Links (5 February 2024)

"The creator economy can’t rely on Patreon. — Joan Westenberg".
"My Call Screening is Now Using My Recreated Voice as the Automated Voice : r/GooglePixel". Would like to see some proper reporting on this because WTF?
'Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of “AI” - Emily M. Bender'. “This is a danger zone for ML tech solutionism because we can always construct ML systems that look like they are doing the job, taking Y and giving X. But if we cannot validate system outputs they are useless.”
"The four phases". “In our new relationship, software isn’t just set up to surveil us to report on us; it’s also set up to be able to do our work.”
"The Good, The Bad, The Web Components—zachleat.com".
"Whose risks? Whose benefits? | everything changes".
"Treating the Symptoms - Jim Nielsen’s Blog".
"Happy international box sizing awareness day - Piccalilli".
"How France’s Film Industry Works". Not linking to this for the explanation but out of my surprise that educated USians don’t know how filmmaking works throughout most of Europe.
"Stripping the web of its humanity". “A world where everyone uses an app like this is a death spiral to an information desert.”
"The LLM search engine | Links | hidde.blog". “Who’s going to make the input these tools grab in order to generate their output?”
"The Tremendous Yet Troubled State of Gaming in 2024 — MatthewBall.co". A long but interesting overview of the economics of modern gaming. Useful if, like me, you aren’t familiar.
"Adactio: Journal—Switching costs".
"The Performance Inequality Gap, 2024 - Infrequently Noted". The performance budget for the JS-Heavy sites is 😮. I get nervous when a dep adds 20K (minified, uncompressed) and people are out there shovelling megabytes of JS over to the client.
"Google spent billions of dollars to lay people off - The Verge". Layoffs are incredibly expensive and leave the organisation in worse shape thane shape afterwards. They are almost always a very bad idea and should be reserved for situations of imminent insolvency.
"The Feature Trap: Why Feature Centricity Is Harming Your Product — Smashing Magazine".
"A highly configurable switch component using modern CSS techniques - Piccalilli".
"Research Suggests A Large Proportion Of Web Material In Languages Other Than English Is Machine Translations Of Poor Quality Texts | Techdirt". This is what happened to Icelandic search results. You end up having to search the known good sites one at a time
"ChatGPT is leaking passwords from private conversations of its users, Ars reader says | Ars Technica". This is the third major security incident at OpenAI.
"Serious New Warning As Google AI Targets Billions Of Private Messages". The AI Bubble is anti-privacy, anti-labour, anti-quality, and in an all-out war against anything resembling a creative practice. This is who you’re siding with when you’re using these tools.
"Why I Find LLMs Frustrating". Essentially, this is a “using an LLM for this use case was an unmitigated disaster even though it looked good to begin with and, by the way, here’s another LLM use case which sure looks good to begin with, and I’m sure won’t turn problematic at a later date” post.
"What we ask in our Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) interviews: Tips to prepare for an EDI interview as a job candidate or interviewer".