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Platforms are selling your work to AI vendors with impunity. They need to stop.
404 Media reports that Automattic is planning to sell its data to Midjourney and OpenAI for training generative models:The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled...
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Some personal updates
I write a lot about the intersection of technology and society here, and lately a lot about AI, but over the last year I’ve written a little less about what I’ve been up to. So, this post is an update...
View ArticleGenerative.
A wonderful playlist from Ethan Marcotte about the state and context of AI and its implications for labor and society. Every quote is a gem; in aggregate it's a strong argument about where we are...
View ArticleIntroducing asides
I’ve set up a new post type, “asides”, on my site. I’ve been kind of worried about writing shorter thoughts here for a while, because all of my long-form blog posts make it into the newsletter in real...
View ArticleWhy I won't have a blogroll
Dave Winer has been talking a bit about blogrolls lately: lists of blogs you like to read that typically sit on a sidebar or separate page of your site. I definitely used to have one, back when I had...
View ArticleSome feels about my non-involvement in the fediverse
I feel more than a twinge of regret that I’m not more involved in the current decentralized social web movement. This is where I came from, after all: I built one of the first open source social...
View ArticleBlogging is the medium of incomplete stories
"Journalists write stories about incomplete events but there is always a mandate to write more. To write the next post that shows the breaking news. Authors write books that, when published, cannot be...
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Feeding my Edinburgh nostalgia
All told, I lived in Edinburgh for nearly a decade between my late teens and early thirties. I went there to study Computer Science at the University, stuck around to work in the Learning Technology...
View ArticleTapestry: What About?
A pretty good example of clear, transparent communication about product decisions that might not please everyone - particularly when the userbase culture is heavily steeped in open source. I respect...
View ArticleTinyLetter: looking back on the humblest newsletter platform
"That is sort of the original spirit of the internet. [...] What if we made no money? What if money wasn’t even something we were thinking about?" A lovely tribute to TinyLetter, which was shut down...
View ArticleOn having good taste
I’ve heard a lot of variations of the quote, “you can’t teach taste” over the years, and haven’t thought much of it. Taste in design, in home decor, in good food, in art — it’s seemed obvious that...
View ArticleThe App Store, Spotify, and Europe’s thriving digital music market
This is kind of a disingenuous statement from Apple, but also an example of why "consumer harm" as currently defined is not the best yardstick for anti-trust. It's notable that Apple is calling...
View ArticleCovert racism in LLMs
"Users mistake decreasing levels of overt prejudice for a sign that racism in LLMs has been solved, when LLMs are in fact reaching increasing levels of covert prejudice." Or to put it another way: AI...
View ArticleSo everyone in tech understands that when ...
So everyone in tech understands that when the AI readjustment happens your stocks are going through the floor, right?
View ArticleA socialist writer skewered the Formula One scene. Then her article vanished.
"It’s almost unheard of for a news outlet to retract an article without explanation, especially a story of this size whose accuracy has not been publicly challenged." And yet, this brilliant article...
View ArticleFinding the best country in the world to live in
People are sometimes a little taken aback by my criticism of the US, just as they used to be about my criticism of the UK when I lived there. In both cases, it’s not that I don’t like the place — I...
View ArticleThe fediverse is really happening
Threads has begun its wider beta test of publishing to the fediverse. You can follow accounts that are part of the test from Mastodon, and even see them interact with each other.Here’s Evan...
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Startup pitch: Fediverse VIP
Here’s my pitch for a fediverse product for organizations.Think of it as WordPress VIP for the fediverse: a way for organizations to safely build a presence on the fediverse while preserving their...
View ArticleDownpour is out!
"It would not be worth all that to make a game that is a single stupid joke. And I like games that are single stupid jokes, and so I guess I have spent a few years in the hopes that I can let more...
View ArticleGardens and power
Manu Moreale discusses the dual use of the garden metaphor for both walled gardens and digital gardens:It’s interesting how we’re using the same metaphor—the garden—to describe two completely...
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