"Nate Fick, the inaugural US ambassador at large for Cyberspace and Digital Policy, on Saturday announced the hack of his personal account (not the government agency one) with - of course - a tweet. "

You can criticize LLMs all you want, they will still be a huge thing in our economy and civilization.

Maybe so. That being said, it's been 3 years since Text to Transformer was released and... we still don't have any novel applications.

I'll take my chances.

Really? What about question answering in line in google searches, chat gpt, that chrome extension demo that can navigate web pages. Is the idea that these aren’t novel?

They're neat, but they're old. And frankly, they don't illustrate enough of an opportunity to build a product off of. Worst of all, they're not nearly dependable enough to provide any guarantee for. At best, you're building on a lie generator, which is only useful insofar as fooling the user is concerned.

I honestly think the last 3 years have been more exciting for compute hardware than AI software, which is really saying something in a post-Moore's-law world.

I think they're only old in that there were terrible version of all that tech in the distant past, but now chat gpt is actually practically useful to me fairly often, machine translation is a bit older but has gotten much better. It's a bit like you looked at google search and went, well yahoo already exists this isn't actually new.

I guess we'll just have to see

This article really needed to be longer and have some illustrations. What's the point of publishing an essay about interface design without including any graphics?

I'm sympathetic to the points made, but as someone who has not used Flutter, I really do not have a sense of what the tooling and output is like based on this short piece.

"Currently, just 13.4% of U.S. adults have a favorable view of Tesla, compared with 16% last month and 28.4% in January 2022, according to survey data released on Thursday by Morning Consult Brand Intelligence. That’s a 15% drop year over year. Driving the decline is Tesla’s loss of popularity with people who identify as Democrats. Just 3% of those adults view Musk’s EV company favorably, down from 10.3% in December 2022."

An interesting look at how the open protocol of ActivityPub has built a much bigger network than it may seem.

I still think Mastodon needs to be made easier for people who aren't techies, but it has a lot of potential since that is only a UX challenge.

He is absolutely scared of Mastodon. Can't let the proles decide where to microblog for themselves!

Got a link with a discussion of his theories? I would find that interesting to see.

He mentioned it briefly in his book/notes on rhetoric. It was from a free audio book.

I've only started my exploration of Aristotle.

Here's a link to "The Californian Ideology" if you haven't read it:

http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideol...

Thanks for sharing this. Paints a clear picture of how deluded the technocrat class is.

I don’t know if it’s amazing or depressing that this was written almost thirty years ago but could have been written last week.

Depressing. I first read it ~11 year's ago after Occupy Wall St failed as I started trying to understand what might actually work, has worked, etc. I was reading about neoliberalism and ultimately Marxism. The essay is excellent but not necessarily better than so much other prophetic work in the Marxist canon.

This is a long-form podcast with Richard Barbrook, the co-author of "The Californian Ideology," a 1995 critique of what later became the dominant ethos of the tech industry.

Lots of interesting history, including a discussion of how Minitel, the French precursor to the web, created a more sustainable form of techno-capitalism even though it was created by the state-owned phone company.