The People Deliberately Killing Facebook
wheresyoured.at/killingfacebook/Enjoy this post? Why not try the podcast version? Please download it, and also all the other episodes. Over the last decade, few platforms have declined quite as rapidly and visibly as Facebook and Instagram. What used to be apps for catching up with your friends and family are now
Tactile Controls: Why Buttons Are Making a Comeback - IEEE Spectrum
spectrum.ieee.org/touchscreensIn an interview with Rachel Plotnick, delve into the past and present of tactile controls. As touchscreens dominate, we examine the current trend shifting back to physical buttons, and why users crave the familiar feel of buttons, knobs, and switches in their devices and interfaces.
Generative A.I. Made All My Decisions for a Week. Here's What Happened. - The New York Times
nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/01/technology/generative-ai-decisions-experiment.htmlThere are also outsiders seeking to manipulate the systems’ answers; the search optimization specialists who developed sneaky techniques to appear at the top of Google’s rankings now want to influence what chatbots say. And research shows it’s possible.
Postcards from the Futch
medium.com/message/postcards-from-the-futch-595796d8a45dNothing looks like the past like talking about “the future” of the internet.
Tech doesn’t make our lives easier. It makes them faster
brettscott.substack.com/p/tech-doesnt-make-our-lives-easierBreaking through the illusion of convenience that's used to sell us automation
What Was the TED Talk?
thedriftmag.com/what-was-the-ted-talk/“TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future – the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human – that never materialized. ... If the research wasn’t entertaining or moving, it was seen as somehow less valuable. TED’s influence on intellectual culture was ‘taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing’, Bratton said. ‘This is not the solution to our most frightening problems – rather, this is one of our most frightening problems.’”
The Rising Chorus of Renewable Energy Skeptics
thetyee.ca/Analysis/2023/04/07/Rising-Chorus-Renewable-Energy-Skeptics/The green techno-dream is so vastly destructive, they say, ‘we have to come up with a different plan.’
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker
newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinseyAs it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?
There Is No A.I.
newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/there-is-no-aiThere are ways of controlling the new technology—but first we have to stop mythologizing it.
A Museum Security Expert on How to Protect Great Art - The Atlantic
theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/van-gogh-tomato-soup-national-gallery-london/671764/A museum-security expert admits that “it’s pretty darn hard to protect a painting from somebody throwing a can of soup at it.”
Moonlight towers: light pollution in the 1800s - LOW-TECH MAGAZINE
lowtechmagazine.com/2009/01/moonlight-towers-light-pollution-in-the-1800s.htmlAt the end of the 19th century, many towns and cities were lit up by powerful electrical lamps placed on towers up to 300 feet (90 metres) high. The arc lamp - the first electric light and the predecessor of Edison’s incandescent light bulb - was extremely bright and much more energy efficient than other lighting technologies from those times. The lamps were too strong for indoor use, but they were regarded as the future of municipal lighting. Especially in the United States, many ci...
The Rotting Internet Is a Collective Hallucination - The Atlantic
theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/06/the-internet-is-a-collective-hallucination/619320/Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
Four-Woman Group That Fought U.K. Algorithms Steps Up for Tech-Worker Rights - WSJ
wsj.com/articles/four-woman-group-that-fought-u-k-algorithms-steps-up-for-tech-worker-rights-11621087200An advocacy group that successfully challenged the use of algorithms in U.K. immigration and education policy is preparing to take on Facebook and Uber Technologies over tech workers’ rights.
Internet Search Tips · Gwern.net
gwern.net/SearchFinally, you can always try to contact the author. This only occasionally works for the papers I have the hardest time with, since they tend to be old ones where the author is dead or unreachable—any author publishing a paper since 1990 will usually have been digitized somewhere—but it’s easy to try.