Techocalypse
“if your new software no longer runs on old hardware, it is worse than the old software.”
Alexis Ong • These artists are making tiny ROMs that will probably outlive us all
What does it tell us about progress if the most influential technological innovation of the century is clearly destroying lives on a massive scale?
Ted Gioia • I Ask Seven Heretical Questions About Progress
If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.
Jonah Peretti • The Anti-SNARF Manifesto
The Importance of Inconvenience
youtube.comThe “convenience” that tech invites replaced what people/ social connections used to do. You can play a video game with someone online on the other side of the world - but now you miss the casual whateverness of your co-player sitting next to you on the couch. Or, hell, the person sitting on the other side of the Scrabble/ Chess board
"Specifically, we demonstrate that by injecting just 250 malicious documents into pretraining data, adversaries can successfully backdoor LLMs ranging from 600 [million] to 13 [billion] parameters."
Attention Required! | Cloudflare
Please? Is this possible?
A cottage industry of people creating documents that corrupt LLMs?
A Generative AI tool that creates the things that inherently corrupt other LLMs?
Thoughts on AI (particularly generative AI) in no particular order of development or importance:
The widespread use of AI is resulting in the largest collective brain drain of the human experience. But is this the result of COVID (remote learning, overreliance on online experiences, mental decline from Long COVID) and AI is the tool used to
Productivity tools shape our thinking in ways that favor standardization, efficiency, and predictability. They demand structure before inspiration has a chance to strike. They ask for timelines when the problem itself is still hazy. But creativity is not linear. Often, it involves struggling down several blind alleys before finding the right path.
Sari Azout • The End of Productivity
The reading brain, once forged by sustained attention and deep engagement, is now adapting to an environment built for speed, distraction, and artificial fluency. What we are witnessing is not the end of reading, but rather the end of the essential consolations that reading affords us. Reading, but in ultra-processed form.
Carl Hendrick • Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us
The result of an ROI driven culture - how can we get instant benefits out of spending our time in the here and now?