Category: Programming
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There is No “Tech” to be Optimistic About
It looks like we are going to do another round of “tech will save us, if you let rich people do what they want!” nonsense, and it is all so, so tiresome. The latest trigger for this is Marc Andreessen’s five thousand word Reader’s Digest version of Atlas Shrugged Techno Optimist Manifesto. It is nothing…
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The Future of AI Assistants is Lies for Free, Money for Trurth
The Washington Post highlights that Alexa is telling lies about the 2020 election. If you ask it about election fraud, it will lie to you and tell you that the election was stolen and that there was unprecedented fraud. It does this because it uses for sources conservative and alt-right news sources such as random…
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The Moral Culpability of Tesla
The Washington Post has an excellent article about a crash involving Tesla’s autopilot. It is astonishing and depressing to me how much we have allowed Tesla to escape accountability for their actions. It is clear from reading the article that Tesla deliberately attempts to make people believe that their autopilot is safer than the evidence…
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Not Everything is a Tech Problem
Rant incoming. So we have another proposed tech standard that will allegedly allow perfect privacy and security and safe social media and puppies and flowers for everyone — if we all just agree to use it and no one minds that moderation will be impossible: The group, Cult of the Dead Cow, has developed a…
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In Semi-defense of Tech
This is going to ramble, so grab a snack. I was listening to the excellent Print Run podcast the other day and they were discussing a couple of trends they felt were interrelated — the purchase of Simon Shuster by a hedge fund known for dismantling companies (they are the ones that destroyed Toys R…
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Telephone Switch Automation Not the Happy Story Vox Wants It to Be.
Dylan Matthews has an … interesting take on a new paper that demonstrates how the automation of telephone switches affected telephone switch operators and, most intriguingly, the cohort of people who would have been expected to be operators in the next working generation. Matthews seems to think that the paper is a good story about…
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The first thing to understand about Threads is that Meta, back when it was known as Facebook because it hadn’t blown ten billion dollars on its founder’s idiotic Second Life but without legs or users clone, was complicit in genocide. The second thing to understand about Threads is that Meta, the company that created it,…
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Our Algorithmically Stupid Future
I am attempting to write a historical novel set in early modern Nuremberg centered around the daughter of a deceased clockmaker who wants to keep her father’s shop and work on early prosthetics (a real thing, by the way) despite the rules against it. And, of course, there is murder, religious, and class conflict, because…
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V.C. Bros Re-Discover A.I. Cannot Write
The V.C. Bros that now own the Gizmodo group fired off their first A.I. written article and it did not go well: Whitbrook — a deputy editor at Gizmodo who writes and edits articles about science fiction — quickly read the story, which he said he had not asked for or seen before it was…
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Social Media Sites are Products
This is encouraging, if the Supreme Court can catch up to reality: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuiton Friday reversed an earlier decision in Rosemarie Vargas, et al v. Facebook, Inc. that the social media giant could not be held liable for discrimination over allegations it excluded housing ads from a user…