Around 1995 or so, a high schooler named Matt Wright decided to launch a website that shared some basic website tools that he
programmed. Many of these were dead-simple, things like contact forms, guestbooks, and web counters.
…
OMG I remember Matt’s Script Archive. I taught myself Perl with (among other things) his scripts.
I took his Counter/ImageCounter script and adapted it into my own FireCounter, which stitched together (non-animated) GIFs of digits (which I made using a filter in Corel Photo-Paint, I
think) into the kinds of edgy hit counter I was into, back in the day.
This is a recreation. It probably looks better than the original!
Later, I even added parameter handling to allow the webmaster to specify a different set of digit images, and referrer detection so that it could track different sites:
each got its own text file with its count in it! For a while, a dozen or so of my friends had my counter visible on their Geocities and Angelfire pages!
I’m sure that my script had many, if not more, of the kinds of security vulnerabilities discussed in the linked article. But man, it felt like magic at the time!
The field-sizing property is coming to Firefox 152, making it available across all major engines. It allows
you to control the sizing behavior of elements with a default preferred size, such as form elements.
…
Sometimes a new CSS feature comes along and I immediately “get it”. Like: that’s a cool new feature, I can already see how it’ll save me time, or make things simpler, or improve
accessibility, or allow me to do something new.
Other times, like this one, I initially shrug. What’s the point?, I think…
…and then later in the very same day find occasion to wish it was already mainstream. Hah!
Yesterday I took a short trip. I began with a ride on the local Hyperloop, which ran through a tunnel dug by Boring Company. Then I used my neural implant to summon a fully
self-driving Tesla robotaxi. While enroute I read the latest news from the Mars colony.
OK, none of that actually happened, because those products don’t exist. There are no working Hyperloops. The Boring Company has not dug any commercial tunnels. Tesla has a few
self-driving — though not fully self-driving — taxis in Austin and nowhere else. (Google’s Waymo driverless taxis are operational in several major hubs.)Neuralink, which is purportedly pioneering brain implants, has tested its products in a handful of patients but done no more than
that. And of course there is no Mars colony: there have been no manned flights to Mars, nor the prospect of any for the foreseeable future.
Yet at various points over the past decade Elon Muskpromisedthat each of these services would be available by 2025 if not sooner.
a few unqualified successes (Tesla leading the charge on the EV rollout; Starlink providing widespread Internet), and
a lot more unfulfilled promises and vapourware (Twitter’s post-takeover nosedive, the failure to deliver anything-of-use by Neuralink, The Boring Company/Hyperloop, the
worse-than-pointless Grokipedia, all the things SpaceX hasn’t yet done…).
The vast majority of his wealth comes from investment, not from returns: people buy his stock if they buy his hype. I’m not saying he’s
producing nothing of value… but yeah: the “world’s first trillionaire” is… unfortunate.
But then again, I’d be quite happy for him to be the world’s last trillionaire, too.
For 25 years, Google Search was built on a contract. The web provided the content – billions of pages, freely linked, freely crawled. In return, Google sent people back. The link
was the unit of exchange. It’s what made the Web thrive as an information system: you publish, Google indexes, users click through, and value flows back to the source. Win-win.
That contract is now broken. Generative UI doesn’t link to your article, necessarily. It absorbs your article, synthesizes it into a
widget, and presents it as Google’s own answer. Information agents don’t send users to websites. They deliver “synthesized updates” with maybe a link or two buried at the bottom.
The web was the scaffolding Google needed to build its index, to train its models, to accumulate the world’s information, and put ads next to it to get filthy rich. Now that the
content is inside the system, the scaffolding is no longer needed. Google is creating its own context.
Google thinks it no longer needs the Web to deliver answers. And it no longer needs ad slots to deliver ads. What it needs is you. Your emails, your files, your calendar,
your purchase history, your travel plans – all flowing into Spark, all building the richest possible picture of who you are and what you’re likely to click on. That’s exactly the
kind of personal context those auction models need to work. The prediction module in the prominence allocation framework doesn’t run on keywords. It runs on knowing you.
…
An excellent piece by Matthias Ott, discussing revelations from this year’s Google I/O. In particular, the imminent pivot of Google Search from its lifelong “query in, list of links
out” model to a wholesale “query in, LLM output out” one.
This isn’t just about putting AI output at the top of the search results, as I gather they do today, but about getting rid of search “results” entirely, and
running everything through the model.
To which Matthias wisely asks: well, how will ads work then? Google’s business model is based on mining your personal data and shoving ads in your face. Where do they go in a search
interface that it’s really a search but a “helpful” AI.
It turns out there’s a few approaches that Google seem to be considering, but what they’ve all got in common is the idea that marketers will be able to “influence” the LLM’s token
generation, perhaps by using an LLM of their own to decide whether you (based on everything Google knows about you) are worth marketing to, and how much they’ll pay to do so, and then
this input being “weighted” against competing advertisers and actual ingested data in order to feature advertiser-influenced content woven directly into the output of the LLM.
Superficially, this sounds a little like product placement, like you sometimes see in American-made TV shows and movies. You know, where one character says, of “I’m going to go get a
drink refill. You know you can get unlimited refills on any drink you want… and it’s free?”, and the next says “It’s a wonderful restaurant.”, while they’re sitting in Burger King.
Except this isn’t about saying “hey, people who watch this show are probably high and want a snack, let’s push our fast food their way”. It’s individualised.
It’s more like if the characters, knowing that your GMail account had a recent email about some test results, and your Google Calendar had an appointment tomorrow at the doctor, started
talking about a particular brand of medication to, y’know, put the idea into your head.
The future presented in Futurama was supposed to be a joke, right?
We’re not at the point of completely-customised TV shows – nor the injection of commercials into dreams – yet. But Google’s plans, which blur the already-grey boundaries between organic
and advertising content, are pretty insidious.
Assuming you’re in their ecosystem already, and possibly even if you’re not… Google may already be looking at your search terms, your calendar, your emails, your location and schedule,
who you communicate with and how often, which web pages you visit, which apps you use, where you spend money, etc. (Seriously: if you somehow haven’t begun de-googling already, what are
you waiting for?)… there’s a huge potential for misuse there.
But the arms race between people blocking or learning-to-ignore ads and advertisers trying to foist them upon us continues, and Google thinks this is an acceptable next step in
escalating that. Using an insane amount of energy to recycle other people’s work without crediting them, in order to mash up the result with information they know about you in order to
deliver you an unverifiable soup of words which might answer your question but with no clue how much or little commercial interest went into producing it, or by whom.
That’s some proper Darkest Timeline shit, right there.
You don’t need to take my nor Matthias’s word on it (although you should read his full post because it’s excellent): just look at the concept videos in Google’s blog post on the subject. You’ll also notice that almost-nowhere
in their demos do Google even hint at the possibility of linking-out to anybody else’s website: there’s like one “visit site” button that appears at the very end of
one of the flows, after the agent has done its things. Google is building a walled garden where they hope you’ll live, served by their AI butler on behalf of the companies
who pay Google to tell you about their products.
🚫 Regrettably you have been locked out of diamond geezer
pending age verification protocols.
You may be UNDER 16 YEARS OF AGE and therefore you must not read anything here UNTIL YOU CAN PROVE THAT YOU’RE
NOT.
The government is taking urgent action to ensure that children are no longer able to access harmful social media apps. At the personal behest of the Prime Minister a raft of
carefully thought-through definitely-not-rushed non-kneejerk policies designed to restrict inappropriate content is to be introduced forthwith.
There is some absolutely terrible stuff online, much of which has already tarnished the minds of innocent youth. It is therefore imperative that all potentially terrible stuff must
now be wrapped in a secure plain cover and placed on the digital top shelf. It’s for everyone’s own good.
…
Despite being parody, diamond geezer’s new age-gating – which e.g. asks for personal information but, obviously, doesn’t actually block access to the site – somehow perfectly
straddles the line between “invasive” and “ineffective”… in exactly the same way that I expect the UK’s legal implementation will manage in a year or two.
Blogs. The curated, written looking glass into someone’s perspective. That’s what I love about them. Blogs. Waking up in the morning and spending a little time reading over the
carefully chosen words of another human being. Truly astounding. Blogs. Poured time and energy, someone distilling themselves into this personal, sharable medium. Blogs.
…
I guess to bring this post to an end… if you don’t have a blog, change that! (especially if I know you IRL, seriously). I wanna hear about you and your life! Start that quirky and
personalised website. If you already do, tell me and share! Every one of them is awesome; from digital gardens to byte-based megacities. Fill them with you and share! I
can’t wait to start reading :)
Oh, so very much this.
There was a time, a couple of decades and change ago, when almost all of the people I spent time with in my real life blogged. Nowadays, it’s far fewer. Ruth shares interesting bits of tech (plus Thames Path walks!), and I keep an eye out in case Gareth shares
more ‘plane-related news or Andy takes a deeper dive into his music… but nowadays the active
blogs I follow are, for the most part, people I know online (or, at least, people I knew online first, even if I’ve subsequently met them in person).
Blogs allow for a deeper level of thought; not everything is well suited to an in-person chat. We sometimes need time to get our thoughts in order and detailed concepts are often
much better understood in writing. It’s honestly a shame that we have confined ourself to short processing times and quick responses. A back and forth can sure be fun, but so can
the meticulous; and nothing’s stopping you from chatting over the stuff you’ve written – imagine how insightful that could? Blogging really recaptures that “handwritten letter”
spark.
Getting updates from people over text is kinda hard too. While I’ve been abroad, I have missed so many moments in peoples lives (good and bad), of which I usually only hear a
summarised fraction. I get it though, asking is hard and responding is even harder; retyping a shortened version of something for the 5th time isn’t much fun. I dream of a time
where more of my friends write blogs, a world where I can easily grasp and know the wheres and whats in someone’s life without feeling like I am nagging for details; where the focus
is being a friendly part of their lives…
I don’t expect this repost to encourage any of my IRL friends to dust off their old blogs (or start new ones). But I can dream!
It doesn’t “feel that the best option is…” It doesn’t feel.
AI is a cheap parlor trick. You provide words, and it provides words back that are most likely to occur alongside the words you provided.
…
A useful reminder for the next time you’re tempted to personify or humanise an LLM.
LLMs are statistical tools. There are some things that the statistics of language can be good at, especially on average: stuff like summarisation, sentiment analysis,
pattern identification, and checking for internal consistency.
But they’re just maths. They’re not a person.
It’s not even that they don’t care about you or don’t want to help you. They don’t even go that far: they’re incapable of “caring” or “wanting” in the first place. What they do is take
all of the information they’ve ingested, plus their training and prompt, plus the conversation you’d had with them so far, plus a random number, and produce output which is, after a
fashion, a prediction of what comes next.
As always: that’s not to say it’s useless. (It’s also not to say it’s always useful.) But as a tool, it’s pretty opaque to most normal people.
Unless you’ve really taken a deep-dive into understanding low LLMs work, they must seem like magic (hell; speaking as somebody who has taken such a deep-dive,
they sometimes seem like magic!). I’m sure that some of the time, they must seem like they’re a living thing, or at least an approximation of one.
But they’re not. And it’s important to remember that.
Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with
the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account,
and Sephora’s account.
…
Well this is unsurprising and unshocking. Turns out that if you give your chatbot help interface unrestricted access to your backend systems – rather than, say, the access level of the
human talking to it – then obviously hackers are going to try to jailbreak it in ways that you can’t possibly predict or guardrails against and, if/when they succeed,
they’ll break into all the systems to which you’ve given the system access.
This shouldn’t even have to be said. Meta’s mistake here is so self-evident that they should be embarrassed.
Because I have access to wp-config.php, I added the following to my file:
define( 'WP_AI_SUPPORT', false );
…
A useful tip.
Personally, I’ve got what feels like an even-better approach (for me, at least) I switched to ClassicPress a year and a bit ago, and haven’t
looked back! It’s a stripped-down fork of WordPress with no Gutenberg, lighter JavaScript, and a handful of other features… plusClassicPress is already AI-free and staying that way.
This isn’t to say that you can’t use AI with ClassicPress. Just that you’re not having to install the feature if you’re never going to use it. With WordPress’s good plugin architecture
it seems strange to me that such divisive features would become part of the core product, but that just seems to be the direction that the project’s been going in for a while now.
Three Rings CIC is, and always has been, a fully-remote organisation. We were doing remote working almost two decades before the Pandemic
made it cool (and well before tools like Slack and Zoom were a thing: we cut our remote-first teeth using IRC as our collaboration
tool!), but, there are still sometimes occasions when it’s good to have as many people as possible physically in a room.
When, last year, the Nightline Association announced it was closing down, it put one of their key services, Nightline Portal, which helps
Nightlines to take and handle calls these days, in serious risk: someone had to host and maintain it, and that had always been the Association. At the point the announcement was
made, in February, the Portal team had about four months to find it a new home.
It took me some degree of back-and-forth with the Nightline Association on one side, and it required some careful governance and planning at our end (as well as a few shifts in
short-term priorities!), but – helped by the fact we all wanted the best possible outcome for Nightlines – we got an agreement in place, a budget plan agreed, and were able to ensure Portal would keep going, for free faster than I think anyone had
expected.
That mattered to Nightlines, because to them, it’s critical infrastructure. And it mattered to us, because Nightlines were where Three Rings began, back in 2002. Today, we
support everything from major national charities to tiny community shops, but Nightlines remain close to our heart. Almost all our team – across a wide range of “x decades ago”! –
started as Nightline volunteers; we’ve nearly all spent the night awake, quietly waiting out the small hours, in case one of our fellow students needs someone to talk to in a crisis
and offering a listening ear when they called. We weren’t going to let that community lose something it relied on.
But adopting Portal meant a lot of work, against the clock. Data validation, new agreements, rebudgeting, and, once that was all done, a full migration to shift Portal from the
Nightline Association’s server infrastructure to ours. So to get that done, we organised an in-person meetup, “Portal Camp,” in a reasonably central hotel. Volunteers gave up their
weekend, left their homes on Friday evening for two more days of work, and we brought everyone together. We spent Saturday morning planning, carrying out test migrations, preparing
comms, and agreed yes – we can go.
…
About a year ago I helped look after the technical side of the “lifeboating” of Portal into Three Rings, right through the point that everything went wrong and my developers almost missed dinner (and, indeed, had to eat at their laptops!). I mentioned at the time my awe and pride of
them, but JTA’s post goes deeper and further and hints at the (much bigger) structural and procedural changes that were needed to adopt Portal.
A great thing about volunteering with Three Rings is that we get to ask, on any given day “how can we do the most good?” Not “will this give value to shareholders?” Not “what’s the
marketing strategy for this?” Not “can this deliver return on investment?” Those are questions for a very different kind of organisation to us. We get to ask, each and every day, “how
can we do the most good?”
That question is why, for me, adopting Portal into the Three Rings family, last year, was a no-brainer. Dozens of voluntary organisations depended upon it, and we had the skills and
volunteers and technical infrastructure to stop it from dying.
Anyway: JTA’s post on LinkedIn is better, and more-interesting, and
somehow also funnier than mine, so go read that. And if you want to talk volunteering with me, I’d love to chat!
No surprises here, but it’s interesting/staggering to see quite how large the disparity between spending and profit is for some of these companies.
I enjoy the fact that there’s a real-time ticker on the site so you can watch Amazon (for example) burn five thousand dollars a second.
When I tell people that generative AI, as it’s currently used, is unsustainable, this is what I’m talking about. Unless there’s a quantum leap in AI efficiency (for which I’ve seen no
evidence of the feasibility) or a dramatic increase in the charged cost of LLM services (on the order of a tenfold increase assuming the increased cost does not drive any customers
away; more if it does), this whole thing looks like a house of cards.
A lot of the AI bubble – and that’s what it is, for all there are useful things inside there – is based on “Invest now, because when it works it’ll be fantastic!” rhetoric that’s
like investing in a mainframe company in the late 60s on the basis that smartphones will take over the world. We’re moving a lot faster than mainframes went to PCs, but it’s
important to invest in the things you can do with the system that work *now*.
There isn’t a good consumer use for AI right now. ChatGPT is a terrible source of information, confidently wrong in a way that sounds human enough to cause delusion and psychosis.
Things that AI/LLM tech is good for right now – pattern matching, repetitive tasks, logic flow – have some great business cases (It’s made some amazing breakthroughs in satellite
and medical imagery, it’s got a bright future in automated transcription), and I think there’s a good case for it in content moderation (Yeah, it’s not great at it, but given the
sick shit content mods on Facebook have had to deal with has
given them cPTSD, I strongly believe it should be a machine job). It’s use for writing, music, translation, or art is still at the very least questionable and at the most
utterly immoral.
…
Well-said, Aquarion!
The current generation of Generative AI isn’t useless. But its uses are quite specific and it certainly does
more-harm-than-good that it’s promoted as an “everything” solution to every problem. I’ve used some form of agentic coding for several years, mostly of the “spicy autocomplete”
variety1,
and I mostly agree with Aquarion’s observations.
The whole post is an enjoyable tale.
Footnotes
1 My experiments with “vibe coding” have shown me that AI working alone can produce
usually-functional code to specification, but that code is often of low quality and rarely maintainable, even by the AI.
Well this is a fun (and frustrating!) game. You’ll be presented with 20 (alleged) CSS properties, but some of them… are convincing-looking fakes! You’ve got 10 seconds to identify
whether each is real or not. Every few you get right increases the difficulty level, but also the score potential. How high can you score?
Me? Oh, I kept getting up into the “forbidden” level and then my brain would melt and I’d crash out. Quite proud of my last run, though:
They are small, almost imperceptible cues that tell the nervous system: you are safe. You are connected. You are still here. Where a trigger tightens the chest and narrows the
world, a glimmer softens the edges. It steadies the breath. It lets a thin ribbon of light slip in.
They are rarely grand in scale. Most often, they are sensory. Fleeting. Easy to miss.
…
This is beautiful.
I’m reminded of the way Ruth reframed imposter syndrome as wonder
syndrome a few years ago, which I wrote about at the time. A “glimmer” is not only a valuable and useful word
that I’d not come across before (I love it when that happens, like with entle), but it also reframes the world in a more-positive light.
I’m going to to start looking for and naming glimmers in my life as part of my general practice of gratitude. Cultivating a conscious awareness of our glimmers is probably harder than
finding an awareness of our triggers – and even that’s not always easy to narrow down specifically! – but it seems like such a worthwhile exercise.
The One and I is a delightful and long-running personal blog, by the way, if you’re looking for somebody new to follow. It feels
calming and personal and sweet and there’s a healthy corpus of pictures of pets.
I potentially saved my client a bunch of money and embarrassment with that 3-line change.
Now, I consider that a productive day.
But had I been measured on my contribution by lines of code, or commits, or features finished, it would have been seen as a very unproductive day by my manager.
…
A great anecdote and some wise words from Jason Gorman on the nature of productivity and code.
This matches my feeling on AI. It’s good at making lots of code. Sometimes it even writes the right code. But something it rarely demonstrates skill at is
comprehending the bigger issue. I’m sure we’re already seeing developers who “game” their employers’ productivity metrics, to the detriment of the end users, by having AI
make “more” code without having to engage their brain and actually understand the problem.
(And, of course, there are employers who, whether intentionally or not, promote this kind of behaviour through their policies and success metrics.)
