new rant from me about how boosters asking critics to admit that AI is “useful” is not the win they think it is vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcBCji6XvE audio: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/94cb1cda/useful-is-nothing

here’s my beat for beat commentary on the WWDC25 event icyi. https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3lr6tm62rpc2h

David pulled it all together perfectly here. It’s amazing how well it fits the hook model, whether they intended it or not

New webbed brief from Heydon

https://briefs.video/videos/introducing-webbed-sites/

very much agree with this

Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience

https://archive.is/20250419163054/https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef#selection-2009.350-2009.663

Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.

ICYI I posted a new vid/pod this week and an accompanying thread about: Everything Is Work Now — Tech products have a work/life balance problem

• Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_os9Pp3AYW4
• Pod: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/7cdb9dc1/everything-is-work-now
• Thread masto: https://hci.social/@fasterandworse/114352163970046171
• Thread bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3lmykmxv6qs2w

Here’s my audio/video dispatch about framing tech through conservation of energy to kill the magical thinking of generative ai and the like podcast ep: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/968a91dd/kill-magic-thinking video ep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLHmtYWzHz8

aw thanks

ICYI here’s me getting a bit ranty about generative ai products https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5MQb-uNf2U

how much is templated now? reckon it’ll be 3hrs every time?

out of curiosity once I tried to ask it to make a colouring picture from a photo of a toy for my kids and it just ran what seemed like imagemagick filters over the photo to convert to black and white and pump up contrast to only show the hard lines - just like all the free convert to outline web tools that have existed forever. I asked it to try again but without the filters, instead to identify the object, and to draw it in a colouring book outline style, and it spat out some shitty stylised mishmash derived from all the illustration IP it stole and ingested. I still feel guilty for trying even that

My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.

See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320

I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.

it all stinks so much. He calls it “opt-in” but the official description of that opt-in is:

If you try to use Proton Scribe, you will be prompted to chose between local and server-side. So, technically, it’s not active until you decide how, and if, you want to use it.

as you can see here: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/112807462045101580

there is opt-in and then there is dangling an expired hotdog

not sure how legit that account is, actually. It’s not the one I @'ed - this one was created in Jan 2024 - either it’s his low-key alt or a bot

perhaps his plausible deniability account.

Eamonn Maguire, author of the Proton Scribe announcement post, responded to my tweet with this: https://x.com/EamonnMagu14645/status/1814062340863651965

We built this as an opt-in alternative to the non-privacy centric options on the market.

Our goal is always privacy by default, we want to make that possible in the GenAI world too given the number of businesses already using it, and the privacy risks other options pose.

Witness some orange site mouth frothing generated by his last medium post. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33988356

it’s also kind of fucking stupid to post an opinion like this on the fediverse of all places

this is the best mic drop savagery I’ve read in a while. There is no coming back from it.

he would have been tweeting about how science can’t explain the mechanical turk