The most radical act in an age of outrage is to play In a culture driven by outrage and constant alerts, play may be the simplest way to reclaim focus, resilience, and human connection.

This piece on the importance of play - even as an act of resistance - is quite good thenextweb.com/news/the-mos...

Remember when big tech companies were considered too powerful to control? I guess these last few years they very forcefully made the point that they are, in fact, very willing to submit to pressure.

I'm not 100% sure what to make of that.

I just saw a website without an adblocker for the first time in a long time.

MY GOD WHAT IS THIS

So either he's uninformed and pundits about things he doesn't understand (which is bad) or he knows it and straight up lies (which is bad). Why does he get such a big platform all the time again?

Many if not all of these wicked societal problems are there not because they're hard to solve but because there different and opposing interest at play. It's a question of governance and collective decision-making, not of scale.

Like, and I know this is an example so simple it sounds silly, but the whole idea that if AI massively boosted GDP that it would help fight poverty, that's total nonsense. There's no lack of money, it's just structurally unevenly distributed.

Whenever I hear Sam Altman talk about potential benefits of AI (esp. GAI) I'm struck by how little he seems to understand the problem spaces he talks about, and how little journalists call him out on it.

"A certain danger lurks there." Indeed.

cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/57...

Joseph Weizenbaum meant ELIZA to be a warning, not an inspiration. Looking at you, gen AI chatbots!

a screenshot of the text of a BBC article about friction-maxxing

"friction-maxxing"

when I first heard the term it struck me as a neologism, something really fresh; the BBC have caught on pretty quickly, though

Has Deutsche Post been losing a lot of mail these last few months? Is that a thing?

I keep coming back to this (it's a couple of years old by now), it's kinda stuck in my head bruces.medium.com/preliminary-...

Claims that AI can help fix climate dismissed as greenwashing Industry using ‘diversionary’ tactics, says analyst, as energy-hungry complex functions such as video generation and deep research proliferate

Sadly, this seems about right to me. We've all been burned by deceptive industry tactics. Being a gargantuan industry that has a lot to lose is a dangerous mix. Sigh. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Resilience > efficiency. Any day.

or McK, obviously

There is a special circle in hell reserved for the smart-asses who came up with the circular customer support systems where a bad error message leads to an call to action that leads back to a system that just tells you the same wrong error message. They 100% work for one of the big 4 consultancies.

Let me just say: People who can type fast and/or well with a bandaid on their finger are true heroes.

The longer I work in this space, the more I think that the whole framing of this recent generation of technologies as "smart" or "artificially intelligent" was an astounding success for the companies making them. So much of this should much more aptly be labeled "reactive" tech, if anything.

one hundred percent. amen!

Every time someone presses SKIP AD on a Youtube video, the advertiser knows *for sure* they just annoyed the hell out of a potential customer. If I was in their shoes, I'd wonder why I pay for those ads in the first place.

Has anyone, like EVER, intentionally subscribed to a newsletter in that pop-up sign-up window that pops up on every website these days?

To me it feels like I'm being punished as a user, having to click first on the cookie banner(s) and then close all the extra sign-ups sheets.

Duden vs KI: Fight!

So OpenAI builds an AI browser and adds... a clock widget? Is this the 90s?

Anyone got an idea for how to get "SwiftoDo for todo.txt", the iOS app, on a phone in Europe when the app isn't listed in Europe? I'd prefer not to get into any region-spoofing shenanigans because they tend to mess with other subscriptions, settings, etc...?

Haha now you're going all fancy on me!

The Em Dash Responds to the AI Allegations “In recent months, a curious fixation has emerged in corners of academia: the em dash. More specifically, the apparent moral panic around how it is...

Look, I know it's wrong BUT I DO IT ALL THE TIME! I'm an em-dash-spacer, I admit to the crime. To me, it just looks so right!

www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

I guess what I’m asking is: is Google Maps genAI now?

Can anyone explain why Google Maps data quality has gone down so much? Or is that a Germany/Berlin specific thing?

Coming to believe that a sizeable chunk of society is held together by people doing favors to their deceased friends’ families and spouses.