Technology

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    What will replace the International Space Station?

    It will be a sad day when the ISS heads to Point Nemo. What’s the replacement?

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    Dooce, RIP

    Sad news.

    “The pioneering mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid bare her struggles as a mother and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and on social media, has died at 47. Armstrong died by suicide.”

    I did not really read her, but I knew her story. My heart goes out to her family and friends, especially her two children, who are feeling her loss right now.

    Here’s a lovely tribute.

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    Substack reportedly in financial trouble

    I had a Substack email for a bit. It was easy to use but lacked a lot of the functionality I wanted. It also looked so restrictive—everybody’s Substack looked exactly like everyone else’s. So, I dropped it but held onto an account just in case things changed or I decided to go all in. It seems that my wait-and-see approach was the right one.

    Verge reports the company seems to be running out of money after failing to raise more capital. Substack, from what I can tell, is not doing well financially.

    It tried to raise last year, seeking $75 million to $100 million from investors. But it had revenue of only $9 million in 2021, and a sky-high valuation on relatively little revenue was not the vibe in 2022. The company gave up. On its Wefunder page, the company says that the pre-money valuation on Substack is now $585 million, a 10 percent decrease from 2021. And now Substack has turned to Wefunder and retail investors. Friends, I do not like it, not least because the VCs last year got a pitch with Substack's annual revenue, and I do not see that shit line-itemed anywhere on the Wefunder page. Where's the money, Lebowski? Substack makes its money by taking a 10 percent cut of the subscription fees its newsletter writers charge. (Its payment processor takes another 4 percent, according to Wefunder.) The company says it paid out more than $300 million to writers, cumulatively.
    They paid $300m to writers and only earned $9m in revenue. At least they earned revenue and are not operating in a deficit, but they are going to have to change something to remain viable. Lovely that they paid so much out, but investors want their money's worth. Not sure it can remain viable long-term.

    I guess I’ll just keep my account parked.

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    GPT-4 is not AI. Stop calling it that.

    Kevin Drum:

    For all the good it will do, I would like to remind everyone yet again that GPT-4 is not artificial intelligence. Neither is anything else. AI, by any reasonable definition, doesn't exist yet.

    GPT-4 is amazing. It will have a huge impact on the world. It’s definitely on the road to AI, the same way the Model T was on the road to a Ferrari. But it’s still not AI. Not yet.

    YET.

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    A Chatbot Is Secretly Doing My Job

    Ryan Bradley, writing for The Atlantic, outlines how he’s using AI to generate copy for work.

    I have a part-time job that is quite good, except for one task I must do—not even very often, just every other week—that I actively loathe. The task isn’t difficult, and it doesn’t take more than 30 minutes: I scan a long list of short paragraphs about different people and papers from my organization that have been quoted or cited in various publications and broadcasts, pick three or four of these items, and turn them into a new, stand-alone paragraph, which I am told is distributed to a small handful of people (mostly board members) to highlight the most “important” press coverage from that week.

    Four weeks ago, I began using AI to write this paragraph. The first week, it took about 40 minutes, but now I’ve got it down to about five. Only one colleague knows I’ve been doing this; we used to switch off writing this blurb, but since it’s become so quick and easy and, frankly, interesting, I’ve taken over doing it every week.

    The process itself takes place within OpenAI’s “Playground” feature, which offers similar functionality as the company’s ChatGPT product. The Playground presents as a blank page, not a chat, and is therefore better at shaping existing words into something new. I write my prompt at the top, which always begins with something like “Write a newspaper-style paragraph out of the following.” Then, I paste below my prompt the three or four paragraphs I selected from the list and—this is crucial, I have learned—edit those a touch, to ensure that the machine “reads” them properly. Sometimes that means placing a proper noun closer to a quote, or doing away with an existing headline. Perhaps you’re thinking, This sounds like work too, and it is—but it’s quite a lot of fun to refine my process and see what the machine spits out at the other end. I like to think that I’ve turned myself from the meat grinder into the meat grinder’s minder—or manager.

    I keep waiting to be found out, and I keep thinking that somehow the copy will reveal itself for what it is. But I haven’t, and it hasn’t, and at this point I don’t think I or it ever will (at least, not until this essay is published). Which has led me to a more interesting question: Does it matter that I, a professional writer and editor, now secretly have a robot doing part of my job?

    I’ve surprised myself by deciding that, no, I don’t think it matters at all. This in turn has helped clarify precisely what it was about the writing of this paragraph that I hated so much in the first place. I realized that what I was doing wasn’t writing at all, really—it was just generating copy.

    This article made me wonder how I could use AI in my job.
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    ChatGPT is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

    Ted Chiang explains how ChatGPT is better understood as a lossy compression algorithm:

    Imagine what it would look like if ChatGPT were a lossless algorithm. If that were the case, it would always answer questions by providing a verbatim quote from a relevant Web page. We would probably regard the software as only a slight improvement over a conventional search engine, and be less impressed by it. The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she's read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material.
    Reframing the technology in that way turns out to be useful in thinking through some of its possibilities and limitations:
    There is very little information available about OpenAI’s forthcoming successor to ChatGPT, GPT-4. But I’m going to make a prediction: when assembling the vast amount of text used to train GPT-4, the people at OpenAI will have made every effort to exclude material generated by ChatGPT or any other large-language model. If this turns out to be the case, it will serve as unintentional confirmation that the analogy between large-language models and lossy compression is useful. Repeatedly resaving a jpeg creates more compression artifacts, because more information is lost every time. It’s the digital equivalent of repeatedly making photocopies of photocopies in the old days. The image quality only gets worse.

    Indeed, a useful criterion for gauging a large-language model’s quality might be the willingness of a company to use the text that it generates as training material for a new model. If the output of ChatGPT isn’t good enough for GPT-4, we might take that as an indicator that it’s not good enough for us, either.

    The rephrasing of information from the internet adds to the illusion of understanding and intelligence, rather than just being a tool for retrieving information.

    I really like this whole analogy, and I think it pairs really well with experiments using Stable Diffusion as a lossy image compression algorithm.

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    It Happened on Medium: The First 10 Years

    The Medium staff looks back at the first ten years of the platform.

    Medium turned 10 this month. A decade ago, we built a place on the internet for stories that aren’t too long or too short, but… that in-between length. Our simple, beautiful publishing tools gave you the freedom to focus on your words, and our platform connected you with other readers, writers, and thinkers. Our goal, from the beginning, was to help you share ideas that matter.
    I’m hoping the new CEO, Tony Stubblebine, has a plan to make Medium work even better.
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    Styx "Renegade" - But the Lyrics are AI Generated Images

    This video is interesting. Not great. Not amaze-balls. Just interesting. Like a thought experiment.

    Great song, though.

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    Rudy Giuliani Should Delete His Account

    Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing tells the story of fatfingered Rudy Giuliani:

    Rudy Giuliani fatfingered a tweet last week and inadvertently referenced a nonexistent URL (G-20.in); some clever wag registered the URL and stood up a static landing page that reads “Donald J. Trump is a traitor to our country.”

    Now, Giuliani has taken to the intertubes again to upbraid Twitter (and Time Magazine!) for his stupid mistake, tweeting “Twitter allowed someone to invade my text with a disgusting anti-President message. The same thing-period no space-occurred later and it didn’t happen. Don’t tell me they are not committed cardcarrying anti-Trumpers. Time Magazine also may fit that description. FAIRNESS PLEASE.”

    He’s wrong, of course.

    Look, not everyone understands how the internet works. However, someone should have told Rudy how incredibly moronic he sounds here. Remember everyone, this is the personal lawyer of the President of the United States.

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    The Distraction Free iPhone

    Curtis McHale posted a review of a Medium article by Jake Knapp on going six years with a distraction free iPhone. I think the most important bit from the article is Knapp’s realization that a distraction free iPhone is a competitive advantage.

    Here’s the thing: When I stopped instantly reacting to everyone else’s priorities, I got better at making time for the projects I believed were most important—even if they weren’t urgent or nobody was asking for them. I invested effort in documenting and promoting my design sprint process. And, after a lifetime of putting it off till “someday,” I finally started writing, eventually publishing two books.
    I think I want something like this, but I’m not sure. I’m going to keep thinking about this.
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    Officially Entering Interstellar Space

    Voyager 2 has officially entered interstellar space joining its twin, Voyager 1, to become the two furthest objects from home. Basically, they are around 11 billion miles away from Earth.

    Frankly, it’s amazing.

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    Star Wars MegaMix

    Darren Tibbles‘ entry in the Star Wars Fan Awards is a tour de force of animation. His “showreel” is fast-paced and fun with all sorts of Star Wars bits thrown in.

    With apologies to Marie Kondo, it is a rare piece of fan art that truly sparked joy in this jaded Star Wars fan.

     

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    The Simple Joy of “No Phones Allowed”

    David Cain at Rapitude wrote a thousand words about his experience at a concert that was set up as a “No Phones” experience.

    Our phones drain the life out of a room. They give everyone a push-button way to completely disengage their mind from their surroundings, while their body remains in the room, only minimally aware of itself. Essentially, we all have a risk-free ripcord we can pull at the first pang of boredom or desire for novelty, and of course those pangs occur constantly.

    He also peeks into the future and sees this idea:

    I imagine that in another decade or two we’ll look at 2010s-era device use something like we do now with cigarette smoking. I was born in 1980, and I remember smoking sections on planes, which is unthinkable today. I wonder if today’s kids will one day vaguely remember the brief, bizarre time when people didn’t think twice about lighting up a screen in the middle of a darkened concert hall.

    I think he has a real point. It’s hard to look back and not see how my grandkids will view our interconnected, always-on boredom-eliminating activities.

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    The Pullout Method

    I’ve gotten into many arguments regarding the proper removal of USB flash drives from computers. I say you have to click to eject, others say just take it out.

    Doing a bit of research I found this article by Rob Verger in Popular Science:

    Pull a USB flash drive out of your Mac without first clicking to eject it, and you’ll get a stern, shameful warning: “Disk Not Ejected Properly.”

    But do you really need to eject a thumb drive the right way?

    Probably not. Just wait for it to finish copying your data, give it a few seconds, then yank. To be on the cautious side, be more conservative with external hard drives, especially the old ones that actually spin.

    That’s not the official procedure, nor the most conservative approach. And in a worst-case scenario, you risk corrupting a file or — even more unlikely — the entire storage device.

    I hate this. Doing it wrong can create a corrupt file. A corrupt file can basically destroy the USB flash drive. I’ve lost a whole external hard drive because of accidental “Disk Not Ejected Properly” notices.

    Do it the right way.

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    How to Configure Your iPhone to Work for You, Not Against You

    This is the longest article on Medium I’ve ever seen, clocking in as a 74-minute read. It’s awesome and easily navigable.

    The iPhone could be an incredible tool, but most people use their phone as a life-shortening distraction device. However, if you take the time to follow the steps in this article you will be more productive, more focused, and — I’m not joking at all — live longer.

    Good advice abounds.

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    The Echo Chamber

    Isaac Butler at Slate has a decent examination of Crooked Media. Since the 2016 election, the media company, formed by the podcast hosts of Pod Save America, has become a progressive beacon.

    Butler states that the actual news and political analysis is low. I agree, but it’s more a reflection of the time we are living in versus an actual point of view. His biggest insight is one sentence –

    Pod Save America exists to do three things: confirm to the audience that they are not crazy and This Is Not Normal, rile the audience up with humor and outrage, and direct that energy toward concrete action items that will help elect Democrats and push back against the GOP’s agenda.

    I hope it succeeds.

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    Some Regrets

    Katrina Brooker of Vanity Fair profiled Tim-Berners Lee, the father of the internet. He’s been having some Oppenheimer-esque feelings about his creation, as summed up by Brooker herself:

    The power of the Web wasn’t taken or stolen. We, collectively, by the billions, gave it away with every signed user agreement and intimate moment shared with technology. Facebook, Google, and Amazon now monopolize almost everything that happens online, from what we buy to the news we read to who we like. Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, they are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in once unimaginable ways.

    Sounds like he has a plan to fix all that.