Links

As a manager, you should ask yourself: are you building a cathedral or a bazaar? And as an employee, you should ask yourself: do you prefer working in a cathedral or a bazaar?

In Cathedral vs Bazaar People Management, Ben Balter explains how these two styles of software development are indeed also styles of people management. He also explains how they can differ by industry (eg army needs more hierarchy than startup), individual (junior might need more structure than senior) and role (of course, it depends on what you do).

Ben Werdmuller tried Arc's new “AI”-based search and shares his concerns in Stripping the web of its humanity.

Like all these tools, it outputs falsehoods. But that isn't the worst issue, he explains. Without attribution, the tool gives a false sense of objectivity and hides away bias:

If I search for “who should I follow in AI?” I get the usual AI influencers, with no mention of Timnit Gebru or Joy Buolamwini (who would be my first choices). If I ask who to follow in tech, I get Elon Musk. It undoubtedly has a lens through which it sees the world.

It's a particular kind of bubble where Elon Musk is worth following and Timnit Gebru is not suggested (would very much recommend following her instead).

Ben also notes that when bots consume content instead of humans, that threatens the ecosystem of content and writing:

If we strip [payments or donations to writers] away, there’s no writing, information, or expression for the app to summarize.

Who's going to make the input these tools grab in order to generate their output? Google faced various legal issues around displaying excerpts of news outlets on their news website. But they did at least quote and attribute them, while linking to the original. The automated processing basically strips away any opportunity for writers to be paid (or known) for their work.

The web is yours. You can put up a website where you share whatever it is that you want to share with others.

(From: The indie web | James' Coffee Blog)

It took a while, but it's happening!

React 19 […] will have direct support for custom elements. Developers can expect that all tests on custom-elements-everywhere.com will pass by default going forward, like they currently do in the experimental channels. Release date, as well as docs for what's supported, still to be announced.

(From: RFC: Plan for custom element attributes/properties in React 19 · Issue #11347 · facebook/react)

Signal shares what it costs to make Signal:

We estimate that by 2025, Signal will require approximately $50 million dollars a year to operate (…)

Here we review some of these costs and where this money goes, [and] help clarify just what is required to fulfill the dream of privacy-preserving alternative technology, and contribute to establishing a solid foundation from which we can grow alternatives that contest tech surveillance and the incentives behind it.

(From: Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive on fhe Signal blog)

They do all this with donations, not investors.

Mandy Brown suggests we should give less fucks about work:

Because here’s what I’ve learned: if you give your fucks to the unliving—if you plant those fucks in institutions or systems or platforms or, gods forbid, interest rates—you will run out of fucks. One day you will reach into that bag and your hand will meet nothing but air and you will be bereft.

(From: A unified theory of fucks)

In a blog post, W3C's new CEO Seth Dobbs outlines a focus on putting people first. He explains global standards, like the W3C's, are essential to:

[ensure technologies] are accessible by all, secure, maintain privacy, respect the planet, and work anywhere in the world

“Artificial general intelligence” is a phrase different people assign different meanings to. Few think is actually within the realm of possibility. Yet, Zuckerberg talked to The Verge to announce Meta's new focus on trying to find out:

While he doesn’t have (…) an exact definition for it, he wants to build it.

(From: Mark Zuckerberg’s new goal is creating artificial general intelligence at The Verge)

In the same interview he also wanted to “unequivocally state” they're still focused on “the metaverse” and will spend more than 15 billion dollars per year on that. Imagine that sort of budget to go to solving some of the world's more clearly defined problems.

iA write excellent posts that put “AI” into context. In their latest, they compare these images, that ‘often miss realness, depth, and originality’, to stock photos. This comes with a business risk: your content looks cheaper, of less value:

using AI images makes all of your content feel ordinary. Good images enrich your article, bad images devalue it. Your audience thinks: “If they use AI for images, they probably use it for content, too.”

(From: AI Art is The New Stock Image)

Unless there's a load of generated images that are so good that we can't recognise them, and we don't realise, I think iA are right: they're super obvious to spot and already look old.

Further down in the post, they predict the lack of creativity in machines may spark more human creativity:

Photography has made us question traditional art. Similarly, AI can make us question empty off-the-shelf communication. Ironically, machine-generated content might catalyze a fresh wave of humane creativity and hand-crafted innovation in verbal and visual storytelling.

I sure hope so. If we are to create things worth having around, we've got to make our choices and intentions matter.

Melanie made a new website called Lit Tapes:

I read a couple books in the past few months that heavily featured music throughout the plot, and thought it would be fun to create playlists for those books.

(From: New project: Lit Tapes | Melanie Richards)

It looks gorgeous.

Books that feature a lot of music are my jam, so I love this idea. I'm currently reading Whites can dance too by Kalaf Epalanga, but in this genre I also liked Mix tape by Jane Sanderson and everything by Haruki Murakami.