried to) and I think are
useful and not immoral.
But, let’s put all the non-AI stuff at the front so you can stop reading partway through if you’ve just had enough of
that stuff.
Not about GenAI
Paul Ford has, after a lengthy gap, started writing again at
ftrain.com. Excellent!
Go there any day and there’ll almost certainly be something good at the top of the
page. He’s a technologist and, yeah, writes about AI sometimes, but
Warp and Woof is about dogs and their people. Charming.
I think most people who aren’t ultra-wealthy now agree that inequality is currently a central problem of our society. But it
would be nice to put some numbers behind that assertion.
Here is a conversation between Paul Krugman,
Nobel-prizewinning economist, and Gabriel Zucman, a French specialist in the subject and frequent Piketty collaborator.
Now, there are quite a few paragraphs up front of talk about general macroeconomic issues and comparisons between the US and Europe,
which I enjoyed reading. And then inequality; here’s Zucman: “And so everybody now understands what was long understood for
centuries, very much including in the West, which is that extreme wealth is never virtual, it is always extreme power.”
CO2 densities in Parts Per Million are a good measure of how full your inhalations are of others’ exhalations. And
thus of how likely you are to catch something by breathing. Especially, Covid, which everyone with a half a brain knows is not
nearly over. Anyhow, A. Grieve-Smith offers
Nine observations from carbon
dioxide monitoring: “I’ve been checking carbon dioxide levels for over three years now, and I’ve started to see patterns.”
This piece could save your life, and that’s not a metaphor.
Patrick McKenzie, who writes Bits About Money, has an icy-cool style and this Link could be a Little Less Long,
but I learn interesting things every time I read one of his pieces.
Fraud Investigation is Believing Your Lying
Eyes launches from the Minnesota child-care fraud story, but is mostly, as the title suggests, relates the conventional wisdom
(which I didn’t know) about how to go sniffing around for in-progress fraud.
From which “As a fraud investigator, you are allowed and encouraged to read Facebook at work.”
Hari Kunzru has written good books and is a former London native. Harpers gave him an assignment:
Walk around and write about the city, thus
Another London: Excavating the
disenchanted city. It’s a tour through time as much as space — London, obviously, is
history-drenched — and not just politics and power either, but arts and ideas. The writing is
beautiful. It’ll take a chunk out of your day but the trade-off is good.
Here’s something beautiful:
The HTML Review. Now I want to publish there, but I’d have to up my
writing game.
Lankum
They’re an Irish band I just discovered, courtesy of Qobuz. The music grows out of traditional Irish acoustic folk. They play
old and new songs and throw in a heavy dose of snarl and drone. Some of the chords are like rotated model augmented 11ths or some
such, scratchy around the edges but helped with an itch I hadn’t known I had. Terrific musicians. Here’s
Hunting the Wren. I might get over-excited and fly to Ireland to see them.
Tech, but not GenAI
Sebastian Pipping is, among other things, an Open-Source software developer, with whom
I’ve collaborated. His recent
Learn from me! begins “Not too long ago, someone literally asked me
what they "could learn from me", and that question has stuck with me since.” So he offers a few candidate lessons. What a nice
idea! What could people learn from you?
Filippo Valsorda, another OSS dev, is particularly interesting because he and a few partners have apparently figured out
how to make a living from their work.
He recently published
Turn Dependabot Off and I’m not going to offer a word of explanation because
if you understand the title I guarantee you’ll be interested in the piece. (I’m terrified of Dependabot.)
It seems like every day I hear from another person who’s trying to get their personal lives off Big Tech. Me too. So…
In The Verge,
How to un-Big Tech your online life.
And from Paris Marx,
Getting off US tech: a guide. We are in the early stages of
de-Googling our family life, so this stuff is super useful. I expect to see more of it.
Amazon polemics, maybe a little AI
I don’t loathe Amazon any more nor less than the rest of the Big Techs, but boy are there are a lot of people
publishing diatribes against the company. Not sure I understand why. But, worth reading.
In
How Amazon Dies: A Possible, Maybe Likely
Future Mark Atwood predicts that the infestation of amazon.com with highly-profitable advertising is a perhaps-fatal
blunder. What’s maybe more interesting is that he points out several potential Amazon alternatives that don’t suffer from
that same infestation; they hadn’t occurred to me.
And from a year ago, Cory Doctorow’s
The future of Amazon coders is the present of
Amazon warehouse workers introduces the “shitty technology adoption curve”. I missed this piece at the time but boy, is it
easy to believe.
Finally, reading
Writing Crystalized Thinking At Amazon. Is AI
Muddying It? angered me. While I have no remaining respect or affection for any of the Big Techs, I enjoyed my time at AWS
and part of it was the writing culture. I think the Way Of The Six-pager is the best business-process innovation I witnessed in
my working life. If Amazon really is slopifying it, I predict disastrous outcomes.
OK, here’s the AI stuff
My own position, just to be clear: There are going to be LLM applications in a few domains here and there, and one of them is
software development, but they won’t be nearly big enough to damage earth’s climate any further, nor to prevent the bubble from
popping. That said…
Let’s do the worst first:
Write-Only Code lays out a genuinely frightening future.
Quote: “I was maniacally insistent that any proposed change to our SDLC (software development life cycle) be evaluated first
through the lens of developer velocity.”
I think I’d rather not go there.
Most of us who watch the space, and have no idea where it’s going or what the future holds, are I think particularly
interested in Anthropic’s Claude. If you’re one, you’ll probably enjoy
What Is Claude? Anthropic
Doesn’t Know, Either.
It’s probably not that GenAI is intrinsically immoral. As Karl Bode writes,
The Problem With AI Is Shitty Human Beings. I
covered some of the same territory last year in
The Real GenAI Issue, but Bode is excellent:
“…the grand vision of modern automation's benefits can never materialize if its stewards are foundationally fucking terrible
human beings disinterested in the contours of empathy. If we're not talking prominently about that, we aren't really talking at
all.” (Emphasis his.)
One of the things that shitty people do is lie. Like for example charismatic leaders of AI “startups” valued in the tens of
billions. But then so do the less-visible, which provoked Kyle Kingsbury A.K.A. Aphyr to write
Trudging Through Nonsense. It’s sad and angry but I think
usefully so.
Armin Ronacher is not bursting with rage, but he is skeptical about all the right things in
Some Things Just Take Time. Quote:
“There’s a feeling that all the things that create friction in your life should be automated away. That human involvement should
be replaced by AI-based decision-making. Because it is the friction of the process that is the problem. When in fact many times
the friction, or that things just take time, is precisely the point.”
For another cool-voiced critique, here’s Rishi Baldawa:
AI Mandates Manufacture Noise. While I’m not
entirely a burn-it-all-with-fire GenAI foe, the “boss mandate” always struck me as dumb, and Rishi spells it out clearly
and simply. It’s really good, so here are a couple of quotes: “But those not in the weeds had no way to know any of this
because… well they aren’t in the weeds. So they feel compelled to solve their information gap with a policy hammer.” and
“As said before, none of this is revolutionary and that’s sort of the point. AI is a ’mirror and multiplier‘. It intensifies
whatever was already happening.”
That’s all
Let’s really hope the bubble bursts soonest. Because when the money goes away, so will a lot of the shitty people.
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