I don’t want to call these the best books I read last year: I read plenty of other well-written, worthy contenders. But these six titles are the ones that stuck with me and left me thinking about them long after I was done; they were, in that sense,
NotableLinks
Charles Stross on tech oligarchs trying to build the torment nexus: "SF authors such as myself are popular entertainers who work to amuse an audience that is trained on what to expect by previous generations of science-fiction authors. We are not trying to accurately predict possible futures but
NotableLinks
Among other things, this campaign site has a useful list of US retail stores that use facial recognition right now (for example, Home Depot) as well as some that are thinking about it - and some that definitely won't (thank you, Costco). "Your face should not be scanned,
NotableLinks
I really like this exploration of what it might mean to build a sense of ambient togetherness on the web. "We currently have no visual, audible, tactile, spatial, or embodied awareness of one another. We also have no awareness of the other people reading this post, even if they&
NotableLinks
"Of course there will be examples of AI-generated misinformation, bots, and deepfakes during various elections next year. But the key question is how politicians will be using these tools." This is it: misinformation and disinformation threats are not some nameless force. Sure, there are people out there
NotableLinks
"Meta’s policies and practices have been silencing voices in support of Palestine and Palestinian human rights on Instagram and Facebook in a wave of heightened censorship of social media amid the hostilities between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups that began on October 7, 2023." This includes
NotableLinks
Some said it would never happen: Mickey Mouse is in the public domain. Or, at least, the very earliest version of him is. As the BBC points out: "It means creatives like cartoonists can now rework and use the earliest versions of Mickey and Minnie." Disney warns that
NotableLinks
I really like this: a starter pack of blogs to follow if you're new to RSS. Some of them are new to me (and others have familiar authors but seem to have fallen off my list). What better way to start the new year on the internet than
Let’s get this out of the way first: 2024 is going to be a hard year across the board. Mass layoffs, another hottest year on record, escalating conflicts with enormous human tolls and flagrant human rights violations in Gaza and Ukraine, not just a declining media but a declining
NotableLinks
There are some jaw-dropping infringements here, including an image where DALL-E apparently copies the entire Pixar universe from the single two-word prompt, "animated toys". It's impossible to hand-wave this away. Even if you don't think the New York Times case
2058 was many things: the hottest year in recorded history, a year when civil rights protests made national news in the face of deepening inequality, and where conflicts and the climate crisis turned millions of people into refugees around the globe. But it was also a year marked by rapid
NotableLinks
"I’d do this even if no one read it. Blogging, for me, is the perfect format. No restrictions when it comes to length or brevity: a post can be a considered and meticulously composed 3,000-word essay, or a spurted splat of speculation or whimsy. No rules