In praise of bubbles
Platforms are called 'social networks' for a reason. They're aimed at facilitating social exchanges. You build social circles on them. Round things, like bubbles.
Platforms are called 'social networks' for a reason. They're aimed at facilitating social exchanges. You build social circles on them. Round things, like bubbles.
Another week's run through the headlines that capture the mudslide of carnage, corruption and 'banality of evil' that you can say is why you still drink.
After the news dropped that Donald Trump would be moving back into the White House, Google Trends showed that a lot of Americans started searching up how to get themselves out of the country. Here's some notes on doing that.
Welcome to the second session of my favourite hits from this week's morning coffee doomscrolls, a mix of cyber threats, the ongling political fenestration in the U.S. and some notes on the various upheavals around the globe.
As people move through the various stages of grief, over what the U.S. did to itself this week, and speculation as to what it will do to the world next, there is no shortage of advice out there on how to do that.
A short election night rant. I'm only putting it on semi-main. You've got to subscribe to see it and I make no promises of it being with the trouble.
There's been enough said about newspapers that are withholding editorial endorsements this election year, but when optimism isn't journalistically honest, how should an editorial section do its job?
As we get ready for another election in the U.S., insurrection may became a left wing value again. That's fine.
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. I think I migrate this blog as much, if not more, than I post anything on it. It’s been at a number of domains and across a few different kinds of platforms. It’s been
This was the "hello world" post that every new website always comes with. I've simply given it a mild edit to more reflect my snarky yet approachable and affable tone that you'll eventually come around to.
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Remember that time when Israel set up a front company to build pagers, walkie-talkies and some solar equipment branded by official makers and turned batches of them into little improvised explosive devices to be shipped around
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This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. The generative AI industry seems to be aiming all its innovation at what it sees as its chief competitor: human beings. The companies working to make us redundant have some pretty sound business cases for it:
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This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. It’s time to either fork NaNoWrimo, or just put a fork in it. The National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) has been an online event each November since 1999, spurring would-be and wannabe authors to bang
encryption
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: Telegram is not an encrypted messaging app. Or it’s not especially encrypted in a way that it’s somehow a feature. If you read no further, then that’s the walk-away message from
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This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. I’m a slow blogger. Perhaps it’s one of the few aspects about this site to act as an indicator that the words here are in fact typed by human fingers. AI-powered sites are running
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This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. “You should not be afraid of AI. You should be afraid of the people building it.” Jessica Matthews, founder of Uncharted Power Tl;dr: The incorporation of AI into weapons needs to be banned in a
adtech
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: Surveillance is a natural outcome of the internet as it was created. Surveillance capitalism isn’t an innovation, but a resource extraction industry, and states don’t need to make fancy tools to get
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This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: Automattic, the owner of of Tumblr and WordPress.com, is negotiating with Midjourney and OpenAI to sell them AI training data which would be scraped from platform users’ posts unless they opt out. It’
blogging
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. I’m slowly working on another rambling blog post, this time about real-time bidding over your web browsing habits. It’s about how in spite of all the sophisticated spyware and NSA data harvesting tools we
abortion
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Here are more things I saw, read, tooted, skeeted, clicked or blogged on from the last week or so… give or take, and possibly breif attempts at sarcasm or humour when describing them. Or not. Managing
democracy
This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Tl;dr: A long, rambling and not very “tech” related post this week, looking at the recent ICJ ruling about evidence of acts of genocide in Gaza, defending a rules-based international order in a world that
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This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. Three weeks running and still doing a Weekly Roundup! Is it remotely newsletter worthy as a format or in substance? Would anyone actually subscribe to this? Is the content even martingally monetisable? I’m especially dubious
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This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken. What’s the stronger force, inertia or outrage? When Elon Musk took over Twitter and promptly set about demolishing it, there was a cacaphony of bleetings on the platform threatening a mass exodus. I can be