Project Tailwind — Google’s answers to DEVONthink, Obsidian/Roam, and ChatGPT rolled into one — has the potential to be the best thing that has happened to academic research in decades. Of course, coming from Google, I fully expect it to be gone and forgotten in a year or so.
Revisiting AOL Hell
The first article I ever saved to Instapaper — 11 years ago, three years after it was created and quite some time before it turned into my personal graveyard of text — was AOL Hell from the now defunct The Faster Times The link is to the Wikipedia entry which, strangely, says that as of February 2018 the url belonged to someone in Serbia. An odd coincidence.. The titular hell is the one AOL created for the employees producing content for its text mill. Writes Oliver Miller:
My “ideal” turn-around time to produce a column started at thirty-five minutes, then was gradually reduced to half an hour, then twenty-five minutes. Twenty-five minutes to research and write about a show I had never seen — and this twenty-five minute period included time for formatting the article in the AOL blogging system, and choosing and editing a photograph for the article. Errors were inevitably the result. But errors didn’t matter; or rather, they didn’t matter for my bosses.
This is, in fact, why AI will destroy the Web as we know it. And if you have any doubts about the outcome of Large Language Models being set loose on the internet, well, AOL wanted to do it even before it was trivial, destroying a few humans in the process:
The document reveals the same attitude that the bosses at the old Ford Motors factory had, when the assembly line was first introduced. Every week or so, the assembly-line was sped up; incrementally, barely noticeably, but the increase had a staggering, cumulative effect, and soon, those workers who couldn’t keep up found themselves standing by the wayside. If AOL could find a good way for machines to write about Lady Gaga, they would almost certainly fire the writers who remain.
They now have the machines, folks… They have the machines.
Mr. Miller can now be found on Medium, writing poetry.
A beautifully designed essay about an ugly entity: dark patterns. I’ve never heard of The Pudding before, but it seems like they do good work.
I just learned about Bike — from Brett Terpstra, who is back blogging and we are all better for it — and outlining will never be the same. Just look at the way it does text formatting, typing affinity in particular, and tell me you don’t want it in all your WYSIWYG apps (looking at you, Word).
Apps and/or services I have tried and dropped so far this year:
The one that stuck:
Yet again, Microsoft is eating everyone’s lunch. Back to the 1990s it is.
He’s a Firefox user.
Old man yells at "date me" docs
I first hear about “date me” docs a few months ago, when someone I followed on Twitter shared his. Today, Tyler Cowen wrote a brief note about them and pointed to another one, from a (female) acquaintance of his.
As someone who’s been in a stable relationship for 14 years this month, I count my blessings every day that I don’t have to think about dating, in the US, in the 2010s and now the ’20s. And for the reason why, look no further than the ridiculous dating apps, and now “dating docs”, which remove all exploration, randomness, and surprise — which is to say everything human — out of the process of finding a partner. Serendipity Which was surprise in a prior version of the post but serendipity is a much better word; thank you, dear reader. in particular is underrated by those who think these documents are a good idea, both in finding out you have common interests with someone you were interested in, and in discovering new things that you wouldn’t have considered before.
Don’t get me wrong, it obviously works for someone — probably people who think a trustless financial system is a good idea — but it is clearly not for me. More worryingly, a portion of kids these days seems to enjoy eliminating everything Dr. Who At least every Dr. Who up to and including David Tennant — things started getting depressing during the Capaldi years and I drifted away from watching…liked about humans. Which is an interesting thing to be happening at the same time when algorithms are starting to “hallucinate”, “lie”, and — let’s call it what it is — bullshit, which have for better or worse been typically human traits.
I shall now grab my walker and shuffle off into the sunset.
I made my feelings about Substack known a few days ago, so why should I care that a blue bird pooped on them?
Well, for one, while writing on Substack isn’t the best choice for most people, some do have things to say and say them well. And two, as much as it was clear that Twitter was in a death spiral, well, actually seeing it is quite a bit sadder than I thought it would be. Pour one out…
Each time I pop into the Midjourney Discord server I feel like I’ve entered a crowded wizards' guild with spells flying all around and no one’s exactly sure what’s going on but my goodness, isn’t it all exciting?
Anyhow, here is my most recent conjuring.
The Mastodon Vibe
The obsession of prolific Mastodon posters with Twitter is what gets me the most. It's like professors complaining to everyone at a lecture that no one comes to lectures any more. Wrong audience?