Links

The main issue with social media is that we want them to be everything. We want them to be a place for casual interactions, for discovery, for news, for serious discourse. And that’s a mistake. Because the moment you put a stupid amount of people in one room and you let them do whatever they want the only reasonable outcome you can expect is chaos. Sure, you might get some positive results out of it but you’ll also likely get someone shitting in a corner and someone trying to fuck the power outlet. Because that’s the world we live in. Now sprinkle some nonsense AI on top of it all and Bob’s your uncle. ...

With so many weird little guys running around Miyazaki’s filmography, it seems time to honor and celebrate them. […] A key aspect of Miyazaki’s weird little guys is how numerous they are. They’re a swarm, frequently providing little moments of comic relief as they move coal or swim through the sea. Their designs are quite simple, but their meaning frequently is not. More here.

The latest issue of The Economist focuses on solar energy. The introductory article is short, compelling, and optimistic. On the economics, they make a good point: Consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel. Solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. ...

Charity Majors1 has a good, long-form article on the Stack Overflow blog. The title is misleading as, while AI’s impact on software engineering and its hiring process (spoiler: you’ll still want to hire junior engineers) is at the heart of the article, there’s so much more in it. It gets exciting in the second part, where she dispenses much from-the-trenches advice on team management and building. Hiring engineers is about composing teams. The smallest unit of software ownership is not the individual, it’s the team. ...

I love this concise checklist on detecting fake experts, with which my experience wholeheartedly agrees. The first one: Imitators can’t answer questions at a deeper level. Specific knowledge is earned, not learned, so imitators don’t fully understand the ideas they’re talking about. Their knowledge is shallow. As a result, when you ask about details, first principles, or nonstandard cases, they don’t have good answers. For more advice, see the original post. ...

Open AI just released ChatGPT 4o. The launch demo is available on YouTube, and yes, it is impressive. They did not launch v5, though, and 4o is only incremental, not exponential, as v4 has been compared to its predecessor. It may mean we’re at the end of the “exponential growth” phase of LLM models. However, the most critical aspect of this release is not technical, as Ethan Mollick correctly pinpoints in his timely What Open AI Did post: ...

This one looks like a promising read: Tor, one of the most important and misunderstood technologies of the digital age, is best known as the infrastructure underpinning the so-called Dark Web. But the real “dark web,” when it comes to Tor, is the hidden history brought to light in this book: where this complex and contested infrastructure came from, why it exists, and how it connects with global power in intricate and intimate ways. In Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy,Ben Collier has written, in essence, a biography of Tor—a cultural and technological history of power, privacy, politics, and empire in the deepest reaches of the internet. ...

Vicki Boykis has a good piece on Redis’s recent vicissitudes. At the same time, she recaps where we stand and sings the praises of a project that many are fond of, and not just for its technical worth. I, like many developers who have worked on high-scale, low-latency web services over the last fifteen years, have an intimate relationship with Redis. At any new job, when you ask where the data is, and someone points you to a server address with port 6379, you know you will meet an good, reliable friend there. ...

Molly White’s experience with LLMs corresponds more or less with my own, but she is much better at recounting, critiquing, and drawing conclusions than I am. I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs. ...