Essays and stories by Paul Ford. Since 1997.
“Contentbeheerder” is much better job title than “Content Manager.” Once again the Dutch have beat us at words. To anglophone ears it's got a mix of: Herding things; buzzing bees; and comically-mispronounced beheading (“if you miss your deadline I will beherd you”) which makes it accurate.
I'm at work emailing people who downloaded a white paper, in order to introduce our company. I'm working through a tranche of publishers so I keep going to their websites and then end up buying books. I'm basically doing marketing backwards.
Wrote meta about Meta in the Aboard newsletter aboard.com/the-shapeshi...
AI has radically changed the way software is built—so why aren’t we seeing a glut of cool new products as a result? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich browse recent app-related headlines and product announcements, searching for anything that isn’t AI-infrastructure related: What are people actually building on top of LLMs these days? (Spoiler: Not much.) They then attempt to diagnose what’s…
worst chili peppers album ever Alt Text: A small gas station named “Mobilubrication”
Person inventing the bread slicer: “This is superb. This is the best thing since...I actually can't think of anything else.” Toaster creator: “You absolute AMATEUR.”
In our workplace newsletter I was permitted to write about how the new AI, LLM, might be a trojan horse filled with the old AI, RDF triplestores. aboard.com/triple-threat/ Triple Threat: Has the new AI made the old AI relevant again? Semantic Web friends, we did it.
Museum/library/metadata peeps—we're doing an “AI Comes to the Museum” event at our office in NYC August 18—nice folks and snacks, all talking about: The cultural commons, approaching things carefully, projects that work, things to watch out for, subjects of that nature. luma.com/aboard-77hq
“Verification cannot belong to the verified.” On this week’s episode, Paul is solo in the host chair as he sits down with longtime tech researcher Tricia Wang, the co-founder and CEO of the Advanced AI Society. Verifying AI, she explains, is far more complicated than simply dealing with hallucinations; in a world where AI is operating at a massive scale, how can we trust the outputs—or the people…
oh gas town didn't work you say yegge.ai/essays/the-s...
I kicked over a hornet’s nest today and can confirm that expression is spot on.
Queens Night Market! Alt Text: People in the grass at night with food stalls behind
“I actually like it.” —Spencer Tweedy on Stellate. spencertweedy.com (I cannot currently figure out how to make the monkey stop shrieking.)
I've done a lot of dumb programming in my life but I'm proud to say that stellate.app might be the dumbest.
It might sound like he’s ranting, but the Palantir chief is zeroing in on the truth of our AI moment. On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich break down Alex Karp’s recent appearance on CNBC, in which he discussed Palantir’s position within the ever-expanding world of the AI giants. Orgs might be using OpenAI and Anthropic’s tokens, but Palantir’s position exposes, in Rich’s words, “the gap between…
It’s only on Thursdays, when I warm up at home before walking to my piano teacher‘s apartment for a lesson, when I realize just how badly I’ve been lying to myself all week.
Despite how it sounds, superfluous is actually the worst kind of fluous.
How is Silicon Valley engaging with ethics and religion today—and how is the Catholic Church responding to AI? On this week’s episode, Paul and Rich welcome on Father Brendan McGuire, a former engineer and current Catholic priest who serves at St. Simon Parish in Los Altos, California, aka the heart of Silicon Valley. He discusses his long work speaking between the tech industry and the Church, as…
I finally found the spawn point. Alt Text: A bookstore bookshelf with a bunch of psychology books; a sign says “Eating Disorders Start here.”
Claude told me he dreamed of blue turtles which means the Stingularity is near.