I didn’t have a great time when I started at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It was my first office job in the US (I think I’d got an SSN barely weeks beforehand) and there was a lot to culturally absorb. My predecessors as EFF’s sole activist were Cory and Ren Bucholz; big shoes to fill. […]
I’m not fond of Twitter as a communicative form — I still believe that the question “what if we put everyone on the same IRC channel?” was one that we didn’t need to run an experiment to answer. But I am enjoying having multiple reincarnations of Twitter, from the individual yurts of the Fediverse to […]
Continuing the Old Hippy mulling: instead of just trying to make old fires spontaneously light again using the same old ashes, my thought is — how do you find a role for the values, for the insight, and keep that in a place that preserves the best of it? I wrote about this a fair […]
Around about 2000, I began to consider how it would be, when and if I became an Old Hippy. Old Hippies had been a common part of my cultural heritage ever since the Eighties, when it was generally understood that they were terrible embarrassment to everyone — including, somehow, hippies. They continued to wear the […]
Why do governments go after companies and executives of services of more weakly encrypted tools? It’s very hard, this early, to pierce through what’s going on with the French authorities’ arrest of Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram — but that doesn’t stop people from having pet theories. Was it retaliation from the US and […]
I didn’t write for a bit. The world doesn’t end; I still get paid; it’s all good. Also, I had no opinions to speak of. Well, that’s not true. For instance, if I took a moment, and I might soon, to write about the fading away of the arcane knowledge of the link. (As a […]
I admit that, post-EFF, when I read about some terrible Internet regulatory proposal, or knotty problem of digital ethics, I often have a burst of “well, thank goodness it’s someone else’s job to deal with this now.” (Except for the narrower domain that is still my problem, I guess). And then again, sometimes, I just […]
I’m downloading the large language model llama-13B-hf as we speak, hoping to get it going on the GPU I have for games. What strange gloss will they put on this moment in history, where machine-learning at home was enabledby videogame users who couldn’t bear to shift from general-purpose computing machines to consoles? My iron self-discipline […]
More things that I’ve noticed about integrating LLMs into my workflow: I also spent some time today catching up on that last piece of hype, Meta’s VR bid. I don’t like to dismiss anyone’s work, but it’s strange how Meta has been shifting tone from Oculus’s gaming vibe to something more … generic? Flat enterprise? […]
Sad about the District Court decision in Hachette vs. Internet Archive; not just because of the ruling against the Archive, but because of many people’s reaction to it online. People have strange intuitions, not just about the status of the law, but also of how it progresses. There’s some tut-tutting that an august institution like […]
A little change of pace. As part of the Not Secret But Not Entirely Documented Either plan to save the Internet, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time with lisp weenies. The parenthesis are rubbing off on me, I think primarily because you can stuff lisp into tinier nooks than even Linux fits. One […]
I’m hoping that the net time I get a promotional postcard from eyebuydirect, they’ll have added another “&” onto my fully-escaped surname, and so on, until it overruns the postcard’s CSS block into the street. A voice-mail from Central Computer: my computer is fixed, I can come and pick it up. It felt very like […]
The equivalent of “time to crate” in conversations with me, is the length of time it takes someone — not always me! — to ask “Have you read Seeing Like a State/Tyranny of Structurelessness”? It was IMMORAL to roll one’s eyes at this point, because obviously it is awesome that anarchist (or CIA, depending on […]
Liz reminded me that I don’t need to publish some abstract essay every day; I can just, you know, blog. Having said all that about my implicit middle-classness, I’m writing this in a J.G. Ballardian brutalist lair somewhere near Sonoma. It’s all glass, infinity pools, uncovered concrete and plastic cows, surrounded by wildfire-scorched...