Blogs to read these days:
See also: web design links.
More in the linklog, under security and privacy. See also: Defending privacy with bad arguments
Now for a story in two acts:
Four years ago people were screaming off the rooftops about the obvious danger to privacy posed by Amazon's cloud-connected doorbell cameras. But people just have to be "incurable optimists", don't they.
And here's a different one:
In other news:
Code Is LOL (19 April 2022) Roughly two decades ago, when Lawrence Lessig coined the phrase "code is law", that was supposed to be a warning, not a roadmap.
Microsoft loves Linux — a little too much? (20 May 2020): just in case you were wondering what Microsoft can do now that they own GitHub.
"Ethics" and Ethics (11 April 2019) Facebook fishing for our email passwords, Roomba is hovering up all the data on our homes, Amazon is listening to our conversations for laughs, Tik-Tok spying on our kids. And that we see so much dirt on the surface makes it likely that under the surface it’s even worse. The solution for all of this: “Ethics”. Design ethics! Tech ethics! Business ethics! Ethics for AI!
Optimize what? (15 March 2019) Silicon Valley is full of the s****dest geniuses you’ll ever meet. The problem begins in the classrooms where computer science is taught.
See also: Trapped in the technologist factory (2021).
The house of cards really came crashing down in 2022:
But people have been raising red flags for a while:
The metaverse is bullshit (29 October 2021) PC Gamer's editorialist sure doesn't mince words.
Here Is The Article You Can Send To People When They Say “but The Environmental Issues With Cryptoart Will Be Solved Soon, Right?” (4 March 2021) Cryptocurrencies and NFTs are an absolute disaster for so many more reasons than the ecological.
Free Software is an Abject Failure (8 November 2021) And now you know why people fight and win Communist revolutions only to become dictators and install a totalitarian regime with centralized economy instead of the Communism they promised.
If a hammer was like AI… (22 June 2023) Computations will “estimate” your aim, tend to miss the nail and push for a different design. Often unnoticeably.
Losing the imitation game (9 April 2023) AI cannot develop software for you, but that's not going to stop people from trying to make it happen anyway. And that is going to turn all of the easy software development problems into hard problems.
ChatGPT Is Just an Automated Mansplaining Machine (8 February 2023) Look, we've all met this guy before.
Why Meta’s latest large language model survived only three days online (18 November 2022) Galactica was supposed to help scientists. Instead, it mindlessly spat out biased and incorrect nonsense.
Invasive Diffusion: How one unwilling illustrator found herself turned into an AI model (1 November 2022) How does it feel to be turned into an AI image model? To find out, I opened a door to the multiverse and interviewed the creator and unwilling subject of a controversial DreamBooth model.
The thing to know about the AI language models, OpenAI’s GPT-3 and its cousins, is that they are fundamentally bullshitters. The bullshit has gotten better and better, but at the core … well, there’s nothing at the core. — Notes on a genre (June 2022)
But that's just it. People include the prompt with AI art because art without context is nothing. What matters is who made it and why; what it says about the artist and ourselves. By itself, the Mona Lisa is an old rag soiled with paint. Its sole value lies in the questioning and discussions it invited from generations of viewers.
Self-driving cars:
A Basic Lack of Understanding (30 March 2018) How does artificial intelligence actually work, and what are its limitations?
Ken Shirriff's blog has many excellent articles about historic computers.
Conversely, the HackADay community and their HackADay blog cover what's going on right now in the way of cool hardware.
On the IBM System/360, microarchitectures, and sanctions
First IC :) (22 April 2018) I am very excited to announce details of the first homemade integrated circuit
Git is simply too hard (16 November 2020) Oh, really? Who designed a tool not really meant to serve human needs in the first place? Funny how in Bazaar, those two questions are trivially answered: you undo a commit with bzr uncommit, and you delete a branch... just like any old directory, because that’s all it is. Nerds... See also: Fossil Versus Git.
The reckoning: a manifesto for Code 2019 (10 June 2019) A Silicon Valley reckoning is forcing tech companies like Facebook and Google to rectify some of the incalculable mistakes they made as they built up the internet.
Software disenchantment (17 September 2018) I’ve been programming for 15 years now. Recently, our industry’s lack of care for efficiency, simplicity, and excellence started really getting to me, to the point of me getting depressed by my own career and IT in general.
Linux:
Systemd:
FreeBSD:
History of UNIX Manpages and other things UNIX:
The Comprehensive List of Window Managers for Unix, and other things X11:
And from long ago: A day without X (21 May 2007)
Haiku OS:
With the latest Beta, the open source Haiku Operating System becomes viable for daily usage.
TempleOS:
Terry Davis, a schizophrenic programmer, has spent 10 years building an operating system to talk to God.
The History of DOS and its free successor:
Windows:
More links: