The European Commission expected that the GDPR would result in websites prioritizing the privacy of E.U. users — a better web in Europe than elsewhere. Instead, the result was increased user annoyance under a nonstop daily barrage of consent popovers — a worse web in Europe than elsewhere
So what’s the alternative? That we just get on with excessive data collection and user tracking practices from big tech? The Web was already in a bad state before GDPR. It’s not the European Union that ruin the Web, it is the practices by US American companies fuelled by insatiable greed. GDPR just surfaces how bad it is.
A tale as old as time, trying to fix current technology with more—and new—technology. As if technology is the problem and not the people who are using it. For blogging to form communities you just need some goodwill. All the tools are out there. HTTP is a perfectly fine protocol, email still works, RCS and Matrix are good-enough for chats and if those aren’t your jam you can pick one of the countless alternatives.
When all you’ve got is a hammer… It’s the problem that many discussions around the impact of technology and the problems they cause are led by technologists, who are often users but are rarely representative of the majority of users. And so, because they have been solving problems with technology for their whole life, they look to technology for every problem they encounter. If no-one is doing code reviews on time, maybe we need another notification system, because email and slack and verbal reminders don’t cut it. When our online communities are broken we look to replace the underlying protocol instead of changing our approach to applications that use the protocols. It creates the never-ending cycle of problem, technology solution, more problems, more technology. It’s what keeps us all in employment.
When faced with this unfamiliar and unsettling situation, we often long for the comfort and simplicity of the past. This is evident in the behavior of a publication that focuses on technology and its future impact, as it devotes attention to the remake of an old beloved machine while simultaneously ridiculing someone attempting to innovate in the field of computing.
You can’t stop technological progress; Malik is right about that. Voice and gesture-controlled devices and AI will find its way into more aspects of our lives, and it will be useful is some cases.
But dismissing any criticism on the current arms race to commercialise AI as nostalgia is shortsighted, to say the least. We’ve seen what happens if we let hyperbolic Silicon Valley venture capitalists and CEOs fund and develop products and entrench them in everyday life without ethical checks and balances: Depressed teenagers, hatred, and a president called Trump.
Questioning how a new technology will affect our society, how it will change the job market and what it does to the already unfair distribution of wealth isn’t nostalgia; it’s anyone’s right and journalist’s duty.
So is ridiculing a class of people who believe their little device will change the world. Especially when these leaders position themselves as the saviours of humanity, engineers of god-like machines, while they only push their own agenda to line their pockets. Humane‘s AI pin is an exciting piece of technology and a glimpse into the future of human-computer-interaction. But it doesn’t solve any of the worlds most pressing problems. There’s a chance that, if unregulated, these products cause even more harm.
It’s not nostalgia when people warn about the dangers of AI; it’s justified criticism and concern rooted in how the last twenty years of technological development under the dominance of Silicon Valley have played out.
It’s not nostalgia that is the curse in life and tech, blindly celebrating every new technology coming out of one city is.
— On the hype cycle of web technologies: “At this point, everything needed to be a Single Page Application with client-side routing, immutable data structures and some kind of store. That is, if you could chose between flux, redux, alt, reflux, flummox, fluxible, fluxxor, marty.js, fynx, MacFly, DeLorean.js, fluxify, fluxury, exim, fluxtore, Redx, fluxx… No, I’m not making that up.”
— IndieKit provides IndieWeb tooling to self-publish content and share on social media; and it integrates with static site generators.
Tuesday, 13 December 2022
— Henn Tan is the name of the man who gave us the thumb drive. You know, that thing we used back in the day to get the master’s thesis to the printer, to share photos and music that was absolutely legally obtained, before we moved all our digital belongings to someone’s server.
Wednesday, 16 November 2022
— A short history of technology hubs in the US. Surprisingly, the article, published only a year ago, is only available from the Internet Archive. The Reboot is now a crypto site.
Saturday, 12 November 2022
— LOW←TECH MAGAZINE runs a solar-powered website that sometimes goes offline when the battery powering their server runs dry during spells of bad weather. The background showing the current battery status is a nice touch.
Tuesday, 08 November 2022
— Manchester City, the football club, is developing a scarf that tracks fans’ physiological reactions during games. Imagine this: After a heart-breaking loss in injury time, your smart watch sends you a notification offering anti-depressants at a local pharmacy, discounted for ticket holders.
Disruption is an ethos for the bored, for people who live in reasonable climates and don’t have tanks in the street.
And:
You can’t just say “software is eating the world” and chill. Software already ate the world, and digested it, and pooped out a new world, and that’s where we’re living.
And:
Stability is my new best friend. Not the big stuff, the UN-level stuff. Leave that to the smart macro-thinkers with European accents and interesting all-weather clothing, or the sad Americans with Substacks.
— A birdwatch note has disappeared from one of Elon Musks tweets, where he was moaning about losing advertising money. I don’t know if Musk ordered to have the note removed or if this resulted from a community review — and I don’t want to speculate.
According to official statements, Birdwatch notes cannot be edited or deleted by Twitter staff. Obviously, this is only partially true.
This blog is built with Jekyll, and a Git repository is its database. I can delete a post quickly, but it will still be available in the commit history. With a little more effort, using git rebase, I can purge the post entirely from history as if it never existed.
There might not be a user interface for Birdwatch notes that Twitter staff can use to remove and delete notes quickly. But the note lives in a database alongside tweets, user information, and likes. In that database, you can amend entities and their relationships. If you have direct access to the database and if you know how to google the SQL command you need, you don’t need a graphical user interface to make changes.
Usually, only a few people in an organisation have this kind of access. But if you own the place, you can find that person, and from there, it’s as simple as DELETE FROM birdwatch_notes WHERE tweet_id = '1588538640401018880';
Anything in a database can be deleted. And here lies a potential problem with Musk’s ownership of Twitter. Nothing can stop him from ordering content removal if pressed by the authoritarian regime of a country where he wants to sell Teslas.
— Douglas Bowman remembers Wired’s redesign 20 years ago, the first major project to ship a standards-conformant website. This was a big deal then; it’s how I first learned that you don’t need tables to lay out a website.
Arc is full of new ideas about how web browsers can work: it combines bookmarks and tabs into one app switcher-like concept; it makes it easy to search among your open tabs; it has built-in tools for taking notes and making shareable mini websites.
Arc is very different from other browsers. The breadth of new functionality in Arc is overwhelming at first. I initially toyed around with Arc for an hour and then didn’t open it for a couple of weeks. But I came back, and it’s growing on me.
Most of our work happens in browsers today, meetings, emails, calendars, or writing. And Arc does an excellent job of grouping all those aspects into spaces, split panels, keeping important tabs open, closing others automatically. Overall it’s a more organised browsing experience.
It’s a simple use of a little JavaScript, but it feels freaky - particularly as you continue to read the page, your face forced into a false grin that feels more and more of a burden as time goes on.
— Like everyone else, I’ve been reading Matt Levine’s Crypto Story over at Bloomberg Business. It’s the most well-written, comprehensive, and least-biased writing on blockchains and cryptocurrencies I’ve seen.
Thursday, 27 October 2022
— Oh hey, a new build tool for JavaScript applications. Turbopack is build in Rust, it’s faster than Webpack, and that’s about it. Build speed always seems to be the only benchmark with build tools, even though most JavaScript projects build in good-enough time. The reason to make a new build-tool is never ease-of-use or extendability or a fundamental change in how we make websites that actually justifies a new build tool.
But this isn’t just about cost. It’s also about what kind of internet we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations.
[I]t feels like my whole career has been spent watching geological layers of technology pack down on each other, layer upon layer upon layer, and that the result seems, in aggregate, completely unapproachable.
And:
I stand amazed at newly minted technologists who can start, and get productive, in this intellectual garbage tip we call a “profession”. We couldn’t have built a less enjoyable or consistent collection of tools if we had tried, and yet you persevere and exceed all of us. Hats off to all of you!
I occasionally use Lynx just to find out what that flashy website looks like in an old browser. If Lynx can render your website and I can still read its content then you built a good website. Indy websites pass this test more often than commercial websites.