Feersum Beasts

Worth reading. We must say this explicitly: AI is killing the value of small developers stone dead. Support them if you care for what they do. The AI accelerationists tell us that they're "replacing" those products - but what they're doing is making them worthless whilst not building alternatives.

Whilst technically interesting, the news this week that "We've built something that looks a lot like Microsoft Office, but doesn't actually function" should be setting of alarm bells for everyone. These are dangerous times. We're going to see immense damage long before we get benefits.

Worth reading. We must say this explicitly: AI is killing the value of small developers stone dead. Support them if you care for what they do. The AI accelerationists tell us that they're "replacing" those products - but what they're doing is making them worthless whilst not building alternatives.

Let's start Monday with an edition of "I told you so" The report into the Online Safety Act landed. It has delivered no significant reduction in harm and sees continued high exposure rates whilst putting many legitimate news and information sites behind age-gates and paywalls.

Surely our Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy (who, it has to be pointed out is not on Bluesky) should understand that this isn't something that can essentially be treated like a national newspaper that occasionally needs rapping on the knuckles?

Let's start Monday with an edition of "I told you so" The report into the Online Safety Act landed. It has delivered no significant reduction in harm and sees continued high exposure rates whilst putting many legitimate news and information sites behind age-gates and paywalls.

And... who do you think was consulted when the regulation was being constructed? The thing is, this isn't just about regulation, it's also about the environment and ecosystems that define our online lives. It's as much civil infrastructure as our roads and city centers.

Let's start Monday with an edition of "I told you so" The report into the Online Safety Act landed. It has delivered no significant reduction in harm and sees continued high exposure rates whilst putting many legitimate news and information sites behind age-gates and paywalls.

We watched as the "Nice men from Facebook" wined and dined civil servants and MPs with next to no understanding of the thing they were trying to control. Those same MPs and civil servants dutifully lined up to tell us we were wrong, fed by self-interested narratives from media billionaires.

Let's start Monday with an edition of "I told you so" The report into the Online Safety Act landed. It has delivered no significant reduction in harm and sees continued high exposure rates whilst putting many legitimate news and information sites behind age-gates and paywalls.

And here is the "I told you so" - there was extensive pushback from seasoned industry professionals (not the corporate lobbyists - the people I've worked with who helped build our modern internet). We said, repeatedly, that this would be the result.

Let's start Monday with an edition of "I told you so" The report into the Online Safety Act landed. It has delivered no significant reduction in harm and sees continued high exposure rates whilst putting many legitimate news and information sites behind age-gates and paywalls.

The changes in Europe in response to global politics and trade pressures have rather exposed the lie of a seamless trade bloc. Even within the EU, trading across national borders requires jumping through tax and regulatory hoops that put small and domestic companies at a huge disadvantage.

They've followed the US in rolling the pitch for global corporations, whilst failing to remove administrative and legal barriers for even the smallest company. It's the worst of all worlds.

Between AI software cloning forcing apps into the cloud, the complete destruction of the value system behind web publishing, corporate gatekeeping of internet access and political interference in social media, we have every reason to be considering what a "new internet" might look like.

They thought LLMs might be a route to AGI - which would imply being able to synthesise new solutions. Increasingly though, we're seeing them doubling down on what they are good for, which is summarising existing knowledge. The sameness is a statistical feature. And they're redefining AGI to suit.

As I understand it, the maths stunts recently are being positioned as evidence that AI tools are generating novel work. However, the actual work seems to have been an exhaustive search through existing research space to find a combinatorial solution that humans would have struggled to spot.