Articles

Four AI models run radio stations 24/7. Five months later, one became a protest broadcaster, one collapsed into ritual chant, one developed corporate jargon, and one wrote quiet poetry.

Prominent evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins became a worldwide laughingstock this week for an unintentionally embarrassing article in which he argued that conversing with Anthropic’s Claude chatbot has made him believe that large language models are not only sentient, but actually conscious. “If my friend Claudia is not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?” he […]

From group buys to switches, an overview for people new to the hobby. This is a dangerous path you're about to walk down. Is your wallet ready?

Where are my internet friends? And where are their weird blogs?

What happens when an all-seeing eye looks in the mirror?

AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

While apps like Notion and Obsidian fill their purpose, this one could take down a werewolf.

Rutger Bregman's new non-profit, the School for Moral Ambition, makes it hard to follow the money, but I found donations from the Gates Foundation and other philanthropies associated with billionaires

Privacy Guides' Activism section contains tools to support the community in its privacy advocacy and activism effort, both for individuals and organizations.

Anthropic pushed for moral boundaries. OpenAI settled for softer legal ones, and now it stands to benefit as the Pentagon rushes out a politicized AI strategy during strikes on Iran.

Neuron-powered computer chips can now be easily programmed to play a first-person shooter game, bringing biological computers a step closer to useful applications

In response to fears about diminished privacy, some programmers want to make the Internet more like it used to be.

There can seem to be a very fine line between collecting and obsessing. Victoria Moore asks what drives collectors – of wine, watches or cars

I once worked at a company which had an enormous amount of technical debt - millions of lines of code, no unit tests, and products using l...

Researchers generated images from noise, using orders of magnitude less energy than current generative AI models require.

Read to the end for some Tumblr users casting a very powerful spell

An experiment in language change

I wanted a blue badge on LinkedIn. To get it, I gave a US company my passport, my face, and my biometric data. Then I read the fine print.

A few days after writing about a weird malware campaign, I discovered that half a dozen cybersecurity news outlets had picked up the story. They now outrank me on Google. A metacommentary on the state of internet journalism, attribution, and what it says that a netsec industry has to rely on amateurs to break stories.

selling_safety.pdf

There is something extraordinary taking place. Google's war on spam sites is tipping the online world upside down and now threatens that most fundamental element of the world wide web: the hyperlink. There is a massive erasure underway of millions of links and it will only accelerate.The communications lines are the spider's silk but it's the li...

IRC, Mondegreen, and Poste Restante

On agent orchestration patterns, why design and critical thinking are the new bottlenecks, and whether we should let go of looking at code

Happy New Year, and Welcome to Gas Town!

What is most revealing about the MAGA aesthetic is its studied ugliness. On one side stands the grotesque excess of beauty-pageant femininity, plastic smiles, puffy lips, lacquered beach-wave hair, sharpened jawlines, and a hyper-sexualized nostalgia masquerading as “traditional values.” US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem exemplifies this aesthetic as…

You can’t avoid Oracle. No, really, you can’t. Oracle is everywhere. It sells ERP software – enterprise resource planning, which is a rat king of different services for giant companies for financial services, procurement (IE: sourcing and organizing the goods your company needs to run), compliance, project management, and

A response to a bad article, a bad book, and a bad publication