Upgrade to Pro — share decks privately, control downloads, hide ads and more …

Collected Friday Feed, 2023

Collected Friday Feed, 2023

The collection of the Friday Feed email newsletter for 2023

Anthony Starks

December 29, 2023
Tweet

More Decks by Anthony Starks

Other Decks in Technology

Transcript

  1. Friday Feed January 6, 2023 Is Moving to Mastodon Ethical?

    First, is it OK to bail out of Twitter? And if bailing out, is Mastodon a acceptable place to land? The voices are those of Black and disabled people (mostly the former) arguing that Twitter has fueled an important flowering of their culture (the hashtag is #BlackTwitter) and become important as a refuge, a meeting place, and a source of power. How China is building a parallel generative AI universe Another Chinese tool that has made noise is Tencent’s Different Dimension Me, which can turn photos of people into anime characters. The AI generator exhibits its own bias. Intended for Chinese users, it took off unexpectedly in other anime-loving regions like South America. But users soon realized the platform failed to identify black and plus-size individuals, groups that are noticeably missing in Japanese anime, leading to offensive AI-generated results. NYC Bans Students and Teachers from Using ChatGPT “While the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions, it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.” Microsoft to challenge Google by integrating ChatGPT with Bing search ChatGPT made conversational AI accessible, now Microsoft is rumored to be integrating the machine learning techniques behind it into Bing search queries. AI is going to reinvent how you do everything on Windows,’ says Microsoft’s Windows boss Panos Panay is the man in charge of Microsoft Windows and Microsoft hardware, and he has CEO Satya Nadella’s ear. So when he says that AI is the future of Windows, we’re definitely paying attention.
  2. Friday Feed January 13, 2023 Microsoft Bets Big on the

    Creator of ChatGPT in Race to Dominate A.I. As a new chatbot wows the world with its conversational talents, a resurgent tech giant is poised to reap the benefits while doubling down on a relationship with the start-up OpenAI. Vigilantes for views: The YouTube pranksters harassing suspected scam callers in India Los Angeles-based Trilogy Media took “scambaiting” to a new level,but some claim they’re gaining viral fame at others’ expense. The FAA Outage Lays Bare an Essential System Everyone Hates A glitch in the so-called NOTAM system caused the agency to ground flights across the US. But its problems go back years. The Heart Wing While you fret about your bank account, your forehead wrinkles, or that person who hasn’t replied to your email, the heart — your heart — just keeps on keeping on in a way no other muscle could. How Much Netflix Can the World Absorb? Bela Bajaria, who oversees the streaming giant’s hyper-aggressive approach to TV-making, says success is about “recognizing that people like having more.”
  3. Friday Feed January 20, 2023 FAA says computer failure that

    grounded thousands of flights was caused by 2 contractors who introduced data errors into NOTAM syste Unspecified “personnel” were responsible for corrupting the file, which led to the outage of an FAA computer system that sends safety notices to pilots, the agency said in a statement. That triggered the FAA to order a halt to all US departing flights, causing thousands of delays and cancellations Wednesday. Is this by Rothko or a robot? We ask the experts to tell the difference between human and AI art An art historian, a critic and a gallerist are tasked with guessing whether a piece is by an important artist or a clever bot. It turns out it’s harder than it looks Extremely Hardcore Twitter’s staff spent years trying to protect the social media site against impulsive billionaires who wanted to use the reach of its platform for their own ends, and then one made himself the CEO. How scientists discovered the universe is really freaking huge At the time, astronomers had some methods to figure out distances to stars, but they only worked for stars relatively close to Earth. Leavitt’s discovery — linking the pulse of one type of star to their actual brightness, was the key to measuring objects farther and farther out into space. The clock is ticking on a TikTok ban The act of scrolling through your For You feed on TikTok might come with an additional sense of impending doom these days. After years of hand-wringing over the enormously popular app’s ties to China and the potential national security threat they present, it looks like someone is going to do something about it.
  4. Friday Feed January 27, 2023 Why are so many tech

    companies laying people off right now? The answer is that investors have changed how they’re evaluating companies, says Michael Cusumano, the deputy dean at the MIT Sloan School of Management...One measure people use for measuring tech companies’ investment value is revenue per employee — and having hired all this staff during the pandemic, that means revenue per employee has gone down. 'Everybody is cheating': Why this teacher has adopted an open ChatGPT policy Ethan Mollick has a message for the humans and the machines: can't we all just get along? Netflix’s New Chapter Spock’s job is finished: Netflix’s future is about creativity and humanity; it’s time for a Captain Kirk. How NASA Solved a $100 Million Problem for Five Bucks NASA engineers discovered that the Ares I rocket had a crucial flaw, one that could have jeopardized the entire project. They panicked. They plotted. They steeled themselves for the hundreds of millions of dollars it was going to take to make things right. And then they found out how to fix it for the cost of an extra value meal. Open source in pharma from five perspectives Data science leaders from Roche, AstraZeneca, GSK, Eli Lilly, and Pfizer share their perspectives on the adoption of open source in the pharmaceutical space.
  5. Friday Feed February 3, 2023 Layoffs are Cruel and Don't

    Work Imagine you had a dog. You got the dog when it was young, trained and raised it. This animal was a part of your family and you gave it little collars and cute little clothes with your family name on it. The dog came to special events and soon thought of this place as its home and you all as loved ones. Then one day with no warning, you locked the dog out of the house. You and the other adults in the house had decided getting rid of any random dog was important to the bank that owned your self, so you locked the door. The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation system Should AI systems treat different demographic groups unequally? ChatGPT Is Dumber Than You Think Treat it like a toy, not a tool. Hustle bros are jumping on the AI bandwagon The world of financial influencers promise viewers they can use ChatGPT to make big bucks with no effort. The schemes they suggest are dubious, but reveal how the AI chatbot might erode our online world. Instagram’s co-founders are back with Artifact, a kind of TikTok for text The app uses algorithmic predictions, which Kevin Systrom sees as ‘the future of social.’
  6. Friday Feed February 10, 2023 Big Data is Dead This

    post will make the case that the era of Big Data is over. It had a good run, but now we can stop worrying about data size and focus on how we’re going to use it to make better decisions. ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. Introducing your copilot for the web: AI-powered Bing and Microsoft Edge Search, Answer, Chat, Create How Wikipedia Erases Indigenous History Disregard and outright contempt for Native American peoples, history, and knowledge on Wikipedia, in the courts, and in the media is not new. Erasing Native existence was common practice in 19th- and 20th-century New England newspapers, for example. And the United States and Canada have been trying to legislate Native peoples out of existence since the outset of colonization. 7 problems facing Bing, Bard, and the future of AI search Microsoft and Google say a new era of AI-assisted search is coming. But as with any new era in tech, it comes with plenty of problems, from bullshit generation to culture wars and the end of ad revenue.
  7. Friday Feed February 17, 2023 The New Gatekeepers Every year,

    I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. This year, ‘The New Gatekeepers’. Why generative AI scares artists but not writers There’s a fundamental reason why this argument applies to visual art and not writing: Humans are less sensitive to the boundaries of right/wrong and good/bad in images than in text The maze is in the mouse What ails Google. And how it can turn things around. What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? The basic concept of ChatGPT is at some level rather simple. Start from a huge sample of human-created text from the web, books, etc. Then train a neural net to generate text that’s “like this”. And in particular, make it able to start from a “prompt” and then continue with text that’s “like what it’s been trained with”. The Backfire Effect I'm going to tell you some things. You're not going to believe the things I tell you. And that's okay.
  8. Friday Feed February 24, 2023 Birth of BASIC Professors John

    Kemeny and Tom Kurtz along with a band of Dartmouth undergraduates invent the Basic computer language. Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Maps and Charts (1887/93) Levi Walter Yaggy’s Geographical Study unpacks like a matryoshka doll. Why all of Hollywood UI looks the same When we are shown a glimpse of the far future through science fiction films, there are omnipresent voice assistants, otherworldly wearables, and a whole lot of holograms. For whatever reason these holograms are almost always blue, floating above desks and visible to anyone who might stroll by. In-Car Climate Control Design: How It Has Gone Backwards and How to Fix It Climate controls are a fascinating design problem. They may seem easy to design on the surface, but you quickly run into much complexity. In the last couple of years, the design of in-car climate controls has gone backward. In this post, I will show why this happened and propose a different way to design climate controls. Whispers of A.I.’s Modular Future ChatGPT is in the spotlight, but it’s Whisper—OpenAI’s open-source speech-transcription program—that shows us where machine learning is going. Apple Makes Major Progress on No-Prick Blood Glucose Tracking for Its Watch Apple Inc. has a moonshot-style project underway that dates back to the Steve Jobs era: noninvasive and continuous blood glucose monitorin
  9. Friday Feed March 3, 2023 You Are Not a Parrot

    And a chatbot is not a human. And a linguist named Emily M. Bender is very worried what will happen when we forget this. What a Sixty-Five-Year-Old Book Teaches Us About A.I. Rereading an oddly resonant—and prescient—consideration of how computation affects learning. Building the New Bing Last Summer, OpenAI shared their next generation GPT model with us, and it was game-changing. The new model was much more powerful than GPT-3.5, which powers ChatGPT, and a lot more capable to synthesize, summarize, chat and create. Seeing this new model inspired us to explore how to integrate the GPT capabilities into the Bing search product, so that we could provide more accurate and complete search results for any query including long, complex, natural queries. Electric Cars 101: How EV Motors Work, Tech Differences, and More Impress your friends and neighbors with your newfound EV knowledge. We all need it. Why Python keeps growing, explained A deep dive into why more people are using Python than ever, its key use cases, and why it’s still so popular 30-plus years after it was first released.
  10. Friday Feed March 10, 2023 The future of TV is

    up in the air Broadcasters are betting that antennas and modern DVRs will help them stay relevant. But a stalled transition to ATSC 3.0 and massive growth of linear streaming services could throw a wrench into those plans. why i use cheap notebooks I always find myself drawn to the cheapest notebooks I can find, spiral and composition ones that you can get at Staples for a quarter during back to school sales. I don't feel nervous about messing these up—they're dirt cheap and eminently replaceable. As long as the paper can handle my fountain pens with minimal bleed (you'd be surprised how many cheap notebooks have decent paper) and the binding doesn't disintegrate with use, I feel invited to write as many pages as I can, to fill them up with inky loops and dots. A technique called Cell Painting could speed drug discovery The method, known as Cell Painting, impressed scientists at several pharmaceutical companies—so much that they launched a consortium and pooled resources, using the approach to create a massive data set that they began releasing to the public in November. The JUMP–Cell Painting Consortium, as it’s called, hopes the database will accelerate drug discovery by helping researchers identify promising compounds and get a better sense of what they do and what sorts of side effects they might have before the molecules get tested in animals or people. The Internet’s Richest Fitness Resource Is a Site from 1999 Exrx.net’s seeming lack of sophistication belies a physiological compendium that is sourced by professors, physical therapists, physicians, coaches, and military personnel, and endorsed by the American College of Sports Medicine. The site has granted use of its materials to nasa and the N.Y.P.D. In praise of ffmpeg ffmpeg has been described as the Swiss army knife of multimedia. It incorporates hundreds of video, audio, and image decoders and encoders, muxers and demuxers, filters and devices. It provides a CLI and a set of libraries for working with its tools, and is the core component of many video and audio players as a result... If you want to do almost anything with multimedia files — re-encode them, re-mux them, live stream it, whatever — ffmpeg can handle it with ease.
  11. Friday Feed March 17, 2023 Recreating and Revising a Dashboard

    About Human Space Flight I would like to contribute to the data visualization community by sharing interesting examples of how beautiful infographics, data art, and visualizations can enhance business dashboards. OpenAI co-founder on company’s past approach to openly sharing research: ‘We were wrong’ OpenAI announced its latest language model, GPT-4, but many in the AI community were disappointed by the lack of public information. Their complaints track increasing tensions in the AI world over safety. Microsoft tries to justify A.I.‘s tendency to give wrong answers by saying they’re ‘usefully wrong’ See also:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bf-dbS9CcRU In an online presentation about the new Copilot features, Microsoft executives brought up the software’s tendency to produce inaccurate responses, but pitched that as something that could be useful. As long as people realize that Copilot’s responses could be sloppy with the facts, they can edit the inaccuracies and more quickly send their emails or finish their presentation slides. The Most Innovative Products of 2023 Amid the more than 500 companies recognized as part of Fast Company’s list of the Most Innovative Companies of 2023, product innovation played a key role in helping cement the recognition of many honorees. Just write It doesn't matter how you do it, just keep doing it. The same mindset can be applied to just about any kind of creative work ... even though it might be hard to write a symphony on a napkin.
  12. Friday Feed March 24, 2023 PLATO: How an educational computer

    system from the ’60s shaped the future Forums, instant messaging, and multiplayer video games all started here. The case for slowing down AI Pumping the brakes on artificial intelligence could be the best thing we ever do for humanity. How An Electrical Engineer Solved Australia’s Most Famous Cold Case DNA, AI facial reconstruction, and sheer grit identified Somerton Man—75 years later Every Possible Wordle Solution Visualized As I've been playing over the last year, my curiosity has had me wondering things like "how many possible words are there?", "how many words start and end with the same letter?", and "how many words use Y as the only vowel?". To try to answer those questions, and more, I built this Wordle visualization tool! It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes In the Steve Jobs voice: "John Gruber is a Bozo and tell people not to waste their time reading Daring Firebal"
  13. Friday Feed March 31, 2023 Five charts that changed the

    world Data visualisation helps us to understand the world. It also has the power to change it. Can Mastodon seize the moment from Twitter? Eugen Rochko is the CEO of Mastodon — the open-source decentralized competitor to Twitter. It’s where a lot of Twitter users have gone in our post-Elon Musk era. AI and the American Smile How AI misrepresents culture through a facial expression. How John Glenn’s $40 Camera Forced NASA to Rethink Space Missions A simple camera purchased at the local drugstore played a pivotal role in shaping the future of space exploration and set the stage for space photography in a non-scientific domain. About Scratch Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface that allows young people to create digital stories, games, and animations.
  14. Friday Feed April 7, 2023 Programming Isn’t Coding I’ve long

    thought that a really useful course would be not necessarily about programming, but about how to use your computer like a programmer. It often seems like that’s really the biggest skill we develop – not algorithmic thinking, but having a deep knowledge of how to use the computer just to do stuff. Framework’s computers aren’t perfect, but they are exciting Framework’s approach to laptops has me nostalgic for the first laptop I ever owned — one you’ve likely never heard of. Smithsonian Places 4.5 Million Historic Images Into the Public Domain The world's largest museum has added even more images from its collection to the public domain, totaling a whopping 4.5 million assets. Available on a platform called Smithsonian Open Access, anyone can download, reuse, and remix these images at any time—for free under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license. The Apple Lisa was a design revolution — and it still feels like one today The design language of the Lisa is the design language of modern computers. It was one of the first machines to use the metaphor of a desktop, including things like folders, icons, and application windows that mimicked sheets of paper. Why ChatGPT and Bing Chat are so good at making things up A look inside the hallucinating artificial minds of the famous text prediction bots.
  15. Friday Feed April 14, 2023 Animated Drawings Create animations starring

    your own drawn characters. This is an implementation of the algorithm described in the paper, 'A Method for Automatically Animating Children's Drawings of the Human Figure'. DIY IBM Selectric type balls give ’60s typewriters new life (and Comic Sans) A Selectric is nothing without its golf ball, but finding one is a costly pain. Timnit Gebru’s anti-'AI pause’ Why would we want to have a world where every single task is done by one model from OpenAI, and the whole world just pays them to do it? A Number System Invented by Inuit Schoolchildren Will Make Its Silicon Valley Debut In the remote Arctic almost 30 years ago, a group of Inuit middle school students and their teacher invented the Western Hemisphere’s first new number system in more than a century. How Instagram’s logo became iconic The original Instagram logo should have gotten its founders sued—and, well, it might have if Apple and a photographer with 45 minutes on his hands hadn’t saved the day.
  16. Friday Feed April 21, 2023 Google's Rush to Win in

    AI Led to Ethical Lapses, Employees Say Even after the public pronouncements, some found it difficult to work on ethical AI at Google. One former employee said they asked to work on fairness in machine learning and they were routinely discouraged — to the point that it affected their performance review. Managers protested that it was getting in the way of their “real work,” the person said. The Origins of Creativity The concept was devised in postwar America, in response to the cultural and commercial demands of the era. Now we’re stuck with it. The Car Thieves Using Tech Disguised Inside Old Nokia Phones and Bluetooth Speakers Criminals use tiny devices, sometimes hidden inside innocuous looking bluetooth speakers or mobile phones, to interface with the vehicle’s control system. This allows thieves with very little technical experience to steal cars without needing the key, sometimes in just 15 seconds or so. With the devices available to buy online for a few thousand dollars, the barrier of entry for stealing even high-end luxury cars is dramatically reduced. Business Intelligence as code Build polished data products with SQL and markdown Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart To look inside this black box, we analyzed Google’s C4 data set, a massive snapshot of the contents of 15 million websites that have been used to instruct some high-profile English-language AIs, called large language models, including Google’s T5 and Facebook’s LLaMA. (OpenAI does not disclose what datasets it uses to train the models backing its popular chatbot, ChatGPT)
  17. Friday Feed April 28, 2023 Mouthpad The MouthPad is a

    tongue-driven interface that controls your computer, smartphone, or tablet via Bluetooth. Virtually invisible to the world, but always available to you, it is positioned across the roof of your mouth to put all of the power of a conventional touchpad in the tip of your tongue. Whether you’re looking for a new way to unleash your creativity or seamlessly interact with your personal devices, the possibilities are infinite with the MouthPad. Observable Plot The JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization NASA Power Hack Extends 45-Year Voyager 2 Mission Even Longer The interstellar traveler is gradually losing power, but a clever tweak means it can continue running all of its scientific instruments Watch the first demo of buzzy startup Humane’s wearable AI assistant in leaked clips “Imagine this: you’ve been in meetings all day and you just want a summary of what you’ve missed,” Chaudhri says before tapping the device and asking to be caught up. In response, the device offers a summary of “emails, calendar invites, and messages.” A Chat With New York Times Graphics Editor Marco Hernandez We all enjoy doodling. At the age of four, most of us were able to grab a pencil to go crazy expressing our thoughts and imagination. That’s evidence that by nature we want to communicate something, express ourselves, and, at the same time, appreciate it.
  18. Friday Feed May 5, 2023 The Full Story of Large

    Language Models and RLHF Large Language Models have been in the limelight since the release of ChatGPT, with new models being announced seemingly every week. This guide walks through the essential ideas of how these models came to be. How Mojo works in Practice Jeremy Howard demo for Mojo launch CSS Zen Garden turns 30 The Canadian web designer Dave Shea launched a community gallery of websites called CSS Zen Garden. The project offered a simple HTML template to be downloaded, the graphic design of which could be customized by any web designer, but only with the help of cascading styles and one’s own pictures. The goal of the project was to demonstrate the various possibilities of CSS in creating visual web design. The CSS Zen Garden gallery exhibited hundreds of examples of diverse web design, all based on a single template containing the same HTML code. Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? A.I. has become a way for a company to evade responsibility by saying that it’s just doing what “the algorithm” says, even though it was the company that commissioned the algorithm in the first place. Eye Candy A Gallery of Cinematic Teghniques
  19. Friday Feed May 12, 2023 How Mark Zuckerberg Led the

    Tech Industry Into a Metaverse Wasteland Zuckerberg misled everyone, burned tens of billions of dollars, convinced an industry of followers to submit to his quixotic obsession, and then killed it the second that another idea started to interest Wall Street From Netflix to HBO, the terrible design of streaming is ruining TV Streaming services have perfected the art of bad design. AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are Because what we are witnessing is the wealthiest companies in history (Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon …) unilaterally seizing the sum total of human knowledge that exists in digital, scrapable form and walling it off inside proprietary products, many of which will take direct aim at the humans whose lifetime of labor trained the machines without giving permission or consent. AI, AI, AI...AI Google is focusing on AI at this year’s I/O What Makes A Data Visualisation Elegant? A prominent strand of discussion observed the importance of a visualisation being able to appeal to its audience through its visual aesthetic. It should charm them and create a positive first impression.
  20. Friday Feed May 19, 2023 Framework Laptop 13 review: a

    DIY dream come true But the Framework has a lot of other advantages over it now, upgradability aside: It has a better screen, a better port selection, better audio, a much quieter and cooler chassis, and better battery life. Crypto: New. Fraud: Old. The “democratization of finance” means the good and the bad; you don’t get to choose which parts. The normal trappings of capitalism and markets — concentration, inequality, and fraud — remain. He started a computing REVOLUTION—then the shortage hit interviewed Eben Upton, co-founder of Raspberry Pi, in early May. We talked about Pi shortages, RP2040, RISC-V, Sony investment, and how the name 'Raspberry Pi' was born! The Automation Charade The rise of the robots has been greatly exaggerated. Whose interests does that serve? Visualizing World Governance Data as a Flower Garden To solve this, I used each country’s latitude and longitude to place it on its geographical location (using a simple equirectangular projection). Then, I reapplied the “force” transformation. This added spatial dimension and created a “floral cartogram.”
  21. Friday Feed May 26, 2023 Donald Knuth and ChatGPT Since

    one of today's popular recreations is to play with chatGPT, I decided on 07 April 2023 to try my own little experiment, as part of a correspondence with Stephen Wolfram. Cory Doctorow: How Big Tech Captured Culture Artists, musicians, and writers are getting ripped off, according to Cory Doctorow, co-author of "Chokepoint Capitalism." From Amazon and book publishing and Spotify and music to Google and Facebook and news media, big tech has ,captured culture,, creating modern day monopolies and ,chokepoints., Doctorow explains how these chokepoints work, and the current film and TV writer's strike and their concerns over AI. ‘Big Brother’ is Using Advanced Camera Tech and AI to Target the Poor The overwhelming majority of the 1.6 million Americans living in public housing are non-white residents. These residents are undergoing 24/7 surveillance. TikTok is now banned in Montana Montana Governor Greg Gianforte has signed a bill banning TikTok within the state — the first ban of its kind in the United States. The bill, SB 419, prohibits TikTok from operating “within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana” and demands mobile app stores make the app unavailable for Montana residents. Building a Raspberry Pi based ultrasound imaging development platform This project has a specific target of providing a low-cost, open source technological kit to allow scientists, academics, hackers, makers or OSHW fans to hack their way to ultrasound imaging - below 500$ - at home, with no specific equipment required.
  22. Friday Feed June 2, 2023 Hold the postmortem: The metaverse

    was never alive in the first place People never really bought into the idea of the metaverse, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in collaborative open worlds. GitHub’s automatic coding tool rests on untested legal ground / The Copilot tool has been trained on mountains of publicly available code Is Avoiding Extinction from AI Really an Urgent Priority? We should be wary of Prometheans who want to both profit from bringing the people fire, and be trusted as the firefighters. When photography produces something other than photographs I was struck by one sentence you said in the Blind Camera video “the code is as much an artwork as the object and the resulting images”: Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? In the battle for “hearts and minds,” modern art was particularly effective. John Hay Whitney, both a president of MoMA and a member of the Whitney Family, which founded the Whitney Museum of American Art, explained that art stood out as a line of national defense, because it could “educate, inspire, and strengthen the hearts and wills of free men.”
  23. Friday Feed June 9, 2023 Apple Announces Vision Pro One

    more thing... Apple Vision Pro Impressions! I tried Apple's first ever spatial computing device, a $3500 VR headset. These are my honest thoughts. First impressions: Yes, Apple Vision Pro works and yes, it’s good A lot of completely new and original hardware. Everywhere you look here there’s a new idea, a new technology or a new implementation Apple Vision Vision is a description of a product, it is an aspiration for a use case, and it is a critique on the sort of society we are building, behind Apple’s leadership more than anyone else. From “Heavy Purchasers” of Pregnancy Tests to the Depression-Prone: We Found 650,000 Ways Advertisers Label You But the exposure of a collection of audience segments this size offers consumers an unusual look at how they and their families are packaged, described, and categorized by ad companies.
  24. Friday Feed June 16, 2023 Vision Pro What has Apple

    built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025. On the Need for an AI Public Option Artificial intelligence will bring great benefits to all of humanity. But do we really want to entrust this revolutionary technology solely to a small group of US tech companies? How cars fuel racial inequality Black drivers are more likely to be pulled over by police than white drivers, and once pulled over, they are more likely to be ticketed, searched, and arrested. High-profile killings of unarmed Black drivers like Tyre Nichols, Philando Castile, and Walter Scott periodically draw attention to the fact that police traffic stops can be deadly, Sir Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence has enabled a 'final' Beatles song "It's kind of scary but exciting, because it's the future. We'll just have to see where that leads." Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview We spoke with Huffman for nearly 30 minutes about the platform’s API changes and ongoing user protests.
  25. Friday Feed June 22, 2023 BYTE Interview with the Creators

    of the Macintosh from 1984 On October 14, 1983, the design team for Apple Computer Inc.'s new Macintosh computer met with BYTE Managing Editor Phil Lemmons at the company's Cupertino, California, headquarters. In the dialogue that followed, Bill Atkinson, Steve Jobs, Andy Hertzfeld, Larry Kenyon, Joanna Hoffman, Burrell Smith, Dave Egner, Chris Espinosa, Steve Capps, Jerry Manock, Bruce Horn, and George Crowe discussed the evolution of their brainchild. Typography 2024: For America! For America’s Best The websites of the 2020 candidates were not miracles of originality. Though even compared to that middling standard, the 2024 candidates have converged even more forcefully around a small set of typography, color, and navigation choices. visionOS visionOS is the operating system that powers Vision Pro. Use visionOS together with familiar tools and technologies to build immersive apps and games for spatial computing. Bob Kahn on the Birth of “Inter-networking” A codeveloper of TCP/IP explains what led to his collaboration with Vint Cerf We have left the cloud The back of the napkin math is that we'll save at least $1.5 million per year by owning our own hardware rather than renting it from Amazon. And crucially, we've been able to do this without changing the size of the operations team at all. Running our applications in the cloud just never provided the promised productivity gains to do with any smaller of a team anyway.
  26. Friday Feed June 30, 2023 Animation vs. Math How much

    of this math do you know? Companies That Replace People with AI Will Get Left Behind Humanity never thrives when it fears innovation. Imagine if the first humans feared fire; yes, they got burned sometimes, but without harnessing the power of it, we might have gone extinct. We think the same applies to AI. Rather than fear it, we need to harness its power. AI Is a Lot of Work As the technology becomes ubiquitous, a vast tasker underclass is emerging — and not going anywhere. Employers losing 'key' workers because of forced return to office A recent report covering 9,500 employers and 6,650 employees across 17 global markets found that those who forced workers to come back to office buildings are paying a price, with 42 percent saying they'd subsequently lost more employees than expected. Gallery of Web Design History Browse through thousands of old websites in our gallery and discover forgotten trends in web design.
  27. Friday Feed July 7, 2023 Spill Is a New Black-Owned

    Twitter Alternative. Here’s What to Know About the App Spill is being designed by diverse developers who are programming the artificial intelligence on the platform to monitor abuse or hate against communities of color. “Everybody who’s in Black Twitter or any of these other communities knows that it’s powered by Black women. Setting all the trends and all of that is part of that, but also getting way more hate than any other group. It’s actually insane, when you actually look at it statistically. Why Instagram is taking on Twitter with Threads The ‘volatility’ of Twitter under Elon Musk has opened a window to compete. It’s a ‘risky’ bet worth trying, says Instagram boss Adam Mosseri. Authors file a lawsuit against OpenAI for unlawfully ‘ingesting’ their books Two authors have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, the company behind the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, claiming that the organisation breached copyright law by “training” its model on novels without the permission of authors. France set to allow police to spy through phones French police should be able to spy on suspects by remotely activating the camera, microphone and GPS of their phones and other devices, lawmakers agreed late on Wednesday, July 5. Part of a wider justice reform bill, the spying provision has been attacked by both the left and rights defenders as an authoritarian snoopers' charter, though Justice Minister Éric Dupond-Moretti insists it would affect only "dozens of cases a year." GUINNESS WORLD RECORD Fourth Of July Drone Show! (1,000+ Drones) This Fourth of July, history was made. Sky Elements Drone Shows achieved the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS™ title for the largest aerial sentence formed by multirotor/drones. 1,002 drones armed with bright LED lights took flight and dazzled the crowd with a show paying tribute to the history of the United States.
  28. Friday Feed July 14, 2023 Actors say Hollywood studios want

    their AI replicas — for free, forever “This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. A change of typeface: Microsoft’s new default font has arrived He designed the font with a slight humanist touch. He wanted Aptos to have the universal appeal of the late NPR newscaster Carl Kasell and the astute tone of The Late Show host Stephen Colbert. “There’s always that little voice inside of me saying, ‘You know, you gotta try to sneak in a little bit of humanity. We might have accidentally killed the only life we ever found on Mars nearly 50 years ago In one experiment, the Viking landers added water to Martian soil samples. That might have been a very bad idea. ChatGPT: A Bullshit Tool For Bullshit Jobs What else but a bullshit-generating tool to cancel out bullshit-requiring tasks so people can finally fill their lives with something else? Seven Rules For Internet CEOs To Avoid Enshittification But if investors are pushing you to make more money now, figure out ways to do that by adding even more value to the world, rather than trying to squeeze your existing community, ripping away the things they love, and telling them you’re doing it for their own good.
  29. Friday Feed July 21, 2023 Vera Molnár: The Grande Dame

    of Generative Art nfluenced by her time among the post-WWII Paris avant-garde, Vera Molnár became one of the first artists to incorporate computers in her practice. Decades later, she’s still making radical works of digital art. A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis One day, I decided to visit my university library to see the original specimen sheet printed by William Caslon in 1741, in the library's rare book collection. It was a timeless experience seeing and handling the specimen sheet itself, not a digital scan of it. It was like a live performance of the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverein, versus an mp3 on the iPod. TikTok is the most popular news source for 12 to 15-year-olds, says Ofcom Algorithm-driven viral video app overtakes YouTube and Instagram as most used single source of news for young teenagers Christopher Nolan wants Oppenheimer to be a cautionary tale for Silicon Valley The film about a man who regrets his great technological innovation because he failed to consider its ramifications certainly does have some potential parallels. Here’s why the best IMAX movies still need a Palm Pilot to work Oppenheimer is 600 pounds of 70mm IMAX film, and it wouldn’t work so well on-screen if it weren’t for a 21-year-old PDA.
  30. Friday Feed July 28, 2023 What AI Teaches Us About

    Good Writing While AI can speed up the writing process, it doesn’t optimize quality — and it endangers our sense of connection to ourselves and others. Llama and ChatGPT Are Not Open-Source An assessment of openness among ostensibly open-source LLM models finds that few live up to the claim Are data dashboards vanity projects? Based on the research on data literacy, this article offers a critique of the overabundance of data visualizations and dashboards, talks about when to use them appropriately, and sketches some guidelines for identifying when an alternative is justified. Your Legacy on Earth May Be a Plant Within ten minutes’ drive of our house, there were no fewer than five home sites that had gone to seed, and sometimes to earth, with nothing left but a foundation and thousands of daffodils. They lost their kids to Fortnite A group of Canadian parents say their kids are so addicted to the video game Fortnite that they’ve stopped eating, sleeping and showering. Now these parents want to hold its tech-giant creator accountable.
  31. Friday Feed August 4, 2023 Data Colonialism and Data Sets

    This is the pattern of colonization — ancient, familiar, and evolving. In their book The Costs of Connection, Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias explore “data colonialism,” a topic describing the “process by which governments, non-governmental organizations and corporations claim ownership of and privatize the data that is produced by their users and citizens.” Maps Distort How We See the World Countries closer to the equator—which happen to be poorer1—seem smaller than they are. Catching up on the weird world of LLMs My goal was to help people who haven’t been completely immersed in this space catch up to what’s been going on. I cover a lot of ground: What they are, what you can use them for, what you can build on them, how they’re trained and some of the many challenges involved in using them safely, effectively and ethically. Behind "Hello World" on Linux Today I was thinking about – what happens when you run a simple “Hello World” Python program on Linux Why Edge Detection Doesn’t Explain Line Drawing Why do line drawings work? Why is it that we can immediately recognize objects in line drawings, even though they are not a phenomenon from our natural world. Numerous studies show that people who have never seen a line drawing before can understand a line drawing; line drawing is not something you have to learn to understand.
  32. Friday Feed August 11, 2023 Artificial General Intelligence This page

    contains up-to-date information about the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), collected and organized according to my judgment, though efforts are made to avoid personal biases. The Lines of Code That Changed Everything Apollo 11, the JPEG, the first pop-up ad, and 33 other bits of software that have transformed our world. What comes after Zoom? Zoom is the Skype of video - it turned a technology few people used much into a mass-market product. But next we’ll get the equivalents of Instagram and Snap - products that ask different questions. Zoom solved getting into a call, but why are you in the call? Want to pwn a satellite? Turns out it's surprisingly easy A study into the feasibility of hacking low-Earth orbit satellites has revealed that it's worryingly easy to do. 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: ‘A lot of executives have egg on their faces’ “Many companies are realizing they could have been a lot more measured in their approach, rather than making big, bold, very controversial decisions based on executives’ opinions rather than employee data,”
  33. Friday Feed August 18, 2023 These Women Tried to Warn

    Us About AI Today the risks of artificial intelligence are clear — but the warning signs have been there all along iMac at 25: a visual history of Apple’s iconic all-in-one computer the iMac has become one of the most popular desktop computer lines ever. The design has evolved from bulbous cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitor all-in-ones to versions that look like contemporary table lamps — and eventually toward the slim aluminum plaques on stands that adorn doctor offices everywhere today. Alongside that, the tech inside has gone from PowerPC chips to x86 Intel processors and, now, to the Arm-based Apple Silicon design. The creator of Black Mirror is okay with tech. People, on the other hand ... Usually our technologies give with one hand and sort of slap us round the back of the head with the other 3 reasons we use graphic novels to teach math and physics In addition to covering a wide range of topics and audiences, graphic novels can explain tough topics without alienating student averse to STEM – science, technology, engineering and math. Even for students who already like math and physics, graphic novels provide a way to dive into topics beyond what is possible in a time-constrained class. What helps people get comfortable on the command line? Sometimes I talk to friends who need to use the command line, but are intimidated by it.
  34. Friday Feed August 25, 2023 "Open" "AI" isn't the "open"

    parts of "open AI" are insufficient for achieving the other claimed benefits of "open AI": they don't promote auditing, or safety, or competition. Indeed, they often cut against these goals. A visit to the one-man computer factory Computers used to be made out of wood, endlessly customizable, and totally personal. Now they’re all metal rectangles. Can one guy in his LA house help bring the old way back? Why young people can't get enough of subtitles It's a controversial moment for anyone watching a show or movie together: Subtitles or no subtitles? For most young people, it's an easy choice. Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding Code Llama is a code-specialized version of Llama 2 that was created by further training Llama 2 on its code-specific datasets, sampling more data from that same dataset for longer. Why Chandrayaan-3 landed near the moon's south pole — and why everyone else wants to get there too Interest in the lunar south pole as a landing site is mainly driven by the fact that scientists know the region hosts water in the form of ice. Water is, of course, essential for life as we know it — but it also has other uses. For instance, it can act as a coolant for equipment and even provide rocket fuel. The latter could be especially useful for a staging mission to Mars launched from the moon someday.
  35. Friday Feed September 1, 2023 Generative AI and intellectual property

    If you put all the world’s knowledge into an AI model and use it to make something new, who owns that and who gets paid? This is a completely new problem that we’ve been arguing about for 500 years. Microsoft is using malware-like pop-ups in Windows 11 to get people to ditch Google I thought I had malware on my main Windows 11 machine this weekend. There I was minding my own business in Chrome before tabbing back to a game and wham a pop-up appeared asking me to switch my default search engine to Microsoft Bing in Chrome. Why McDonald's Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken and How To Fix Them You’ve got to feel sorry for those poor McDonald's employees. Why is it that their ice cream machines are always broken? If you check the historical data, you’ll see the failure rates get worse over the summer. One thing we know for sure is that this 42% downtime is in no way related to the various alien invasions that New York is prone to. No, not Sting. The other type of aliens. To get to the bottom of this potentially extra-terrestrial mystery, we bought our very own ice cream machine. A DIY ‘bionic pancreas’ is changing diabetes care — what's next? Ten years ago, a tech-savvy group of people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) decided to pursue a DIY approach to their own treatment. They knew that a fairly straightforward piece of software could make their lives much easier, but no companies were developing it quickly enough. The NYPD will police Labor Day parties with surveillance drones If there’s a drone flying over your backyard party this Labor Day / J’Ouvert / West Indian Day Parade weekend in New York City, it might be the police — because the NYPD have apparently granted themselves the power to surveil the city that way.
  36. Large language models aren’t people. Let’s stop testing them as

    if they were. “There are several critical issues with current evaluation techniques for large language models,” says Natalie Shapira, a computer scientist at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. “It creates the illusion that they have greater capabilities than what truly exists.”
  37. Friday Feed September 8, 2023 Silicon Valley’s elites can’t be

    trusted with the future of AI. We must break their dominance–and dangerous god complex Altman and his Silicon Valley peers are the wrong ones to lead us into the AI future because they are largely driven by profit, disconnected from the world’s realities, and often suffer from a serious god complex. VWFNDR™ — 003 A series of concept camera explorations by an open collective of photo nerds. Ideations on new hardware, UX and interface design paradigms. straight to your inbox. Guided by passion and ruled by feasibility. Your dream car is a privacy nightmare Rampant data collection and vague policies mean drivers essentially surrender their anonymity just to get behind the wheel, according to a scathing report from Mozilla. In Memoriam: John Warnock (1940–2023) A Mathematician With An Artist’s Eye Apple vs Meta: The Illusion of Privacy A walk through of the on-boarding process for Threads, and the hidden privacy implications
  38. Friday Feed September 15, 2023 United States takes on Google

    in biggest tech monopoly trial of 21st century The Justice Department's case hinges on claims that Google illegally orchestrated its business dealings, so that it's the first search engine people see when they turn on their phones and web browsers. Samsung is bringing artwork from the Met museum to its Frame TVs Samsung is expanding the art selection available on its Frame TVs with the help of a renowned museum. Today, the company and New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art announced a partnership that will bring 38 pieces from the Met to Samsung’s Art Store. Showing Human Stories Behind Data Points One of the many advantages of data visualisation is that it can help us understand big numbers. A simple bar chart can show many thousands of people. A line chart can track a whole country’s population over time. However, these displays that aggregate a large number of people or things in single visual elements can make it harder to emotionally connect with the people or objects being counted. Some designers instead choose to “disaggregate” data—a design style that focuses on individual points rather than grouping points together—to create a more emotional connection with the entities being counted. AI and the end of programming It’s still early days for large language models. ChatGPT was published less than a year ago; the underlying technology is only about six years old. Although I feel pretty sure of myself declaring that LLMs are not yet ready to conquer the world of coding, I can’t be quite so confident predicting that they never will be. The models will surely improve, and we’ll get better at using them. An introduction to Shader Art Coding In this tutorial, I explore the fascinating realm of shader art coding and aim to offer helpful insights and guidance to assist you in beginning your own creative journey.
  39. Friday Feed September 22, 2023 Google’s Bard chatbot can now

    find answers in your Gmail, Docs, Drive Google’s Bard AI chatbot is no longer limited to pulling answers from just the web — it can now scan your Gmail, Docs, and Drive to help you find the information you’re looking for Why Oppenheimer’s Cinematography is so Special Not many movies these days are shot on the "old" analog film format because of the rise of digital cameras, however Christopher Nolan and Quentin are filmmakers who swear by analog film. Why is it that? Is it pure nostalgia? Does that mean analog is still better than digital? Or is there something bigger underlying their choice? Let's find out... Computing History Hub Hi! This is a resource for learning about the history of computing, the design of user interfaces, and why we interact with these machines the way that we do. Each database includes a Start here view — consider these hand-picked as first reads. XML is better than YAML. Hear me out... My spicy take is that XML is better than YAML, because there are situations where XML is appropriate, but there’s no situation where YAML is appropriate. Study Finds 95 Percent Of NFTs Are Now Worthless "This daunting reality should serve as a sobering check on the euphoria that has often surrounded the NFT space," dappGambl's analysis reads. "Amid stories of digital art pieces selling for millions and overnight success stories, it is easy to overlook the fact that the market is fraught with pitfalls and potential losses."
  40. Friday Feed September 29, 2023 How Shopify’s anti-meeting, anti-mandatory-office experiment

    is going Nine months after the e-commerce giant dramatically reduced its meetings count, we see what they’ve learned. Meet Mr. Internet: Vint Cerf Even after 50 years, he’s still extending and evangelizing the Internet Synth wars: The story of MIDI, the one interface that ruled them all Kakehachi realised that, if liberated from purchase anxiety, musicians could buy what they wanted (and lots more of it), safe in the knowledge their studio would ‘just work’ for years to come. It's not just you. LinkedIn has gotten really weird Personal sharing on LinkedIn is booming, people who use the platform say, because of tidal shifts in both social norms and the social-media marketplace. Raspberry Pi 5: EVERYTHING you need to know Surprise! Raspberry Pi 5 is coming in 2023. This video highlights everything new in Pi 5.
  41. Friday Feed October 6, 2023 Shift Happens is a beautifully

    designed history of how keyboards got this way Marcin Wichary on his long quest to capture everything that shaped modern type. Ring Is Cashing In on the UFO Craze to Promote Its Surveillance Dystopia The 'Million Dollar Sighting' contest will reward people for putting up cameras in their home and capturing irrefutable proof of extraterrestrials. Nobel Prize in medicine won by two scientists for ‘groundbreaking findings’ on mRNA Covid-19 vaccines Karikó and Weissman published their results in a 2005 paper that received little attention at the time, it said, but later laid the foundation for critically important developments that served humanity during the coronavirus pandemic. Authors shocked to find AI ripoffs of their books being sold on Amazon But glancing at a few passages revealed that Cellan-Jones had fallen victim to someone attempting to piggyback on his memoir by releasing a title with text apparently generated by artificial intelligence – one of an influx of AI titles since the emergence of ChatGPT enabled people to generate pages of text rather than bothering to write it. Why Timnit Gebru wants AI giants to think small When a select few companies in Silicon Valley promise more than their technology can actually deliver, Gebru argues, it makes it even harder for smaller companies to compete.
  42. Friday Feed October 13, 2023 Predictive Policing Software Terrible At

    Predicting Crimes Crime predictions generated for the police department in Plainfield, New Jersey, rarely lined up with reported crimes, an analysis by The Markup has found, adding new context to the debate over the efficacy of crime prediction software Exploratory Data Analysis for Humanities Data One of the goals of the course was to try to teach enough computing to a mostly non-technical and definitely not computer-experienced population that they could use computers to do an interesting and new (to them) exploration of some dataset that they found intriguing. The Algorithm for Precision Medicine Programming Languages and Medicine: optiming health with data A Brooklyn Café That Said No More Influencers Its meticulously curated space has a no-laptop policy, so that people can concentrate on their misugaru ice cream served in a silver goblet. But over the past two months, its problem has not been unsanctioned laptop users — it’s been hordes of influencers armed with tripods. NASA finds water and organics in asteroid sample—possible clues to origin of life By studying Bennu, scientists are looking back to that primordial era when Earth began transitioning from an extremely hot world with a hellish surface environment into something more like a mud ball.
  43. Friday Feed October 20, 2023 App, Lover, Muse Inside a

    47-year-old Minnesota man's three-year relationship with an AI chatbot. Hacker leaks millions more 23andMe user records on cybercrime forum The same hacker who leaked a trove of user data stolen from the genetic testing company 23andMe two weeks ago has now leaked millions of new user records. Wealth Shown to a Pixel Scale Compelling view of the wealth gap The 1924 Mikiphone: The World’s First Pocket Record Player Back in the 1920s, long before modern gadgets took over our daily lives, a nifty little invention brought music to people’s pockets. The 10 Year Anniversary of the HealthCare.gov Rescue It was getting late. Could we throw a Hail Mary? Walk out of that building leaving behind something of tangible value, something promising they could build on?
  44. Friday Feed October 27, 2023 First malaria vaccine slashes early

    childhood mortality In a major analysis in Africa, the first vaccine approved to fight malaria cut deaths among young children by 13% over nearly 4 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported last week. Internet Artifacts Internet artifacts -- 1977 to 2007 -- for example the map of the Arpanet, the first smiley and LOL, the first Amazon order, the first Facebook page. NASA just sent a software update to a spacecraft 12 billion miles away Voyager 2 is over 12 billion miles from Earth, making its way through interstellar space. Along its almost 50-year journey, the probe has seen more of the universe than we ever will. Now, NASA has completed a critical software update for Voyager 2 that will help keep it running even longer. Discovering William Blake's Innovative Printing Process Watch the printmaker Michael Phillips demonstrate Blake's relief-etching process. Running the “Reflections on Trusting Trust” Compiler In October 1983, 40 years ago this week, Ken Thompson chose supply chain security as the topic for his Turing award lecture. In the lecture, Ken explains in three steps how to modify a C compiler binary to insert a backdoor when compiling the “login” program, leaving no trace in the source code. In this post, we will run the backdoored compiler using Ken’s actual code.
  45. Friday Feed November 3, 2023 The people who ruined the

    internet As the public begins to believe Google isn’t as useful anymore, what happens to the cottage industry of search engine optimization experts who struck content oil and smeared it all over the web? Well, they find a new way to get rich and keep the party going. The Cloud Computer Today we are announcing the general availability of the world’s first commercial cloud computer...From the outset at Oxide, and as I outlined in my 2020 Stanford talk, we have had three core beliefs as a company: Cloud computing is the future of all computing infrastructure. The computer that runs the cloud should be able to be purchased and not merely rented. Building a cloud computer necessitates a rack-level approach — and the co-design of both hardware and software. The Beauty of Chalk Wynne, a professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, traveled across North and South America and into Europe to photograph mathematicians’ chalkboards. The beauty of finished software This program embodies the concept of finished software — a software you can use forever with no unneeded changes. YouTube's ‘War’ on Adblockers Shows How Google Controls the Internet Google's anti-ad scripts are breaking browsers and privacy plugins. It could get worse because Google controls the ad market, Chrome, and the extension store.
  46. Friday Feed November 10, 2023 Unexpected Baskerville: The Story of

    LoveFrom Serif LoveFrom, founded by Sir Jony Ive, Marc Newson, and Peter Saville, is a collective of creatives who explore the intersection of design, art, and technology. As their first project, they created the “LoveFrom“ typeface, drawing inspiration from the iconic letterforms of John Baskerville. This talk delves into the process of creating a new interpretation of Baskerville‘s letters, exploring surviving punches, printed books, and contemporary writing master‘s manuals. Humane officially launches the AI Pin, its OpenAI-powered wearable See also:https://hu.ma.ne/ What Humane is trying to do with the Pin is essentially strip away all the interface cruft from your technology. It won’t have a homescreen or lots of settings and accounts to manage; the idea is that you can just talk to or touch the Pin, say what you want to do or know, and it’ll happen automatically. The OpenAI Keynote This is the implication of a Universal Interface, which ChatGPT is striving to be: it also requires universal access, and that will always be a challenge for any company that is “just an app.” Yes, as I noted, the odds seem long, thanks to Apple and Google’s dominance, but I think there is an outside chance that the paradigm-shifting keynote is only just beginning its comeback. Fourteen Years of Go Today we celebrate the fourteenth birthday of the Go open source release! Go has had a great year, with two feature-filled releases and other important milestones. Ray, This Is a Religion’: Inside Ray Dalio’s Hedge Fund Core to that effort is Dalio’s narrative that all Bridgewater employees are on an equal playing field and that any difference in rank or authority is due only to a rigorous system that susses out merit. That system involves employees constantly rating one another, taking real-time polls in meetings on whether a speaker is right or wrong, voting on whom to hire and fire, and being quizzed on internal case studies and investigations
  47. Friday Feed November 17, 2023 Is My Toddler a Stochastic

    Parrot? The world is racing to develop ever more sophisticated large language models while a small language model unfurls itself in my home. A Failed AI Girlfriend Product, and My Lessons But, does humanity really need an AI friend? https://mazzzystar.github.io/2023/11/16/ai-girlfriend-product/ Coding has always felt to me like an endlessly deep and rich domain. Now I find myself wanting to write a eulogy for it. DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs Here’s a catalog, from a guy who chooses cool gadgets, and writes about them in great detail, every word his own. Sounds fun. And then, you dig in. Capturing One Million Deaths on a Page: A Chat with NYT’s Carrie Mifsud When I was asked to do this, I knew it would have to have news value, be informative, be sophisticated but also carry the weight of the loss somehow. I was looking for a way to do all of that.
  48. Friday Feed November 24, 2023 OpenAI chaos: A timeline of

    firings, interim CEOs, re-hirings and other twists If we've learned anything from the mess at OpenAI, it's that the humans are still in charge, for now. Ansel: Your digital darkroom It is grounded in the legacy of Ansel Adams, pianist and photographer, who pushed darkroom craftsmanship like never before to serve his photographic vision. (Ansel is what Darktable 4.0 could have been if its developers were not so busy turning it into an usability nightmare.) Polio is on the brink of eradication. Here's how to keep it from coming back The campaign to eradicate polio could succeed in the next few years. But that’s just the beginning of a new challenge — keeping it away. Reflecting on 18 years at Google The deterioration of Google's culture will eventually become irreversible, because the kinds of people whom you need to act as moral compass are the same kinds of people who don't join an organisation without a moral compass. Elon Musk’s Poisoned Platform When Musk bought Twitter last year, he said that he wanted to protect the platform as a bastion of free speech. It has become increasingly apparent that the speech he means to protect is primarily his own and that of people who agree with him.
  49. Friday Feed December 1, 2023 IT sent the intern to

    sort out the nasty VP who was too important to bother with backups One day, the horror VP reported that her emails were going missing. She would be in the middle of writing, then if she left her desk for whatever reason she would return to find her work in progress gone. This was happening several times a day. Python is Easy. Go is Simple. Simple != Easy. we’d start with a Django skeleton because of its built-in Admin, which is fantastic. Once the rough Django proof-of-concept starts resembling a product, we identify how much of it can be rewritten in Go. The birth and death of search engine optimization The basic idea is that you use generative AI to systematically churn out articles about a given topic and then use A/B testing to eliminate the ones that don't "work" on search engines in favor of the ones that do. This is a way to automate the process of creating content farms. Color: From Hexcodes to Eyeballs Why do we perceive background-color: #9B51E0 as this particular purple? When technology follows art From optics to machine learning, artists have played an important, if underrated, role in the history of technology
  50. Friday Feed December 8, 2023 Three Decades of HTML A

    few days ago was the 30th anniversary of the first time I wrote an HTML document. Back in 1993, I took a Usenet posting of the “Incomplete Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode Guide” and marked it up. How Companies Incentivize Layoffs—A Study of Corporate Career Incentives Managers at growing companies are incentivized to do one thing more than anything else. Grow their teams. The 23andMe Data Breach Keeps Spiraling 23andMe has maintained that attackers used a technique known as credential stuffing to compromise the 14,000 user accounts—finding instances where leaked login credentials from other services were reused on 23andMe How the first gen ipod was reverse engineered to run Rockbox: ... Now the exploit was rewritten to read memory, and *blink* out the contents using the LCD backlight. A LEGO construction was built and a webcam would register the binary stream of a few megabytes of memory contents I turned Hacker News top stories into AI art on your wall The concept is straightforward: every four hours, the most discussed stories from Hacker News are transformed into AI-generated art, optimized for the E Ink display.
  51. Friday Feed December 15, 2023 In historic decision, FDA approves

    a CRISPR-based medicine for treatment of sickle cell disease The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the world’s first medicine based on CRISPR gene-editing technology, a groundbreaking treatment for sickle cell disease that delivers a potential cure for people born with the chronic and life-shortening blood disorder. How to make Charts for the Movies For Chart Chat #46 we're looking at charts on the big screen. We're joined by Shaun Yue. He's designed the data interfaces for many Hollywood movies, including Skyfall, The Dark Knight, Prometheus and many more. Tyler Hobbs on Algorithmic Aesthetics This is the way I like to precisely define where the art is now: it's the potential output space of the generative procedure combined with the curation model. AI, and everything else Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. For 2024, ‘AI, and everything else’. “In my lifetime, I've seen two demonstrations of technology that struck me as revolutionary...The GUI and ChatGPT” Why Vision Pro Will Change Photography Vision Pro opens up opportunities to think about this in more traditional terms — using negative space and the environment with a device like a smartphone can help open up creative opportunities.
  52. Friday Feed December 22, 2023 The 2023 Stratechery Year in

    Review 12 of Stratechery’s free Weekly Articles were about AI in some way, shape, or form. The second biggest topic was a Stratechery staple: the evolving content landscape; 2023 was particularly notable, though, for the dramatic shifts that are hitting Hollywood, highlighted by both strikes and the Disney-Charter standoff this fall. There were also big stories about the tech industry itself, from a bank failure to board room drama, and a “vision” of what might come next. Unblocking User Freedom: the right to use adblockers As the use of these adblockers increases, some companies have begun considering whether it is legal for users to be able to block their ads. Fedora Asahi Remix Fedora Asahi Remix is the result of a close multi-year collaboration between the Asahi Linux project and the Fedora Project. Apple wants AI to run directly on its hardware instead of in the cloud Apple’s latest research about running large language models on smartphones offers the clearest signal yet that the iPhone maker plans to catch up with its Silicon Valley rivals in generative artificial intelligence. Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the public domain. The first movies in which the iconic mouse appeared – Steamboat Willie and the silent version of Plane Crazy­[1] – were made in 1928 and works from that year go into the public domain in the United States on New Year’s Day 2024.[
  53. Friday Feed December 29, 2023 The 2023 Good Tech Awards

    Toasting a year of breakthroughs (and a few breakdowns) in Silicon Valley and beyond. NY Times copyright suit wants OpenAI to delete all GPT instances Shows evidence that GPT-based systems will reproduce Times articles if asked. 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning Decades of research into cognitive psychology, education, and programming education provide strong insights into how we learn. Gemini vs GPT-4V : A Preliminary Comparison and Combination of Vision-Language Models Through Qualitative Cases The rapidly evolving sector of Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) is at the forefront of integrating linguistic and visual processing in artificial intelligence. This paper presents an in-depth comparative study of two pioneering models: Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4V(ision). Our study involves a multi-faceted evaluation of both models across key dimensions such as Vision-Language Capability, Interaction with Humans, Temporal Understanding, and assessments in both Intelligence and Emotional Quotients. The core of our analysis delves into the distinct visual comprehension abilities of each model. Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC) vs USB-C Chargers I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.