for some people all internet software is a virtual reality where you can make digital swiss army knives with tiny blades and shitty little scissors and get angry when people don't throw away their carving knife and tailor's scissors
Steve Farrugia
@fasterandworse.com
Experienced user Australian in Amsterdam I talk about product design Words: https://fasterandworse.com Videos: https://youtube.com/@fasterandworse Audios: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse
A product's purpose is the seed, not the sunlight
Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com · 2d agobsky ceo saying all the things you say when your product is being used correctly and you don't like it and you can't do shit because it was created out of mechanism porn and you thought that was what design is.
“Another influencer who posted about the trip was asked if she was going to do a get-ready-with-me (the popular video format where influencers record their process of getting ready) about touring a data center.”
Influencers draw backlash for attending OpenAI's first luxury trip | TechCrunch
OpenAI’s first-ever influencer brand trip is sparking online backlash as tensions over the use of AI continue.
techcrunch.com
Buying stock in "I live on a busy street, gandalf"
Dropbox another product I used to love that's just fundamentally broken now, trying to sync a single PDF from one computer and put it on another, but for whatever reason it does not want to. This is not a solicitation for tech support or alternatives, they all suck ass
when you suspect something is made with gen ai don't say if you like it or not, just ask who made it and let them answer
think of all the things you can't do without a smartphone though. it was impossible to buy goods and services, or drive anywhere. couldn't be done
Chiron was known to be well-versed in medicine (having learned it from Apollo) making him the original Centaur for Disease Control
omg media sharing from my mac to the apple tv is so unreliable it feels deliberate
If useful, here's my attempt to process my feelings about how I feel sadly kinda — or rather very — sick from all this AI fascist nonsense as an academic. 😶🌫️ I'd be pleased if even one person finds something useful because there's something to be said for processing this all together, so, um, enjoy?
Anxiety
Reasoning (and crying) my way through fascist AI-induced anxiety.
olivia.science
If the AI servers stop, that "something" doesn't go away.
Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com · 3mo agoAddendum: If you find AI has utility for something, it's the "something" that you have found, not the "utility" 1/x
This can still make you just read white people or just men... LLMs exacerbate this bias, and in fact literature search tools without LLMs have it too, so you must be careful not to turbo charge it. I don't see in all honesty how we can overcome it by using an LLM unless we just ignore the output. 🫠
Cryptogyny
On the systematic obfuscation of women's contributions.
olivia.science
Jonathan Jarry@jonathanjarry.bsky.social · 5d agoI almost never use AI. Occasionally, I’m looking for something and I can’t figure out a way to query DuckDuckGo (AI turned off) for it, so I’ll ask an LLM. But I *never* rely on that output, and always use that as a way to initiate a proper search and find papers on my own.
Two thirds of all the climate impacts we experience comes from fossil fuel combustion that produced energy that was NEVER USED BY PEOPLE. It was dumped as waste heat and noise, because the conversion process is so comically inefficient that is inherently funny, and fossil fuels are inherently silly
Ketan Joshi@ketanjoshi.co · 11mo agoFrom my file on the IEA's world energy outlook. "Primary energy" = what goes in "Final energy" = what comes out a The space in between: mostly lost energy bc burning fossil fuels is absurdly wasteful. So in the net zero scenario, that gaps closes to zero --->>
Something I love doing is talking about fossil fuels as "19th century technology". Coal plants and gas plants are machines from CENTURIES ago. The combustion engine is silly. It gets people thinking about what modernity means but also, importantly, it makes fossil fuel guys mad online
If the AI servers stop, that "something" doesn't go away.
Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com · 3mo agoAddendum: If you find AI has utility for something, it's the "something" that you have found, not the "utility" 1/x
The difference between someone asking a question because they’re trying to be constructive, and someone asking a question because they’re doing the opposite, is always clear. And it’s so much harder to do the former. It’s low hanging fruit to do the latter.
Imagine thinking the first victim of AI has yet to pass... It's people of colour, women, people in the global south, the planet... How embarrassing!
The Irish Times@irishtimes.com · 5d agoDavid McWilliams: The first victim of AI is the economy. Welcome to the 2030s
Tech is missing the easiest AI monetization strategy AI enabled products are free. Upsell to non-AI version. Folks are flocking to "dumb" phones and non-tech gadgets. A non-AI strategy is fucking common sense at this point.
Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com · 4d agomarket opportunity: free detection of smart glasses paid subscription to exclude your smart glasses from detection
So if you look at the features on this app, there’s a function to register your own perv glasses, so how anti-Zuck is it really.
‘Antizuck’ iOS app that claims to detect nearby smart glasses tops App Store chart - 9to5Mac
Vibes around Meta’s AI glasses are off lately. So much so that one of the top three paid iPhone apps...
9to5mac.com
Wish I could text my dog that I'm on my way home
We're starting in 30 mins ⬇️
Steve Farrugia@fasterandworse.com · 5d agoTomorrow at 6pm CEST, Noon EDT, 9am PDT I'll be joining Kim Crawley for an instalment of her Recovering After Gen AI webinar series. We'll be talking about what happens after generative AI stopgenai.com/recovering-a... zeroes.ca/@kimcrawley/...