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I’m a fan of the Bluesky leadership and engineering team. With the VC money as fuel, I expect their next 12 months or so to be golden, with lots of groovy features and mind-blowing growth. But that’s not what I’ll be watching.

I’ll be looking for ecosystem growth in directions that enable survival independent of the company. In the way that email is independent of any technology provider or network operator.

(From: ongoing by Tim Bray · Why Not Bluesky)

Love this new series by Tetralogical, who photographed and chatted with people with disabilities about what they do and how they use the web.

Meet Steve, a photographer from London who is deaf and low vision. He is an ex-civil servant who then went on to do freelance technology journalism and travelled the world.

(From: Meet Steve: a photographer who is deaf and low vision - TetraLogical)

Writer Joanna Maciejewska on Threads (29 March 2024):

You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction. I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.

(From: Threads)

Creating effective, trustworthy communication with language communities means doing the work to make sure your content meets them where they are.

A big part of this is learning about, and incorporating cultural norms into your efforts.

(From: Don’t forget to localize your icons – Eric Bailey)

Just as I argued here in April 2024, LLMs have reached a point of diminishing returns.

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The economics are likely to be grim. Sky high valuation of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence. As I have always warned, that’s just a fantasy.

(From: CONFIRMED: LLMs have indeed reached a point of diminishing returns)

Humans aren’t trained up. We have experience. We learn. And for us, learning a language, for example, isn’t learning to generate ‘the next token’. It’s learning to work, play, eat, love, flirt, dance, fight, pray, manipulate, negotiate, pretend, invent and think. And crucially, we don’t merely incorporate what we learn and carry on; we always resist. Our values are always problematic. We are not merely word-generators. We are makers of meaning.

(From: Can computers think? No. They can’t actually do anything | Aeon Essays)

This shouldn't surprise anyone, but it turns out LLMs also make up stuff when used by doctors:

[Professors Allison Koenecke and Mona Sloane] determined that nearly 40% of the hallucinations were harmful or concerning because the speaker could be misinterpreted or misrepresented.

(From: Researchers say AI transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said | AP News)

The article lists some examples: the tools made up violence, racial details and medication out of thin air.

If the pursuit of an easier, slower and more pleasant life comes at the expense of others, is staying where you are and suffering the right thing to do? Maybe.

(From: How Digital Nomads Are Exploiting the World - Thrillist)

The unlicensed use of creative works for training generative AI is a major, unjust threat to the livelihoods of the people behind those works, and must not be permitted

(From: Statement on AI training)

Gladwell writes like someone who doesn't care about being correct because he doesn't care about being correct! His spitballs are truly spitballs, and he doesn't care where they land.

(From: Forget Gladwell)