Design is social.
Much of the software that we encounter on a daily basis, including the bulk of the infrastructure on which the internet runs, is grounded in a decades-old paradigm called “Free and Open Source Software.” FOSS developers distribute their work under permissive licenses that allow others to use, share, modify and redistribute the resulting code for free. LLM use threatens that paradigm, in part by...
One of the fundamental deceptions of AI is that it reduces work. It looks that way only because you receive the output through a very narrow aperture, creating the illusion of ease. Anatomy of an AI System is a fantastic resource that strips away that illusion. The patient accumulation of detail exposes how “each small moment of convenience — be it answering a question, turning on a light, or ...
In a recent forum post about Canonical’s plans for Ubuntu, technical lead Jon Seager has drawn a useful distinction between “implicit” vs. “explicit” AI. Explicit, in his schema, denotes AI features that present as AI features, e.g. deploying an AI agent. Implicit features, by contrast, look like the sort of features that were available before AI, but work differently under the hood. Segar fram...
Writing at Tech Policy, Emily Bender and Nanna Inie make a number of important points about how anthropomorphizing language leads us into potentially dangerous category errors about what AI is and how it functions. It’s useful to generalize that argument into a broader caution about the language we use when debating and critiquing technologies like AI. Consider novelist Robin Sloan’s declarati...
Imagine a type of social media post where the goal is to point readers to some way of addressing communal problems. Call it “constructive political discourse.” There are, of course, many ways to post about politics, not all of them conducive to healthy communities. The sort of post we’re after is different— and desirable— because it is… participatory, actionable, and aimed at improving...
Suppose, for a moment, that Mastodon is a Big Data company. That is to say, not only do they pass huge volumes of data across the network they operate, but also that deriving additional utility (and, thus, value) from that data is a core part of the company’s financial proposition. Historically, that is how social media companies have functioned: by giving a platform to anyone looking for ways ...
Drew Lyton is right that the future is NOT self-hosted, though I’m of two minds about his arguments for why not. That self-hosting is inconvenient doesn’t strike me as a convincing reason to dismiss it. Of course self-hosting is less convenient than dependence on services operated by global corporations. So is cooking at home, rather than ordering take-out. For a variety of reasons— cost, nutri...
The back and forth over the energy consumption of consumer AI is interminable. Researchers regularly update the predicted costs, AI luminaries (like Sam Altman) counter with internal figures but decline to explain how they were calculated, lay people chime in with cocktail napkin calculations (to which I won’t bother linking), and commentators conclude that there are actually more interesting t...
I’ve been thinking lately that it might be good to expand the aperture of this site a bit. Up to now, you could say my intended subject has been the social spaces we construct online. That has mostly meant writing about the changing shape of social media in the post-Twitter era. Here and there, though, that focus has slipped a bit, and I’m finding that I don’t mind the slippages. In fact, I th...
A recent report from Pew Research shows Bluesky catching up to Twitter/X in popularity among “news influencers.” The fediverse, by contrast, has never had much draw for that crowd. There are fediverse accounts that operate in that general mode, but they never seem to get the same sort of traction as they would on other platforms. In part, that’s due to the less integrated structure of the fedi...