Ben Werdmuller
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Blog aspirationally, not opportunistically

When you find yourself writing a 3000 word essay about engineering management on your personal website, you might want to take a step back and take another look at your goals. And if you find that this isn’t quite what you want to be talking or writing about, it

24 Mar 2024

Building engineering

I’ve spent most of my career — now well over two decades of it — building things on the web. I’ve worked as a software developer, I’ve founded a couple of my own companies, and I’ve often found myself leading teams of engineers. Right now I’m the

23 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

Threads has entered the fediverse

"We’re taking a phased approach to Threads’ fediverse integration to ensure we can continue to build responsibly and get valuable feedback from our users and the fediverse community." It's really great to see Meta do this and communicate well about it. However you see the

21 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

Big Journalism’s hopeless myopia

"One way you know that it’s business as usual for journalists is that so many have remained on Twitter, a platform whose owner has taken right-wing trollery to extremes lately. He loudly supports people who want to install a fascist government in the United States, and it’s

20 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

The Intercept charts a new legal strategy for digital publishers suing OpenAI

A detail I hadn't noticed: while the New York Times OpenAI lawsuit rested on copyright infringement, the Intercept, Raw Story, and AlterNet are claiming a DMCA violation. "A study released this month by Patronus AI, a startup launched by former Meta researchers, found that GPT-4 reproduced copyrighted

20 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

AI Is Threatening My Tech and Lifestyle Content Mill

"Sure, our articles maintain a rigid SEO template that creatively resembles the kitchen at a poorly run Quiznos, and granted, all our story ideas are gleaned from better-written magazine articles from seven months ago (that we’re totally not plagiarizing), but imagine if AI wrote those articles? So much

19 Mar 2024

Building vs using the web

One thing that becomes clear when you move outside of open web groups and a certain kind of tech company is the difference between trying to build the web as a platform and trying to use the web as a platform. In the former mental model, you’re experimenting to

19 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

ASCII art elicits harmful responses from 5 major AI chatbots

"Researchers have discovered a new way to hack AI assistants that uses a surprisingly old-school method: ASCII art." So many LLM exploits come down to finding ways to convince an engine to disregard its own programming. It's straight out of 1980s science fiction, like teaching an

18 Mar 2024

The edges are more interesting

If AI makes it easier to create generic, middle-of-the-road content, the way forward for human beings is to create content that is out there on the edges, blazing ground that probabilistic algorithms could never possibly reach. Which, honestly, I wish more people would do anyway. The middle of the road

18 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

“I've Rediscovered A Mode Of Expression That Was Important To Me As A Kid”: A Talk with Jordan Mechner

A lovely interview with the creator of Karateka and Prince of Persia. (Karateka in particular was a formative game for me.) "If you'd asked me at age 12, I’d probably have said that my dream job would be comics artist or animator." Me too. So

18 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

The weird world of altruistic YouTube

This is such an interesting trend: "It seems like a pretty well-worn path at this point. Start a YouTube channel with some compelling videos, and when you amass enough views/revenue, use that money to entice strangers into helping you make more videos that get more revenue." Mr

17 Mar 2024

Right-wing comments on Microsoft Start

My posts are syndicated to Microsoft Start as part of the Creator Program. It’s been interesting to see which ones find an audience there and which ones don’t: politics seems to be more interesting to the community there than tech commentary, which stands to reason, as it’s

16 Mar 2024
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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

Writing at the intersection of technology, journalism, and community.

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Ben Werdmuller explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. Always independently published, reader-supported, and free to read.