No matter how much the city changes, no matter how prohibitive it may seem, artists always make room for themselves. New York belongs to them.
Very cool feature on artist spaces that persist in New York in the midst of skyrocketing rents and real estate prices.
Along with lots of other flowers, vegetables and herbs, we’ve got dozens of sunflowers in the yard. They’re just starting to bloom!
Came across Wild Heart Homestead while reading about the Tiny Awards. It’s a beautiful guide to small-scale gardening/farming, and a lovely website to boot.
This is a grim tale written in the New York Times. A lot of serious consequences to consider, and not just for Canada. Most countries will have to deal with these sorts of challenges, if they aren’t already.
The Verge created a list of their top 40 non-fiction books about tech. I’ve heard of a few of them, but I’ve not read any.
Yet I’ve been on the lookout for books that really help explain our relationship with technology or how it shapes our society and frequently asked myself the question, “Which are the ones worth reading?”
Jason Kottke has asked the same question of his readers:
Anyway, back to the list — it seems incomplete in a way that I can’t quite articulate. I would have liked to have seen Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet on there. What else? I would like to hear about your favorite books about tech (or non-tech books that are sneakily about tech anyway) or what you think might be missing from the list.
The Verge article makes it clear they chose non-fiction books exclusively, and that a list of fiction would be a whole different enterprise entirely. Looking back at my reading over the years, I’ve got many more fiction books about technology, and very few non-fiction–and even those non-fiction works lean towards biographies of innovators rather than considerations of technology itself.
I have a few books in my “to-be-read” pile that weren’t on the Verge list that I should get to:
As Kottke writes, the Verge focused on Silicon Valley and its effect on society, whereas the books on my brief list above are definitely a philosophical/sociological look at technology. Maybe I need to lighten up a bit.
A man who was injured on a flight to New York tried to sue an airline. The lawyer he hired used ChatGPT to write the brief submitted to the court. It was full of absolute garbage as ChatGPT had invented pretty much everything.
Mr. Schwartz, who has practiced law in New York for three decades, told Judge P. Kevin Castel that he had no intent to deceive the court or the airline. Mr. Schwartz said that he had never used ChatGPT, and “therefore was unaware of the possibility that its content could be false.”
He had, he told Judge Castel, even asked the program to verify that the cases were real.
It had said yes.
Amid all of the uncertainty surrounding ChatGPT and artificial intelligence in general, the one thing I’ve been reminding myself repeatedly is LLMs – large language models – are designed to come up with coherent (grammatically speaking) text responses following a prompt provided by the user. These responses are based on the text the LLM was trained on, which can represent large swathes of the internent, but not everything ever written. While this can be useful in a number of cases, there are other scenarios where it is downright dangerous to trust the response provided, as Mr. Schwartz found out.
My impression is that non-technical people using LLMs like ChatGPT for niche purposes have been seeing results like those produced in the above story. The situations where LLMs are proving to be much more proficient are where technical people are deploying the ChatGPT API, training it using a specific set of texts, and then using it to answer prompts querying information from those texts. Dave Winer fed ChatGPT his entire blogging history, for example, and has seen great results asking it questions about his past writings.
I would imagine if a law firm were to feed a whole bunch of case law (aviation case law, for example), and then create prompts specific to that case law, that law firm would not have ended up in the same jeopardy as described in the NYT story. Users who believe vanilla ChatGPT alone can produce a solution to their niche questions should do so at their peril.
Coke has created a new ad using Stable Diffusion. It’s quite remarkable.
Dave Winer offers some interesting thoughts on AI. He has been on a roll lately with his writing on both AI and social media/blogging implementations.
From Ryan Broderick, writing at Garbage Day:
The way I see it, the jaw-dropping speed of generative AI’s embrace is essentially a large-scale acknowledgement that modern life is sort of miserable and that most people don’t actually care if anything works anymore. Which is, honestly, fair. Our lives are full of tasks that no one wants to do that offer little reward for doing them well. The systems we live, work, and create inside of are simply too large to comprehend or really care about.
Broderick was writing about his experience using ChatGPT to create a meal plan and place an online grocery order. The whole thing sounds depressing.
Smoke has drifted down from the wildfires in northern Alberta this morning, making things very gloomy outside.
Finished reading: Do The Work! by Steven Pressfield 📚
This new translation of The Iliad looks very interesting. I’m curious to look into Wilson’s creative process as well.
I keep thinking about this description of Bitcoin’s value:
It’s a popular myth that a Bitcoin’s value is based on nothing, just pulled out of thin air by math. But that’s not true—Bitcoin is a way to commoditize energy consumption without accidentally producing anything useful. Other energy-intensive industries tend to convert energy into useful materials like aluminum or cement. Bitcoin converts electricity into waste heat and records its destruction in the form of numbers, which can then be traded for other numbers but not used to make anything people need or converted back into energy.
Currently reading: First We Read, Then We Write by Robert D. Richardson 📚
But we live after all in that “weary kingdom of time,” and Emerson’s idea of art, of poetry, fits satisfyingly into this world as he says, in the essay’s high point and culminating line, “Art is the path of the creator to his work.” One cannot not repeat it enough; art is not the finished work, art is the getting there.
According to this post, most social media content is produced by professional creators these days.
The reactions all missed the underlying shift behind the move: Social media feeds, once filled with content from ordinary users, are now programmed primarily by professional creators. These creators need identity verification, customer service, and visibility boosting. And they’re willing to pay. Meta is simply filling the need.
(https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/social-media-is-changing-and-paid)
Does this require a reconsideration of what defines social media? Professionalism is not how social media was built, but it is what Meta and Twitter are becoming. I think this illustrates the differences that can be found with platforms like Mastodon & Micro.blog quite nicely.
From this morning’s reading.
I’ve been around for a bit now at Micro.blog, but not really said anything.
Let’s change that! I’m Matt, a lapsed journalist of sorts who does other things now. Things that interest me most at the moment are tech, media, China, and philosophy (not necessarily in that order).
It’s nice to be here!