#technology (84 links)
- What AI has in common with dogs economist.com
Back when dog technology was first being developed, it was far from obvious that it was safe for people—who were literally inviting wolves into their caves. They had to train them not to eat babies. Thousands of years later, dogs still sometimes escape and go rogue. But overall, people are happy with how things have worked out. (It did not end so well for the Neanderthals.)
Great analogy.
- ‘It’s absolutely criminal’: US tipping culture has reached the UK – and is causing chaos theguardian.com
Many of those I speak to think tech has pushed this change forward – and rapidly. The shift away from cash towards card and digital payments is usually framed as removing “friction”, says Prof John Vines, the chair of design informatics at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Informatics. “It’s about being more convenient. This is all a trend towards making it easier for us to spend our money.” The software in point-of-sale terminals prompts the customer for a tip. “These systems are presented as a way of making giving a tip easier. We don’t have to think about it too much, we don’t have to fiddle with coins and notes. But, really, it’s about encouraging us to spend more.”
Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.
- The unraveling of fictions - by Azeem Azhar exponentialview.co
These fictions were functional adaptations to real constraints. The job, the credential, the expert, each solved a genuine problem in a high-friction world. But the constraints changed. And now the adaptations are decaying.
- Chris McCausland: Seeing into the Future – an astonishing look at how tech is changing disabled people’s lives | Television | The Guardian theguardian.com
I love having my perspective shaken up. A glass screen with no buttons sounds like the most excluding device imaginable, McCausland acknowledges, yet his phone became the most accessible tool he’s ever used. He’s similarly excited by the Meta Specs – I don’t think that’s what they’re actually called – which are always on and offer live video interpretation, telling you what you’re looking at. Like a phone but, crucially, wearable. “The one thing blind people never have is two hands free,” he observes.
Ah, the memories.
- There Is No AI Revolution wheresyoured.at
Accompanying guide for this most excellent exhibition.
Great article on commercially available assistive tech: AirPods Pro 2, Wandercraft Personal Exoskeleton, Emporia ME.6, Nobi Pendant light and Xigxag X-book.
- Against the dark forest wrecka.ge
Over the last 9 months we’ve deleted close to 80% of the marketing footprint off ibm.com. Tens of thousands of pages. The result is that traffic, conversion and all our experience and NPS metrics are up. It was a gross project but I’ll tell you about it.
Just build a normal website.
- Spatial computing: Why Apple’s headset is not the most important thing it announced this week | The Independent independent.co.uk
The most important thing that Apple announced this week was not actually that Vision Pro, even if it is what has grabbed the headlines and will decide Apple’s future. Instead, it is the software and operating system that underpins it, and which could be around for much longer than the headset itself.
If Apple’s vision wins out, the fear is that we’ll all sink into our cypberpunk home theater goggles, consuming content as the world burns — it’s almost enough to make you wish for the metaverse.
Spicy.
- On Jackpot Technologies, or, what Apple's new headset is actually *for* davekarpf.substack.com
- Apple Vision stratechery.com
What is more striking, though, is the extent to which Apple is leaning into a personal computing experience, whereas Meta, as you would expect, is focused on social. I do think that presence is a real thing, and incredibly compelling, but achieving presence depends on your network also having VR devices, which makes Meta’s goals that much more difficult to achieve. Apple, meanwhile, isn’t even bothering with presence: even its Facetime integration was with an avatar in a window, leaning into the fact you are apart, whereas Meta wants you to feel like you are together.
- Hundreds of lives ruined. Not a single person held to account. And still: silence on the Post Office scandal | Marina Hyde theguardian.com
It might be nice to think it is, but I don’t believe that getting angry on Twitter particularly helps anyone other than Elon Musk, or that sitting in judgment on every passing infraction is anything other than a hiding to nothing. It is not effecting change – it is the illusion of effecting change. It is exactly the sort of looking-the-wrong-way that allowed the Post Office scandal to happen – and if we keep doing it, the people who really run things will keep on getting away with it.
Some astounding (to me at least) stats.
New research from Ofcom has found that a fifth of three- and four-year-olds now have a phone of their own, and are already using them to watch streaming services, use social media and play games online.
A weak take.
- Twiddler doctorow.medium.com
There’s another, simpler explanation for the enshittification of platform economics. Rather than trusting the self-serving narratives of the Prodigal Techbros who claim to have superhuman powers but promise that they have stopped using them for evil, we can adopt a more plausible worldview: that tech barons are ordinary mediocrities, no better and no worse than the monopolists that preceded them, and any differences come down to affordances in technology and regulation, not an especial wicked brilliance.
- The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok | WIRED pluralistic.net
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.
- Why Are QR Codes Everywhere? medium.com
- Our Comrade The Electron - Webstock Conference Talk static.pinboard.in
<blockquote>I'm not saying we can't have the fun next-generation Internet, where everyone wears stupid goggles and has profound conversations with their refrigerator. I'm just saying we can't slap it together like we've been doing so far and expect everything to work itself out.
The good news is, it's a design problem! You're all designers here - we can make it fun! We can build an Internet that's distributed, resilient, irritating to governments everywhere, and free in the best sense of the word, like we dreamed of in the 90's. But it will take effort and determination. It will mean scrapping permanent mass surveillance as a business model, which is going to hurt. It will mean pushing laws through a sclerotic legal system. There will have to be some nagging.</blockquote>
- The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
Worth it. Overdue. Helps explain noticeable burn-out type feelings. "There are organizing principles for what is considered a "good" idea. These ideas are supposed to be the right size and shape. There is a default spreadsheet that we expect ideas to fit onto. But maybe it's time that changed."
- Be Thoughtful (A Gifting Guide For Humans) | The Wirecutter thewirecutter.com
- SUPERINTEND superintend.typepad.com
- Plain English Nuclear: Yet another Japan reactor post plainenglishnuclear.blogspot.com
That's better.
- Scripting News: WikiLeaks on the run scripting.com
Politicians should be aware that these are the stakes. They either get used operating in the open, where the people they're governing are in on everything they do, or they go totalitarian, around the globe, now.
- It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up: 3D Printing... | Public Knowledge publicknowledge.org
This white paper, It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology, examines how intellectual property (IP) law impacts the rapidly maturing technology of 3D printing, and how incumbents who feel threatened by its growth might try to use IP law to stop it.
"Content management remains an unsolved problem. Untold billions of dollars (and hours) have been spent building commercial, open source, and custom content management systems since the first Web page was pushed to a Web server using FTP, and yet they all still suck." High five!
- Tweetage Wasteland - Confessions of an Internet Superhero - by Dave Pell tweetagewasteland.com
- Lee Maguire – Guided by the Whispers of Angels hexkey.co.uk
Much more beyond this quote... "When you actually need to travel, your personal devices will keep you on track. For example something the “JITwatch“, or that iPhone app that triggers an alarm when GPS indicates you’re within a particular distance from your destination."... but everything has been done already.
- What Happened to Yahoo paulgraham.com
"So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are "in the software business" in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software."
- William Gibson - BOOK EXPO AMERICA LUNCHEON TALK blog.williamgibsonbooks.com
If Pattern Recognition was about the immediate psychic aftermath of 9-11, and Spook Country about the deep end of the Bush administration and the invasion of Iraq, I could say that Zero History is about the global financial crisis as some sort of nodal event, but that must be true of any 2010 novel with ambitions on the 2010 zeitgeist. But all three of these novels are also about that dawning recognition that the future, be it capital-T Tomorrow or just tomorrow, Friday, just means more stuff, however peculiar and unexpected. A new quotidian. Somebody’s future, somebody else’s past.
- Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research slideshare.net
- The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery - Microsoft Research research.microsoft.com
"The collection of essays expands on the vision of pioneering computer scientist Jim Gray for a new, fourth paradigm of discovery based on data-intensive science and offers insights into how it can be fully realized." Free book from Microsoft Research.
"Bring tech-heads into creative conversations early to color communication ideas with what's possible in web development." But don't call them tech-heads.
"Partners have little or no incentive even to investigate non-fee-producing options. Therefore, open source or lower cost, more out-of-the-box CMS solutions are rarely if ever offered as possible solutions. In fact, my experience found that more times than not, the Big 5 partner already knew exactly which CMS solution she was going to pitch before she walked through the client’s door. This was something that never ceased to amaze me, but the lesson here is to beware of software recommendations from any Big 5 firm." No shit.
- Charlie's Diary: Jeff Bezos Eats Kittens antipope.org
Today's big news is that Amazon are going to start selling Kindle ebook readers world-wide. Let me explain why I think this is very bad news for writers.
- TubeSat Personal Satellite Kit interorbital.com
A TubeSat is designed to function as a Basic Satellite Bus or as a simple stand-alone satellite. Each TubeSat kit includes the satellite's structural components, safety hardware, solar panels, batteries, power management hardware and software, transceiver, antennas, microcomputer, and the required programming tools. With these components alone, the builder can construct a satellite that puts out enough power to be picked up on the ground by a hand-held amateur radio receiver.
- h+ Magazine hplusmagazine.com
Covers technological, scientific, and cultural trends that are changing - and will change - human beings in fundamental ways.
The procession of technological discoveries is inevitable. When the conditions are right — when the necessary web of supporting technology needed for every invention is established — then the next adjacent technological step will emerge as if on cue. If inventor X does not produce it, inventor Y will.
- Toy Chest (Online or Downloadable Tools for Building Projects) - UCSB English Department Knowledge Base wiki.english.ucsb.edu
""Toy Chest" collects online or downloadable software tools/thinking toys that humanities students and others without programming skills (but with basic computer and Internet literacy) can use to create interesting projects."
- WebHome < Main < Reprap reprap.org
"Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself." Want.
#design #tools #hacks #technology #hardware #prototyping #diy #electronics #engineering#fabrication#reprap - Top 5 Technology Selection Pitfalls -- CMS Watch cmswatch.com
- tweenbots | kacie kinzer tweenbots.com
Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
- Wrong Tomorrow - time vs. pundits wrongtomorrow.com
What does this site do? It keeps track of predictions of the future by public figures.
"Wired, [Albert Read] suggests, may not really be a tech magazine at all. "It's a magazine about innovation and the future, and should not be narrowly confined to technology in people's minds," he says. "You read Wired if you see yourself as a forward thinker or an early adopter." I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out.