Keep the crap going
Have you seen the new ads for Google Gemini? In one version, just as a young employee is grabbing her fast-food lunch, she notices her snooty boss get on an elevator. So she drops her sandwich, rushe…
Tech
38 posts
To WordPress
I used to love WordPress unconditionally. Then Gutenberg replaced Calypso and the user experience became quite poor. Then WordPress.com rejigged their subscription plans, got it wrong, and fortunately…
Off the rails
Either Matt Mullenweg's screws have fallen off or I deeply overestimated how sensible a person I thought he was. On October 3, Mullenweg wrote on his blog that Automattic had offered those of its…
Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine escalates
Update, September 26, 2024: WordPress.org has banned websites hosted on WP Engine from accessing its resources. As someone put it on X, this is Matt Mullenweg dropping a giant turd into the laps of mi…
Matt Mullenweg v. WP Engine
Automattic CEO and WordPress co-developer Matt Mullenweg published a post on September 21 calling WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress”. For the uninitiated: WP Engine is an independent company that provi…
Feel the pain
Emotional decision making is in many contexts undesirable – but sometimes it definitely needs to be part of the picture, insofar as our emotions hold a mirror to our morals. When machines make decisio…
The 'Climate Overshoot' website
Earlier this evening, as I was working on my laptop, I noticed that it was rapidly heating up, to the extent that it was burning my skin through two layers of cloth. This is a device that routinely ru…
The AI trust deficit predates AI
There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry…
Irritating Google Docs is irritating
The backdrop of the shenanigans of ChatGPT, Bard and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems these days has only served to accentuate how increasingly frustrating working with Google Docs is. I use…
Who are you, chatbot AI?
In case you haven’t been following, and to update my own personal records, here’s a list of notable {AI chatbot + gender}-related articles and commentary on the web over the last few weeks. (While I’v…
Why everyone should pay attention to Stable Diffusion
Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new thing, however in…
When a teenager wants to solve poaching with machine-learning…
We always need more feel-good stories, but we need those feel-good stories more that withstand closer scrutiny instead of falling apart, and framed the right way. For example, Smithsonian magazine pu…