Frank Turner is a musician I've listened to in the past but had forgotten about recently until I read a story on Boing Boing about him trying to break the world record for most concerts performed in different cities in 24 hours.

The video of his most recent single, "Do One", was embedded in the page. Love the message, love the song. The acoustic version is even better in my opinion.

This clip from Tommy Tiernan's Cracked show is around 20 years old but sounds like it could have been written today.

Peter O'Mahony's reaction to John Hodnett's answer to a question is priceless.

Sony Animation released a short film this week based in the Miles Morales universe. I love the Spider-Verse series. The animation is stunning and the writing matches it.

This film follows Miles and how he deals with anxiety. It features a couple of examples of good parenting. It's a great watch.

Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a public relations firm based in Las Vegas. He's best known to me as the most entertaining critic when it comes to technology, particularly Silicon Valley technology companies. His newsletter, Where's Your Ed At, and podcast, Better Offline, are both worth subscribing to.

He made 2 memorable podcast appearances this week. The first was as a replacement for Leo Laporte, who is on holidays, on This Week in Google on the TWiT podcast network. The second was as a guest on the Tech Won't Save Us podcast hosted by Paris Marx.

Ed can be too caustic for some people. He can be insulting about people he doesn't like and is more confrontational when products don't meet the hype. There is a danger in this approach that you can be too dismissive of new technology that is not ready for prime time. However, he seems to be right about cryptocurrencies and the metaverse at this point in time. I'm not sure he's wrong about AI yet.

One of the topics covered included an interesting story from The Information about Amazon and Google trying to quietly bring down expectations on generative AI.

I came across this clip from CNN about the fact checking team for the ESPN show, Pardon the Interruption. PTI is a sports discussion show where 2 people, normally sportswriters Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon, debate the sports topics of the day. At the time, Tony Reali had a segment at the end of the show to make corrections to inaccuracies or omissions made during the broadcast.

It's an interesting idea that could be more widely used. Getting sports statistics correct is easier than digging through the intricacies and spin involved in something like a political debate.

ESPN show keeps itself honest

As people know, I'm a huge Cory Doctorow fan. He has 18 titles for sale as a Humble Book Bundle to raise funds for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). You can get all 18 for €16.75 so it's a great chance to get some good books for a good price to support a good cause. The offer will end around the 23rd of March so there's a little over 12 days to get them.

The Markup published an interview of Dorothy Gambrell by Gabriel Hongsdusit, the visual designer of site. It covers a number of topics including the importance of publishing to your own site even as your audience move towards platforms and how publishing on the Internet has changed since she started writing Cat and Girl in 1999.

The main topic of the interview is Gambrell's response to finding out her art was used to train Midjourney, an AI image generation model. She wrote a beautiful piece about her journey as an artist that captures the struggle to make work that you find meaningful and the fear of that work being taken and abused.

I've included it below under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License. The final 6 frames are heartbreaking.

This letter made me to the Irish Times made me laugh. I have family in the farming community in rural Ireland and they agreed with the sentiment.

Decoder had a great episode where Hank Green interviewed Nilay Patel, the Editor-in-Chief of The Verge, about his experience of building and maintaining the business. It covers a lot of topics like the state of the media nowadays, why creating content for platforms can be a mistake and the importance of distribution channels.

The Verge focused on their website and building a sense of community that attracted people back to the site. There are many media companies that suffered by allowing social media companies like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube to act as intermediaries between them and their audience. Email and RSS feeds, while not likely to go viral, can provide a more sustainable foundation for businesses to build on.

This does not mean ignoring social media. It builds on the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) concept promoted by IndieWeb.

A story that stood out is one where Patel was traveling with Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. They were going through the list of things that Nadella had done during the day. Patel asked how he got so much done. Nadella looked at him and said:

It's your time. You have to be selfish about it.

Satya Nadella according to Nilay Patel (Guest host Hank Green makes Nilay Patel explain why websites have a future/Decoder)

This reminds me of a quote:

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

Seneca

Maria Popova wrote a piece on The Marginalian on Seneca and the Shortness of Life that expands on his thinking about this subject.

Damien Dempsey was interviewed on The Fresh Batch podcast and sang Jim Larkin's favourite song, "The Rising of the Moon", towards the end of the episode. This is a similar arrangement on YouTube. A great song for a session.

404 Media published a concerning report that they have obtained internal documents from Automattic that they are preparing to sell user data to Midjourney and OpenAI. Automattic is the parent company of WordPress and Tumblr.

This blog is published using WordPress.com for hosting. I'm going to have to see if there is an opt-out option and to read the terms and conditions attached to that option. If that option is available, I would hope opt-out would be the default option. People should be able to opt-in if they want to. Subterfuge shouldn't need to be used.

A concern raised in the report is that when compiling a data dump from Tumblr for Midjourney/OpenAI, Cyle Gage (a product manager at Tumblr) stated that some data was included that shouldn't have been such as:

• private posts on public blogs
• posts on deleted or suspended blogs
• unanswered asks (normally these are not public until they’re answered)
• private answers (these only show up to the receiver and are not public)
• posts that are marked ‘explicit’ / NSFW / ‘mature’ by our more modern standards (this may not be a big deal, I don’t know)
• content from premium partner blogs (special brand blogs like Apple’s former music blog, for example, who spent money with us on an ad campaign) that may have creative that doesn’t belong to us, and we don’t have the rights to share with this-parties; this one is kinda unknown to me, what deals are in place historically and what they should prevent us from doing.

Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools (Sam Cole/404 Media)

The benefit of having my own site is that I can move if I feel like I need to. I'll have to consider other options whether it's moving to a new platform like Ghost or by finding another hosting service.

It is disappointing to see Automattic moving in this direction. They have described themselves as the guardians of the open web but this decision will have people considering whether to remove their Tumblrs or blogs to avoid it being included in a training set for a large language model.

The promise of the open web was that it allowed people to connect with each other in a new way. As Gita Jackson wrote:

The internet has been broken in a fundamental way. It is no longer a repository of people communicating with people; increasingly, it is just a series of machines communicating with machines.

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit (Gita Jackson/Aftermath)

This decision by Automattic, if it is true, will make this problem worse in the short term. There's no guarantee that it will improve in the medium to long term either. Companies like OpenAI have made great promises of progress in the past only to renege on them when it suited. Unfortunately, I have little faith that this will be any different.

I could be wrong. I hope that I am.

One of the wonderful things about cover versions is how they can introduce a new audience to an old artist. They can also introduce old audiences to new artists. I had never heard of Luke Combs when he covered Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" in 2023. Chapman and Combs performed a beautiful duet of the song on during the Grammys in 2024.

Kara Swisher devoted an episode of her podcast, On with Kara Swisher, to the resurgence of interest in Chapman's self-titled debut album since the Combs cover was released titled "Tracy Chapman's Timeless Earworms". Timeless as an apt descriptor because the most notable aspect of Combs' version is how little he changed. It's close to the original version but the song is so good that it can stand on its own over 30 years after it was written.

Hat tip to Yogthos and Brian Krebs for sharing this on Mastodon. It made me laugh.

Josh Wyatt's cover of "Standing Outside the Fire" by Garth Brooks is good.

2023 was a brutal year for layoffs in tech and 2024 has not improved the situation. It can be an incredibly difficult time especially if this is the first time you've been laid off. I was laid off from my first job in tech a decade ago and it's only recently that I've come to realize how much it affected me psychologically.

I came across this series from Joey deVilla, who was laid off from his job as a Senior Developer Advocate for Okta earlier this month. This advice is incredibly important to remember.

If you’ve been laid off — and especially if you’ve been laid off for the first time — you will blame yourself for being laid off. This post is just for you, and it can be summed up as this: you’re probably facing the consequences of someone else’s mistakes.

Laid off in 2024, part 10: Unearned consequences (Joey deVilla/Global Nerdy)

It is hard to reconcile the number of layoffs with the vast profits that the large tech companies have announced over the past few months. It feels unnecessary but it is important to remember that is also a tactic to reset salary expectations in this job market.

I've done a couple of interviews a year to research what the interview process is and how it has changed over time. It is not a process I have ever enjoyed.

Wishing anyone entering the job market all the best.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts. Let go of them in the water. Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.

The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)

Penn Jillette has written and spoken about why he was a libertarian in the past. I came across this quote in an interview on Cracked about his attitude to libertarianism has changed recently.

Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate.

Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out (Tim Grierson/Cracked)

I came across this quote on a post from Jason Kottke's site.

Especially since most minimalists want to keep exactly the economic and police system that keeps them privileged. That’s libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves.

Green Mars (Kim Stanley Robinson)

Twitter blocked searches on Taylor Swift's name last week. The reason: explicit AI-generated images had gone viral on the social media site. This is not a new phenomenon. It did remind me of a depressing quote from Scarlett Johansson when she spoke to the Washington Post about this issue in 2018.

Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired... The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause... The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.

Fake-porn videos are being weaponized to harass and humiliate women: ‘Everybody is a potential target’ (Drew Harwell/The Washington Post, December 30, 2018)

Cory Doctorow delivered the Marshall McLuhan lecture in Berlin on January 30th, 2024. It was recorded and posted on YouTube. There are also contributions from Frederike Kaltheuner and Helen Starr.

transmediale McLuhan Lecture 2024 with Cory Doctorow and Frederike Kaltheuner.

The Second Captains Podcast had an episode about the murder of Sean Brown, the chairman of Bellaghy Wolfe Tones GAA club in May 1997. He was locking up the pitch after a committee meeting when he was abducted, beaten and shot by the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF). No one has been convicted for the crime. The PSNI have apologised to the family about the inadequacies of their investigation.

The Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill came into force in 2023 and stipulates that all legacy inquests must be completed by May 1st, 2024. Any inquests that are open on this date will immediately end. The bill was opposed by all 5 main political parties in Northern Ireland and the Irish government has launched a legal challenge to the European Court of Human Rights.

Siobhan and Damán Brown outline the slow progress of the inquest so far and that PSNI and MOD were not meeting deadlines in regards to releasing documentation necessary to complete the inquest. They are afraid that they are stalling until the deadline passes. They do not believe that the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR) will provide the truth that they seek.

They wish to see the inquest finished or, failing that, a public inquiry.

Siobhan Brown read from the club statement from the Bellaghy Wolfe Tones GAC which is scathing in its criticism of the PSNI and the British State. It finishes:

We respectfully request that this correspondence is considered by all units of our Association, at both club and county level, and we ask each club member in Ireland, as you are locking your club gates in the evening, consider – if the same thing were to happen at your club, would you accept this sort of treatment? For your family? Your community? Is this how you would want your memory to be treated?

A STATEMENT IN SUPPORT OF THE FAMILY OF OUR ESTEEMED FORMER CHAIRMAN, SEAN BROWN. (Bellaghy Wolfe Tones GAC)

I ran into an issue with a Windows laptop I was using for work. The internet connection dropped. I tried restarting my laptop but that didn't work.

I then tried using the troubleshooter under Settings to see if that would improve matters. Once the troubleshooter was finished then only option I could see in the Network options was Airplane Mode. Uh oh.

I tried an number of approaches with no joy but I came across this article that provided a good step by step approach to fix the issue. If you have a Windows machine and all the Wi-Fi options disappear then this is a good starting point if you're trying to fix the problem yourself.

The guys on The QAnon Anonymous Podcast had Arif Hasan on to discuss Aaron Rodgers evolution over the past few years. It's an interesting listen if you're into that sort of thing.

QAnon Anonymous Episode 263: Aaron Rodgers feat Arif Hasan

Keith Kurson wrote a great blog post about blogging and provides a number of links to help people to get started.

The advice he gives about starting a blog is great.

1. Share your thoughts on whatever. You’re a blogger, not an opinion columnist in the washington post.
2. Change your mind! Write about why you changed your mind!
3. Write however you want. Run-on sentences. Weird grammar. Write in limericks, sonnets, or haikus – defy the grammar cops.

You should blog (Keith Kurson)

Have some fun!

Éanna Burke's winning point for St. Thomas in the All-Ireland club final yesterday was one of the best scores I have ever seen. Check it out here.

George Orwell died on this day, January 21st, in 1950. Maria Popova shared a couple of post from her website, The Marginalian, worth reading.

• George Orwell on Writing and the Four Questions Great Writers Must Ask Themselves
• Haunting Illustrations for Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ Introduced by the Courageous Journalist Who Broke the Edward Snowden Story

Dare Obansanjo (a great follow on Mastodon) shared a LinkedIn post from Diane Hirsh Theriault, a staff software engineer at Google. The atmosphere at Google sounds grim. The fact that Sundar Pichai notified Google employees that there will be more layoffs this year wouldn't have helped.

This post does run into the danger of reading too much into one person's opinion. However, this is not the first instance I've heard of people complaining about the leadership and lack of morale in Google. Praveen Seshadri wrote this in a Medium post after he left Google last year.

The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.

(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.

The maze is in the mouse (Praveen Seshadri/Medium)

That's a real indictment of the culture and management in Google.

A couple of things stood out from the LinkedIn post to me.

1. Leadership, or lack thereof, is a major problem

Theriault starts her post like this:

My hot take: Google does not have one single visionary leader. Not a one. From the C-suite to the SVPs to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed.

Diane Hirsh Theriault on LinkedIn

and it only gets worse from there. There appears to be a lack of direction and a problem with communication. People are being let go seemingly at random which is disrupting functioning teams.

Google has had the benefit of the money machine that is their search for such a long time that they have taken their eye off the ball in terms of new products.

The Google Graveyard is a real problem because whenever Google launches a new service, people are not using it because it could be gone again in a few years. I don't trust Google to maintain their services. That has become their brand to me.

2. There is a fine line between excitement in work and exploitation

There is a pervasive sense of nihilism that has taken hold. "Well, I guess I will just do the job until they fire me." A lot of people have golden handcuffs situations and aren't going to walk away from the salary, but nobody works late anymore. The buildings are half empty at 4:30. I know a lot of people, myself included, who used to happily do extra work evenings and weekends to get the demo done or just out of boredom. That's gone. 

Diane Hirsh Theriault on LinkedIn

I work in the IT industry and I enjoy my job. I have done the long evenings and weekend work. I regret some of that now.

There are times when extra hours are required. Sometimes you just need to drive through to hit a deadline.

When I see people being encouraged to stay late by peer pressure when there is not urgency to the work, that is a red flag for the workplace. What I regret from working in environments like these is that all my social relationships were tied to work. Companies that encourage this behaviour will drain every drop of effort they can from their employees.

The problem is that, oftentimes, I enjoyed myself while working. There's a real feeling of accomplishment when completing a project or learning a new language, framework or technology. There was a sense of camaraderie that developed in teams when hitting targets we weren't expected to. Most times, we didn't receive any benefit. Maybe a pat on the back, some drinks and dinner. Then get back to work.

If you find yourself in a situation like this, take stock if this is something you want. Is this a temporary work schedule? Is this expected even during quieter times during the year? Can you keep working this way until retirement? What will it do to your relationships?

If you plan to be in this industry for the long haul, consider what is sustainable for you. Keep adjusting that baseline as you get older. You could say life gets in the way. That's wrong. Life is what's important but work can get in the way of that.

I stumbled across an interesting website that is an interactive explainer on how QR codes work. If you want to know more about how QR codes operate then it's worth playing around with.

https://qr.blinry.org/

"You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype" by Lee Vincel is an essay I return to often. It was the first place I heard of the term "criti-hype".

Criti-hype breaks down as critics of a certain technology warning of the worst case scenario of its adoption end up advertising its features rather than looking at the real world problems happening today. As Lee Vincel puts it:

It’s as if they take press releases from startups and cover them with hellscapes.

You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype (Lee Vincel/Medium)

It's important to keep criti-hype in mind when extraordinary claims are being made by technology companies about how their new invention will disrupt an industry. Uber spoke of making transit cheaper and more efficient by allowing people to act as taxi drivers on their commute home or in their spare time. A few years later,

Uber's bezzle destroyed local taxis and local transit – and replaced them with worse taxis that cost more.

No, Uber's (still) not profitable (Cory Doctorow/Pluralistic)

AI has been the new technology in the hype machine for the past year. As Lee Vincel writes:

More recently, “AI” is the area of technology that has likely experienced the greatest amount of criti-hype. As Yarden Katz and others have argued, “AI” is really best thought of as a rebranding exercise: around 2017–2018, corporations using “AI” to describe things that had previously been known by other faddish terms, like “Big Data.”

...

First, criti-hype helps create a lousy information environment and lends credibility to industry bullshit. In Bubbles and Crashes, Brent Goldfarb and David Kirsch write about the role of narratives in creating speculative bubbles around new technologies. When academics engage in criti-hype, they lend more authority to these narratives.

Here is one example of how credibility-lending can work: McKinsey says 60 percent of occupations would have 1/3 of their activities automated by “AI.” Let’s be real. McKinsey says this because it sells consulting services to firms and wants executives in those firms to believe they will be soon be dealing with a radically transformed environment. In other words, McKinsey wants to scare the shit out of us.

You’re Doing It Wrong: Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype (Lee Vincel/Medium)

That is not to say that there is no utility from AI and large language models. I've tested out some AI assistants and there are some useful aspects to them. Sometimes they speed up my work process but I've found they have slowed me down more often.

That is also not to say there is no risk to employment from AI. As Cory Doctorow said:

I also think that out bosses have proved over and over again, indeed since the Industrial Revolution, they're happy to replace skilled labourers who make good things with machines that make substandard things.

IBM Predicts AI Job Disruption (Cory Doctorow on This Week in Tech)

The nature of the technology is hype and change. The next thing is the next "big" thing. Get in early so you don't get left behind. Look at the guys who got in early on the previous "big" thing. In times like these, I try to remember the Gartner hype cycle and wonder where we are on the chart before I get too excited about the next thing.

Yanis Varoufakis appeared on the Keen On podcast with Andrew Keen to talk about his new book, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism. It is an interesting conversation but I found an answer that Varoufakis gave to be bleak when thinking of how society is structured around these digital platforms. When he speaks of digital fiefdoms, he means platforms like Amazon and Facebook.

Within the digital fiefdoms of the 21st century, you are not even a subject. You are certainly not a citizen but you're not even a subject. You are only a resource and an asset to be stripped by the owner. In other words, you have even fewer rights under technofeudalism that you would have had under feudalism. At least under feudalism you could petition your lord and be heard occasionally. Today, this is simply impossible. You enter one of these digital fiefdoms and the algorithm, on behalf of the owner, is matching you to individuals whether they are sellers or other users in a manner which maximizes the rent extractive capacity of the owner of the algorithm. And that's it. You are not a citizen. You are not a subject. You are little bit like in The Matrix, the movie, humans who had been turned into batteries or solar panels providing energy and heat to the system. In this case, the system being cloud capital.

What killed capitalism? Yanis Varoufakis' murder mystery about the death of capitalism and our descent into "techno feudalism"

Sam Kriss wrote a funny review of Walter Isaacson's biography of Elon Musk in The Point. The part that stood out the most was Kriss' opinion of Isaacson.

Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible. After stints at Harvard, Oxford, the Sunday Times and Time magazine—Christopher Hitchens called him “one of the best magazine journalists in America”—Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved. What else was he supposed to do? Follow the demands of human dignity even in the face of mild, non-life-threatening opposition? Don’t be ridiculous.

Very Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer (Sam Kriss/The Point)

Scathing.

Meredith Whitaker, the President of Signal and chief advisor to the AI Now Institute, appeared on the Big Technology Podcast and she had some interesting things to say about OpenAI, Microsoft and the hype that has built around AI since the release of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT itself is not an innovation. It's an advertisement that was very, very expensive that was placed by Microsoft to advertise the capacities of generative AI and to advertise their Azure GPT APIs that they were selling after effectively absorbing OpenAI as a Microsoft subsidiary. But the technology or frameworks on which ChatGPT are based are dated from 2017.

So, Microsoft puts up this ad, everyone gets a little experience of communicating with something that seems strikingly like a sentient interlocutor. You have a supercharged chat bot that everyone can experience and have a kind of story about. It's a bit like those viral "upload your face and we'll tell you what kind of person you are" data collection schemes that we saw across Facebook in the 2010s and then an entire narrative of innovation or a narrative of scientific progress gets built around this sort of ChatGPT moment.

Suddenly generative AI is the new kind of AI. Suddenly claims about sentience and about the superintelligence and AI being on the cusp of breaking into full consciousness and perhaps, endangering human life. All of this almost like religious rhetoric builds up in response to ChatGPT.

I'm not a champion of Google but I think we need to be very careful about how are we defining innovation and how are we defining progress in AI because what I'm seeing is a reflexive narrative building around what is a very impressive ad for a large, generative language model but not anything we should understand as constitutionally innovative.

Meredith Whitaker on ChatGPT

She also talks about the dangers of trusting the models to return factual information.

I didn't say useless. I said not that useful in most serious contexts or that's what I think. If it's a low stakes lit review, a scan of these docs could point you in the right direction. It also might not. It also might miss certain things because you're looking for certain terms but actually, there's an entire field of the literature that uses different terms and actually if you want to research this and understand it, you should do the reading.

Not maybe trust a proxy that is only as good as the data it's trained on and the data it's trained on is the internet plus whatever fine-tuning data you're using.

I'm not saying it's useless, I'm saying it is vastly over-hyped and the claims that are being made around it are I think leading to a regulatory environment that is a bit disconnected from reality and to a popular understanding of these technologies that are far over-credulous about the capabilities.

Any serious context where factuality matters is not somewhere where you can trust one of these systems.

Meredith Whitaker on AI Hype and Doing the Reading

I remember Ezra Klein talking about the importance of doing the reading and the connections that can be formed in your mind as the material becomes more familiar to you. That depth of knowledge can provoke insights to create something new or to improve an existing service. Loading all your books into an expert system does not help this type of thinking if you never read them yourself.

Productivity in knowledge work is still incentivized to produce more volume rather than more quality. There's great story about Bill Atkinson when Apple decided to track the productivity by the number of lines of code that they wrote in a week. According to Folklore.org:

Bill Atkinson, the author of Quickdraw and the main user interface designer, who was by far the most important Lisa implementer, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code.

He recently was working on optimizing Quickdraw's region calculation machinery, and had completely rewritten the region engine using a simpler, more general algorithm which, after some tweaking, made region operations almost six times faster. As a by-product, the rewrite also saved around 2,000 lines of code.

-2000 Lines Of Code (Andy Hertzfeld/Folklore.org)

I'm afraid that the diligence and craft displayed by Bill Atkinson would not be rewarded today when developers are encouraged to crank out as much code as possible using GitHub Copilot or some other AI assistant.

Justin Garrsion wrote a really interesting article on how Amazon have used their return to office (RTO) policy to quietly lay people off. I heard about while listening to his interview on The Changelog podcast "Amazon's silent sacking with Justin Garrison" which is an excellent interview about the topic.

A prediction he makes is that AWS will have a major outage in 2024 as a result of these layoffs.

Many of the service teams have lost a lot of institutional knowledge as part of RTO. Teams were lean before 2023, now they’re emaciated.

...

I suspect there’ll be a major AWS outage in 2024. No amount of multi-region redundancy will protect you.

There has already been an increase in large scale events (LSE) throughout Amazon , but AWS is so big most customers don’t notice. This is a direct result of RTO and Amazon’s silent sacking of thousands of people.

Amazon's Silent Sacking (Justin Garrison)

AWS provides the resources for a surprisingly large portion of the internet that when it goes down, it can cause major problems for other businesses like it did in 2021 and 2023. Netflix wrote about what they learned from an AWS outage in 2011 but their service still went down when AWS did in 2021.

Amazon used to speak of their "customer obsession" and "customer-centric innovation" but cutting teams in the knowledge that AWS services are going to degrade doesn't seem obsessed by the customer. It looks more like another step on the road to "enshittification" that Cory Doctorow wrote about.

The fact that a large part of the internet is built on such a fragile foundation is a problem but that isn't the real issue.

The real issue is how they treat their employees. The stories of how badly they treat their warehouse workers and delivery drivers are common. I know that a software engineer losing their job because they can't or won't go into the office is not the same.

It's still is a family losing an income. It's someone worrying that they can't make rent or a mortgage payment. It's struggling to find work to replace the salary you lost. Being laid off is hard enough. Pretending that it's a breach of the RTO policy for the company to save face is insulting.

According to this study from Stanford University, the answer is yes. From the conclusion:

We conducted the first user study examining how people interact with an AI code assistant (built with OpenAI’s Codex) to solve a variety of security related tasks across different programming languages. We observed that participants who had access to the AI assistant were more likely to introduce security vulnerabilities for the majority of programming tasks, yet were also more likely to rate their insecure answers as secure compared to those in our control group.

Do Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants?

404 Media reported on a study published by German researchers from Leipzig University, Bauhaus-University Weimar, and the Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence titled "Is Google Getting Worse? A Longitudinal Investigation of SEO Spam in Search Engines".

Google isn't the only search engine dealing with this issue. Jason Keobler writes:

Notably, Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo all have the same problems, and in many cases, Google performed better than Bing and DuckDuckGo by the researchers' measures.

Google Search Really Has Gotten Worse, Researchers Find (Jason Koebler/404 Media)

The research does highlight how much damage search engine optimization (SEO) has done to the ecosystem of the internet. The release of generative AI is only going to make the problem worse. Amazon is dealing with product titles and reviews being generated using ChatGPT.

David Roth had a good piece on Defector about the promises made by the developers and boosters of AI and its actual use in the present day.

One reason it is not very interesting is that everything they have touted as the future of some essential human thing or other—the future of art, or money—has mostly crashed out in ways that left behind very little useful residue. Another is that the ways in which AI is used in the present, by your lower-effort plagiarists and scammers, are so manifestly not the future of anything that works, but rather both the present and the future of shitting-up web search results, which is roughly analogous to saying that robocalls about homeowners insurance are the future of human communication.

The Future Of E-Commerce Is A Product Whose Name Is A Boilerplate AI-Generated Apology (David Roth/Defector)

Tadhg Hickey is an Irish comedian, actor and writer who published a wonderful book last year, "A Portrait of the Piss Artist as a Young Man". I read it after Philip O'Connor named it as The Global Gael Book of the Year 2023.

The book tells his story growing up in Cork, his relationship with his family and his use of drink and drugs. There are a lot of laughs to go with the tales of self-destruction.

An important message is how being an alcoholic is not all tears and tragedy. It may end that way but it is not whole story. He writes:

But the truth of the matter is that I know very few alcoholics who didn't have an absolute hoot on their way to eventual despair. We wouldn't be so preoccupied with drinking if it weren't absolutely brilliant. And I do think it's important to say that because I've always found the best way you can help someone struggling with addiction is to be honest with them. If you come in hot with the 'drink and drugs are evil' routine, you run the risk of alienating them. Drink and drugs are superb until they stop working.

A Portrait of the Piss Artist as a Young Man by Tadhg Hickey (Chapter Six - A Snowball's Chance in Hell, Page 99-100)

Philip O'Connor interviewed Hickey on The Global Gael podcast where they talk about the book among other topics.

https://youtu.be/cPmp92U6nLE?si=qjG2E-Z_mRitO00I

I also liked this passage towards the end of the book about recovery. It can be a depressing thought when you start your recovery and look back all the time and opportunities that have been wasted. It's never too late to get started.

If you're open and honest and you're willing to put the work in, life is just about to start, not end. You won't need to be drunk anymore to cope with the burden of being you. You'll wish your drunk buddies well but you're no longer feel compelled to join them. You won't be smug or judgemental; you'll neither be better nor worse than your fellows. You'll just feel alright. You'll reach an unimaginable summit in an Irish context: having booze-free fun. Imagine that.

A Portrait of the Piss Artist as a Young Man by Tadhg Hickey (Chapter Twelve - Nice Things to Be at When You're Not Demented, Page 218-219)

I listened an interesting interview on the 'Protestant work ethic' and its lesser known, progressive alternative on The Gray Area with Sean Illing. The interviewee was Elizabeth Anderson, a professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan.

She recently published a book "Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back" about how the unrelenting accumulation of more has led to the exploitation of working people. Whether you agree with the premise or not, it is a conversation worth listening to.

There is also a profile about her in the New Yorker.

I just finished the second season of Things Fell Apart, a BBC podcast series where Jon Ronson dives into the culture wars. The first season was excellent and the second matched it.

It focuses on the changes in the culture wars brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic but moves through the deaths of sex workers in Miami in the 1980s to Plandemic to a family being terrorized while on holiday in Oregon to George Floyd's murder and the BLM protests to the Great Reset. It's just a fascinating listen.

I've always appreciated Ronson's empathy when interviewing people, especially when he disagrees with them. His curiosity helps me to try to understand why they think what they think. He lets them speak but also puts their claims against actual evidence and experts to see if they have any merit.

I liked how he signed off the series.

This has been a series about the culture wars that snowballed during lockdown told by some of the main players. There have also been stories about untruths and their consequences.

Excited delerium is not real and George Floyd wasn't suffering from it.

Judy Mikovits was not jailed by a medical establishment for exposing Big Pharma's deadly secrets and vaccines aren't killing millions.

I don't believe that Brandon, put on trial for plotting to kidnap the governor of Michigan, was a white supremacist. Nor that Covid and lockdown were engineered to enslave the people.

The family in the Big Bertha school bus weren't Antifa and the media shouldn't scare people that way nor forego evidence for ideology.

Children are not using cat litter boxes as toilets in American schools and being confronted with uncomfortable ideas is not the same as suffering from PTSD.

Finally, tempting as it always is, documentarians should try not to see the world in terms of heroes and dragons.

We all get things wrong sometimes. No one is perfect. But as this series has shown, when untruths spread, the ripples can be devastating. And so it feels more important than ever to try and hold onto the truth, like driftwood in the ocean, because, if not, we might drown.

Things Fell Apart (Season 2, Episode 8: Mikki's Hero's Journey)