More or less developed 250-1500 word essays, mostly about the web and its politics. Some of it’s technical.| www.thisdaysportion.com
It is my increasingly firm belief that computers are tools that strip us of our humanity, converting our behaviour and thoughts into data that can be captured and commodified by other machines and their owners. They are not “just tools” – how can they be when we consider who made them and for what purposes, and how they continue to be used in our social and work lives? The computer. The Internet. Artificial intelligence. These are military technologies, first and foremost. First and for...| This day’s portion – Posts
One of those this came to me in my half-sleep thoughts that I’m typing into a cheap, reconfigured laptop at 06:25. It’s a light-gray, cooler, summer morning. A photo of an Anduril ad at Westminster station came up on my fedi timeline yesterday, to which my response was something along the lines of “dystopia!” (It used a neo-grotesque typeface and a cut-off Union Jack – defence, right? – which put me in mind of Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy pill packets. There’s a business idea in fl...| This day’s portion – Posts
I’ve been looking at self-hosting (on managed servers rather than a Raspberry Pi beneath the stairs) an alternative to Feedbin. I always like the idea of self-hosting, and Feedbin costs $5 a month. It’s a great service, but $5 could get you two or three low-resource apps on Pika Pods, such as Miniflux, FreshRSS, Wallabag among other FOSS (free and open source software) options. There’s a real mix in terms of quality – finding a web-based RSS reader that can match Feedbin’s features ...| This day’s portion – Posts
Thom reviews Foto, a new Instagram alternative, noting you can’t add alt text to its images. Quite rightly, this makes it a non-starter, despite its no-ad, no-VC funding approach. This is frustrating as we want to support new, independent services that allow us to ditch the Instagrams of this world. Being the “unfortunately, this isn’t great” guy or the guy-who-doesn’t-need-alt-text-but-calls-you-out-for-it is no fun. While a few rough edges and a lack of comparable features in a ne...| This day’s portion – Posts
Consider the BBC reporting of a protest against asylum seekers in Diss, 26 miles up the road from here in Ipswich. Glen Saffer, one of the organisers, said: “It’s what we wanted - a peaceful demonstration. We are here as a community to shut this place down.” He said he was not against all immigration, and that the protesters were not racist. And here are some pictures from the story: We should note some of the ways in which the language and format of the story legitimises the protest, a...| This day’s portion – Posts
I got needlessly annoyed and self-righteous over a couple of recent articles in the MSM gushing over the punk-ness and old school blogging feel of Substack. 700 words into a blog response later and the familiar feelings of self-doubt started to creep in. What point are you making?Stop being so fucking pompous! and Who cares? – that sort of thing. That post was scrapped. (I don’t even like punk music, to be honest. I mean, Holidays in the Sun is a good song and I guess the Clash are alrigh...| This day’s portion – Posts
We argue that neither of these ways of thinking are accurate, insofar as both lying and hallucinating require some concern with the truth of their statements, whereas LLMs are simply not designed to accurately represent the way the world is, but rather to give the impression that this is what they’re doing. ChatGPT is bullshitIn my last post I looked at how LLMs lack a world model, or a set of rules that enables them to do “intelligent” things properly, such as play chess or respond coh...| This day’s portion – Posts
Before I started doing some fairly cursory reading into what LLMs actually do, I assumed it involved some form of world modelling. It may seem an odd interest, but I created what I would term world models quite a lot when I was a teenager. When my group of friends and I were into role-playing games (RPGs) – around the time D&D was making us all satanists – I’d be the games master (GM, not DM – rather sweetly, we looked down on D&D), responsible for creating the normally more or less T...| This day’s portion – Posts
You do not need “analytics” for your blog because you are neither a military surveillance unit nor a commodity trading company| www.thisdaysportion.com
Blogging as we know it is a solitary process. What if we took a more collective approach?| www.thisdaysportion.com