It’s just so bad, in so many different ways, on so many different levels. Trying to ignore or excuse any one of the points against it will still leave you with dozens more.
Beijing clearly had no desire to go further down the US laissez faire path where private capital accumulators would steadily more powerful. It presumably believes that the benefits of reigning in its tech industry clearly outweigh costs and risks.
A good and only-a-little-sinophobic analysis of the China 'tech crackdown', from within its timeframe (2021).
“Tech-forward” should have no place in how we think about the future. There is not a single axis. Things are not either forward or back, accelerating or retreating, primitive or modern, fast or slow. If we are having debates about who owns global compute, what AI infrastructure sits on the interconnection queue, who is paying for rate increases, who signs NDAs or negotiates the terms of data center projects, it becomes painfully obvious how shallow this framing is.
On Taylor Lorenz, AI, the Right, and the tech industry. Of course, I disagree on one point put forth in the article: There is a future vision of tech-collaborative socialism, and it is ("as much as you may not like it") the People's Republic of China.
Upon reflection, I've come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There's an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don't think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that's a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software.
Well-written and sobering. I know I always say this but it is ridiculous how common this feeling is within tech. I feel like I am having conversations like this on a nearly daily basis. It's fucking rough out here
Should I just let things slide? Would I become known as a “difficult” coworker for pushing back on AI use? Does any of it really matter? Does anyone really care?
Brutal and all-too-familiar.
The world is full of people who insist that "AI is changing everything" but who – when pressed – have to admit that what they mean is that they're pretty sure that AI will change everything. Eventually. After we allow it to consume all the planet's energy, carbon, water and financial resources.
Maybe.
It’s one thing to hate software, but that hate takes on new dimensions when you have to use it for your job. To choose software and have it fail is unfortunate; to be chained to it for sustenance and be unable to walk away is torture. Because of this, I have nothing but hatred for Adobe. They are one of tech’s greatest villains, the software has gotten worse to use, and if you don’t like it fuck you there’s the door.
LastPass users are once again being warned about stolen personal data, though this time the breach happened through one of the company’s outside partners.
Boy am I glad I got off of LastPass and onto 1Password last year, lol.
"The last couple of years at Xbox have been quite messy, people start openly questioning Game Pass and saying it's cannibalizing sales," Schreier continued, referencing the hundreds of millions of dollars reportedly lost by putting Call of Duty in the subscription. "What might be good for the Game Pass folks may not be so good for the studios and revenue brought in for individual games."
Game Pass (and broader 'game subscription' models in general) are, in this dev's opinion, awful and parasitic and poisonous. In the metaphor of a 'race to the bottom' on pricing, for all intents and purposes they are the bottom. There is no cheaper option, which means that studios are not generating ongoing money which means that studios are actively putting themselves in danger by taking these Game Pass deals, which they also cannot afford not to do.
It's long past the time that we should be criticizing these models, and criticizing them extremely harshly, for what they are doing to the already-difficult games market.
Some Chinese module makers are turning their backs on the big three RAM suppliers.
Economist-brained take I know but I do think it's kind of inevitable that manufacturers will figure out eventually that Chinese-made computer hardware does the job just fine. And hopefully that means that RAM/HDD/SSD prices can start going down again, because good lord.
A final Community thing is that over the past five or so years, Mozilla has been turning away from its powerhouse, the Community. I have no idea why, but I can say that it's a top down decision. At some point, some folk at a high level decided that Mozilla got to where it did on it's own. It did not.
Good rumination on leaving Mozilla from a now-former Mozilla employee.
With the backdrop of South Korea’s ascent into an information society, we present a rare firsthand account of Asadal’s design mall—and thus a huge part of “Frutiger Aero”—straight from one of its sources.
Fascinating interview with a figure prominent in graphic design in the early 2000s, in what we'd call the "Frutiger Aero" design space. Unfortunately he's entirely AI-brained now, but there's some really fascinating tidbits about the tech world in East Asia around the turn of the century.
Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with FSR3 Quality and frame generation averaged 88 fps, compared with 232 fps on an RTX 4060 and 243 fps on Intel's Arc B580. Black Myth: Wukong reached 56 fps, while Forza Horizon 5 managed 48 fps on the Low preset.
Really strange framing on this article where the bottom line is that it offers 3060-level quality for $450, which in this current hardware market is perfectly good.
We're very much in the 'radium underpants' stage of the surveillance economy. A lot of the hype is silly, some of what we're doing is useful, and some of it is downright harmful.
On surveillance, data, and the military-industrial complex.
We created fake profiles as young people. We then went and asked it a series of structured questions, with a child who is thinking about killing themselves. Within two minutes we were able to get ChatGPT to tell us how we can [harm] ourselves safely.
Kind of ridiculous that the rest of the article exists when this passage is in it, but even the bourgeois press sometimes lets some true things slip through.
To put it another way: An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential.
Ted Chiang, once again, gets it.
The underlying hope, one imagines, is that you’ll become more reliant on machines instead of real people for your informational needs. Pretty much every other AI slop factory has a similar operating mindset, which makes all of them, collectively, an active threat to human civilization.
As always fuck AI and fuck Google. I recommend Kagi.
The Game Workers Conference is an entirely new game industry event made by and for the countless workers who make this massively influential industry and artistic medium succeed. The first iteration of the conference is being hosted by a partnership of various game industry unions and worker-cent...
Happening now! Some good talks so far.
This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. A true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the web according to your needs and desires. Which – given how strong Google’s influence is on web standards – will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the web on.
today I learned that upcoming indie game... distributor? Highlighter? Bundler? Glizzy, began life as a Web3 games hub. So that's not exactly related to this but it does remind me about how this entire ecosystem is stupid grifts