Category: Link Blog

  • Monday Notes: AI

    Monday Notes: AI

    Originally posted on K E Garland: Recently, I used Lensa to generate some artificial intelligence (AI) photos. I’d seen a couple of celebrities do it and thought why not? So, I uploaded 15 photos, and two hours later these appeared. They’re beautiful, right? I was amazed. It was mystifying to see how the app captured…

  • Return of the personal blog

    Return of the personal blog

    It’s time to own the spaces where we dwell online.

  • Artificial Intelligence Will Do What We Ask. That’s a Problem.

    Some interesting quotes from the article: “The current way we do AI puts a lot of burden on the designers to understand what the consequences of the incentives they give their systems are,” said Hadfield-Menell. “And one of the things we’re learning is that a lot of engineers have made mistakes.” A major aspect of…

  • A beautiful tiny home

    I adore tiny homes. There’s something very soothing about the ability to live in small spaces. This one is especially wonderful because she has a beautiful garden too. Honestly, this place doesn’t feel small at all! Her TINY HOUSE is the size of a garage, & it’s really cute! – YouTube

  • Pluralistic: Tiktok’s enshittification

    Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. Cory Doctorow in https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/

  • The enshittification of social media

    Cory Doctorow, in his article, Social Quitting, highlights how social media have life cycles. One day, they were sparsely populated fringe services, the next day, every­one you knew was using them and you had to sign up to stay in touch. Then, just as quickly, they imploded, turning into ghost towns, then punchlines, then forgotten…

  • From self-hosted WordPress to WordPress.com

    Thanks to the dominance of SEO optimised posts about WordPress from all manner of companies, any blog posts about wordpress.com is very, very difficult to find. Especially those about moving from self-hosted WordPress to WordPress.com. Here are some I discovered and kept for posterity: “…was surprised that they offer WordPress.org hosting. I always thought that…

  • Twitter misleads

    How Twitter misleads us about how many people have left — and what to do about it Social feeds are engines for distorting social understanding. Here’s how to push back against the algorithm. https://natematias.medium.com/how-twitter-misleads-us-about-how-many-people-have-left-and-what-to-do-about-it-bba484b6fed6

  • Algorithms and creativity

    “In the absence of an algorithm there is only your own creative compass.” In the #Fediverse I discovered people like @ewen who understood the impacts algorithms had on creativity. I felt the same sense of suffocation as a writer. In other spaces besides #Mastodon such as #Twitter nobody really understood my angst against it and…

  • Solarpunk fiction

    Learned about a new science fiction genre today – Solar Punk “Solarpunk stories take place in futures where humanity, technology, and nature live in harmony rather than in conflict.” TBH, it sounds a lot like Star Trek which makes me think I will love this genre! Who are the authors in this genre?