Proposal: every product vendor must disclose the wages of the people who made it. If you buy a box of chocolate, you get to know how much the people who picked the raw ingredients made, as well as the chocolatiers downstream from them, and so on. If you buy an
Walking around Oxford, my hometown, I used to see Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke from time to time. He always looked miserable. At Boots the Chemist? Miserable. At the Ashmolean Museum? Miserable. Having a picnic with his family? Miserable. Walking down North Parade? Miserable. It was only years later that I
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
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
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"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
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"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
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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
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"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
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
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"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
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
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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