The personal website and blog of Alexander Petros
You Can Fix Email August 10, 2026 Lots of essential software is getting worse in ways that you can't do anything about. You can't turn off the autoplaying videos on Instagram ; you can't control the software updates to your car ; you can't clean up the the bloat that has metastasized across Windows 11 . But you can fix email, for two reasons: It's an open standard - emails have to be able to talk…
Ouroboros of Bullshit March 22, 2023 If you are somehow unaware of ChatGPT, Bing's Sydney, and large language models (LLMs), please let me know whether there are any vacancies under your rock. I'm tired of hearing about them. Large language models are the latest commercial development in artificial intelligence. They are best understood as a very fancy autocomplete. ChatGPT is one implementation…
The Easiest Moment in Human History to Plan a Party November 4, 2022 Do you remember Facebook Graph Search? In 2013, Facebook announced a new feature that it touted as a bold and revolutionary new way to search the web. It was called Graph Search, and it would index a powerful dataset that Google could never access: your social graph. By taking advantage of Facebook’s incomparable knowledge of who…
The Unbearable Cheapness of AI-Generated Art September 16, 2022 As occasionally befalls internet culture writers, it was once again time for Charlie Warzel to write a piece about Alex Jones. The top photo for articles about figures like Alex Jones tend to coagulate into a few familiar poses. Yelling at the camera; yelling at the InfoWars desk; yelling on the street—you get the idea. These quickly…
When the Down Arrow is not an Upside-Down Up Arrow May 25, 2022 First posts are hard, so I'll start small. Here's two arrows: ⇧ ⇩ If you're on reading this on a relatively recent smartphone, chances are you see two reflected, but otherwise identical arrows. One points up and the other points down. On MacOS (Big Sur 11.6), however, the up arrow is much squatter than the one pointing down. This is a…