Long Links
This will be the 30th Long-Links outing. I’m 100% sure that there does not live a human being who has looked at all those Links, but my logfiles say that quite a few of you, Dear Readers, at least take the time to open one occasionally. All aboard!
Sadly, more than half the Long Links, this time out, are about AI. I almost decided to bury the piece but, whatever you or I think, the subject matters. And the ones I posted are a tiny fraction of those I read (or tried to) and I think are useful and not immoral.
But, let’s put all the non-AI stuff at the front so you can stop reading partway through if you’ve just had enough of that stuff.
Not about GenAI · Paul Ford has, after a lengthy gap, started writing again at ftrain.com. Excellent! Go there any day and there’ll almost certainly be something good at the top of the page. He’s a technologist and, yeah, writes about AI sometimes, but Warp and Woof is about dogs and their people. Charming.
I think most people who aren’t ultra-wealthy now agree that inequality is currently a central problem of our society. But it would be nice to put some numbers behind that assertion. Here is a conversation between Paul Krugman, Nobel-prizewinning economist, and Gabriel Zucman, a French specialist in the subject and frequent Piketty collaborator. Now, there are quite a few paragraphs up front of talk about general macroeconomic issues and comparisons between the US and Europe, which I enjoyed reading. And then inequality; here’s Zucman: “And so everybody now understands what was long understood for centuries, very much including in the West, which is that extreme wealth is never virtual, it is always extreme power.”
CO2 densities in Parts Per Million are a good measure of how full your inhalations are of others’ exhalations. And thus of how likely you are to catch something by breathing. Especially, Covid, which everyone with a half a brain knows is not nearly over. Anyhow, A. Grieve-Smith offers Nine observations from carbon dioxide monitoring: “I’ve been checking carbon dioxide levels for over three years now, and I’ve started to see patterns.” This piece could save your life, and that’s not a metaphor.
Patrick McKenzie, who writes Bits About Money, has an icy-cool style and this Link could be a Little Less Long, but I learn interesting things every time I read one of his pieces. Fraud Investigation is Believing Your Lying Eyes launches from the Minnesota child-care fraud story, but is mostly, as the title suggests, relates the conventional wisdom (which I didn’t know) about how to go sniffing around for in-progress fraud. From which “As a fraud investigator, you are allowed and encouraged to read Facebook at work.”
Hari Kunzru has written good books and is a former London native. Harpers gave him an assignment: Walk around and write about the city, thus Another London: Excavating the disenchanted city. It’s a tour through time as much as space — London, obviously, is history-drenched — and not just politics and power either, but arts and ideas. The writing is beautiful. It’ll take a chunk out of your day but the trade-off is good.
Here’s something beautiful: The HTML Review. Now I want to publish there, but I’d have to up my writing game.
Lankum · They’re an Irish band I just discovered, courtesy of Qobuz. The music grows out of traditional Irish acoustic folk. They play old and new songs and throw in a heavy dose of snarl and drone. Some of the chords are like rotated model augmented 11ths or some such, scratchy around the edges but helped with an itch I hadn’t known I had. Terrific musicians. Here’s Hunting the Wren. I might get over-excited and fly to Ireland to see them.
Tech, but not GenAI · Sebastian Pipping is, among other things, an Open-Source software developer, with whom I’ve collaborated. His recent Learn from me! begins “Not too long ago, someone literally asked me what they "could learn from me", and that question has stuck with me since.” So he offers a few candidate lessons. What a nice idea! What could people learn from you?
Filippo Valsorda, another OSS dev, is particularly interesting because he and a few partners have apparently figured out how to make a living from their work. He recently published Turn Dependabot Off and I’m not going to offer a word of explanation because if you understand the title I guarantee you’ll be interested in the piece. (I’m terrified of Dependabot.)
It seems like every day I hear from another person who’s trying to get their personal lives off Big Tech. Me too. So… In The Verge, How to un-Big Tech your online life. And from Paris Marx, Getting off US tech: a guide. We are in the early stages of de-Googling our family life, so this stuff is super useful. I expect to see more of it.
Amazon polemics, maybe a little AI · I don’t loathe Amazon any more nor less than the rest of the Big Techs, but boy are there are a lot of people publishing diatribes against the company. Not sure I understand why. But, worth reading.
In How Amazon Dies: A Possible, Maybe Likely Future Mark Atwood predicts that the infestation of amazon.com with highly-profitable advertising is a perhaps-fatal blunder. What’s maybe more interesting is that he points out several potential Amazon alternatives that don’t suffer from that same infestation; they hadn’t occurred to me.
And from a year ago, Cory Doctorow’s The future of Amazon coders is the present of Amazon warehouse workers introduces the “shitty technology adoption curve”. I missed this piece at the time but boy, is it easy to believe.
Finally, reading Writing Crystalized Thinking At Amazon. Is AI Muddying It? angered me. While I have no remaining respect or affection for any of the Big Techs, I enjoyed my time at AWS and part of it was the writing culture. I think the Way Of The Six-pager is the best business-process innovation I witnessed in my working life. If Amazon really is slopifying it, I predict disastrous outcomes.
OK, here’s the AI stuff · My own position, just to be clear: There are going to be LLM applications in a few domains here and there, and one of them is software development, but they won’t be nearly big enough to damage earth’s climate any further, nor to prevent the bubble from popping. That said…
Let’s do the worst first: Write-Only Code lays out a genuinely frightening future. Quote: “I was maniacally insistent that any proposed change to our SDLC (software development life cycle) be evaluated first through the lens of developer velocity.” I think I’d rather not go there.
Most of us who watch the space, and have no idea where it’s going or what the future holds, are I think particularly interested in Anthropic’s Claude. If you’re one, you’ll probably enjoy What Is Claude? Anthropic Doesn’t Know, Either.
It’s probably not that GenAI is intrinsically immoral. As Karl Bode writes, The Problem With AI Is Shitty Human Beings. I covered some of the same territory last year in The Real GenAI Issue, but Bode is excellent: “…the grand vision of modern automation's benefits can never materialize if its stewards are foundationally fucking terrible human beings disinterested in the contours of empathy. If we're not talking prominently about that, we aren't really talking at all.” (Emphasis his.)
One of the things that shitty people do is lie. Like for example charismatic leaders of AI “startups” valued in the tens of billions. But then so do the less-visible, which provoked Kyle Kingsbury A.K.A. Aphyr to write Trudging Through Nonsense. It’s sad and angry but I think usefully so.
Armin Ronacher is not bursting with rage, but he is skeptical about all the right things in Some Things Just Take Time. Quote: “There’s a feeling that all the things that create friction in your life should be automated away. That human involvement should be replaced by AI-based decision-making. Because it is the friction of the process that is the problem. When in fact many times the friction, or that things just take time, is precisely the point.”
For another cool-voiced critique, here’s Rishi Baldawa: AI Mandates Manufacture Noise. While I’m not entirely a burn-it-all-with-fire GenAI foe, the “boss mandate” always struck me as dumb, and Rishi spells it out clearly and simply. It’s really good, so here are a couple of quotes: “But those not in the weeds had no way to know any of this because… well they aren’t in the weeds. So they feel compelled to solve their information gap with a policy hammer.” and “As said before, none of this is revolutionary and that’s sort of the point. AI is a ’mirror and multiplier‘. It intensifies whatever was already happening.”
That’s all · Let’s really hope the bubble bursts soonest. Because when the money goes away, so will a lot of the shitty people.
