Links, October 11, 2024

A lot happened this week, and I’ve been making good progress cleaning out my open tabs, so there’s more here than usual.

XOXO 2024 Videos

The videos fro XOXO 2024 are coming online. In particular I think both Erin Kissane’s talk about the importance of open, distributed social networks and Ed Yong’s talk about his Pulitzer-winning pandemic coverage are together easily worth an hour of your time.

wreckage/salvage

Speaking of Erin, she’s launched a studio for her work. From into the wreck:

So: What even are these systems in which we live and work and—stripping away the ideologies of what corporations and technologies cannot possibly be expected to do—how should they function?

Her first big post, how to buy shoes in the fediverse, makes a strong case for further attention:

I picked shoes for my analogy because shoes (like social media) are often coded as frivolous, but (like online sociability and communication) they’re essential to the functioning of most human societies.

The Disappearance of an Internet Domain

If you haven’t heard, the .io top-level domain (TLD) is going away — don’t worry, it will be around for at least another 5-10 years. This TLD in particular has been popular in the tech & gaming communities thanks in part to the association with “I/O” (input/output) or use in Domain Hacking. This is going to be a big deal.

Once this treaty is signed, the British Indian Ocean Territory will cease to exist. Various international bodies will update their records. In particular, the International Standard for Organization (ISO) will remove country code “IO” from its specification. The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which creates and delegates top-level domains, uses this specification to determine which top-level country domains should exist.

As this piece states, there is a lot of money tied up in the .io TLD, and there will be enormous pressure on IANA to fudge their rules. With the increasing popularity of generic TLDs (gTLD), I’ve heard suggestions that .io could become one of those. This would be contrary to the rules for gTLDs specify (section 2.12):

Applied-for gTLD strings in ASCII must be composed of three or more visually distinct characters. Two-character ASCII strings are not permitted, to avoid conflicting with current and future country-codes based on the ISO 3166-1 standard.

I believe that IANA & ICANN should not make an exception to their procedures for this.

First of all, the history of the Chagos Islands is bloody, and it is not clear that the islands’ new owner Mauritius has the Chagossians’ best interests in mind, as the Chagossians themselves have been excluded from the negotiation process.

Secondly, the history of the .io TLD itself is full of questionable antics.

Choosing a domain name is increasingly difficult –– believe me, I know! — but associating with country codes in particular has consequences, as queer.af found out recently and typographica found out a while ago.

I realize that perhaps I shouldn’t throw stones from my .us glass house, but I’m not domain hacking and it is the country in which I was born and have spent most of my life.

Jevons paradox

Jevons argued that improvements in fuel efficiency tend to increase (rather than decrease) fuel use, writing: “It is a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.”

I’ve heard of this before, but I didn’t know it had a name. Some things don’t improve with scale, but rather, the opposite. Applies to energy, traffic, and a few things in technology as well.

Curly-Cue: Geometric Methods for Highly Coiled Hair

We present geometric methods for generating shapes that are characteristic of highly coiled hair. Different features become visually relevant when hairs are well-approximated by high-frequency helices instead of low-frequency curves, so we present algorithms for three such phenomena.

As a white person with naturally very curly hair (type 3c, about as curly/kinky as white people get), I am personally very excited to see this and where the research continues.

Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information

When I want information, like the real stuff, I go to forums. Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.

Forums are the decentralzed inheritor to the BBSs of yore, and this is a great directory of them.

Yes, the striking dockworkers were Luddites. And they won.

Now, no technology is inevitable—it’s the result of a series of human decisions. Opposing the use of a technology that will harm you and your peers does not mean you “hate the future”—just, perhaps, that you would like more input into how that future will unfold. And what, exactly, the future of work is should be up to all of us; especially, you know, the ones doing the work.

Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs

This is so unhinged that readers thought this was something I made up. 1200% productivity improvements? You can use Scrum to report on wars and accomplish your weekend chores? This looks like I asked ChatGPT to produce erotica for terminally online LinkedIn power users.

If you’re not familiar with “Scrum” and it’s the application of Taylorism to software development, I envy you. This piece does a great job of explaining why you should be wary of anyone pushing the methodology.

LI + AI = GIGO

The fact that LinkedIn is not rolling out this generative AI model in the EU, EEA, or Switzerland – places which unconditionally require opt-in consent, while also giving users the right to call out incorrect information that companies hold about them – is a bit of a confession to me.

It tells me that they know their site is built on data slop, and that slop is a feature, not a bug.

LinkedIn has been feeling particularly cringe lately, and that’s because it’s no longer a networking site for professionals, but instead, something else.

How to Monetize a Blog & Scrollbars

These are very well-done (if intentionally painful to read) parodies from the same site (which will have to find a new domain name). Stick with them, keep scrolling.

It turns out I’m still excited about the web

That ethos is how it succeeded; it’s why the web changed the world. And it’s why someone like me — over in Scotland, with no networks, wealth, or privilege to speak of — was able to break in and build something that got peoples’ attention. It’s also why I was interested to begin with.

Challenging The Myths of Generative AI

“Myths and metaphors aren’t just rhetorical flourishes; they are about power. They tell us who has it, who should have it, how they should use it, and in the service of what goal,” he told me in an interview over email. “By actively choosing myths and metaphors that perpetuate a healthy, collaborative, ethical, and accountable understanding of AI, we can help ordinary people better understand how this technology works and how it should be used.”

This is one of those things I wish more people in technology really understood; there are a bunch of equivalent ones on the open/free software side of the fence that could stand to be cataloged and examimed.

Report: Roblox Is Somehow Even Worse Than We Thought, And We Already Thought It Was Pretty Fuckin’ Bad

This is a summary of a much longer and report (which has its own agenda). I’m not quoting it because it’s appalling.

A major challenge for parents in these times is figuring out how to shield our kids from the internet. Spoiler Alert: it’s a lot harder than you think, because “just don’t let them on the internet” isn’t an option unless you want to go full homeschool.

Personally, we don’t let our child do anything with strangers on the internet, but several of our kid’s friends from school are into Roblox, and its the one thing that both the kid really wants that we deny, and that we’ve heard from people we trust that we must avoid.

This piece vindicates our approach.

After software eats the world, what comes out the other end?

Human beings only feature at the very beginning of the story, when they generate the outputs that are initially fed to the model. But in actuality, LLMs, like other algorithms, repeatedly influence and are influenced by human culture.