Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA? – Terence Eden’s Blog
I want to live in a future where Artificial Intelligences can relieve humans of the drudgery of labour. But I don’t want to live in a future which is built by ripping-off people against their will.
Link tags: author
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Bookin’. — Ethan Marcotte
The twelve(!) year old photo that Ethan has illustrated this post with still makes my heart sing.
ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. | America Magazine
But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.
ignore the code: Bookfeed.io
Such an elegant idea!
Bookfeed.io is a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.
Small pieces, loosely joined.
An Ocean of Books
What you see is the big map of a sea of literature, one where each island represents a single author, and each city represents a book. The map represents a selection of 113 008 authors and 145 162 books.
This is a poetic experiment where we hope you will get lost for a while.
Quarantine Book Club
Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!
A great initiative from the folks at Mule Design. As well as chatting to talented authors, you can also chat to me: this Thursday at 4pm UTC I’ll be discussing Resilient Web Design.
Why Are Accessible Websites so Hard to Build? | CSS-Tricks
I reckon a lot of websites have bad accessibility not because folks don’t care, but because they don’t know there’s an issue in the first place.
The headline is begging the question (I don’t think accessible websites are so hard to build), but I agree with Robin’s idea:
What if our text editors caught accessibility issues and showed them to us during development?
This is something that Hidde has been talking about recently too, looking at content management systems.
The Philip K Dick book I love most… | Books | The Guardian
Three authors pick their favourite book by Philip K Dick:
- Nicola Barker: Puttering About in a Small Land
- Michael Moorcock: Time Out of Joint
- Adam Roberts: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Future Simple Steps - where to find your favourite ex-Five Simple Steps authors and their books
Now that Five Simple Steps has closed down, the individual authors are in charge of distributing their own books. This site links to all of those books.
The Anti-Tolkien - The New Yorker
A short profile of Michael Moorcock’s Elric series (though, for me, Jerry Cornelius is the champion that remains eternal in my memory).
Brian Aldiss: ‘These days I don’t read any science fiction. I only read Tolstoy’ | Books | The Guardian
A profile of Brian Aldiss in The Guardian.
I still can’t quite believe I managed to get him for last year’s Brighton SF.
Designing the Wider Web
The dominance of the desktop browser is over – the web has become wider. After so long painting in a tiny corner of the canvas, it’s time to broaden our approach.
It’s understandable that the community is somewhat nervous about the changes ahead. So far, we’ve mostly responded by scratching around for device-specific tips, but this isn’t sustainable or scalable. We should transcend “platformism” and instead learn to design for diverse contexts, displays, connectivity, and inputs by breaking devices down into first principles. Instead of the defective dichotomy of the “desktop” and “mobile” web, designers should aim to create great user experiences using the truly fluid nature of the web.
NYRblog - Atwood in the Twittersphere - The New York Review of Books
Margaret Atwood is all kinds of wonderful.
Techno-utopian fail - The National Newspaper
Don't be too proud of this technological terror you have created.
Hamish Hamilton: Five Dials
A beautiful PDF literary magazine, designed to be printed out and read away from the computer. I'd still love to see an HTML version.
We Tell Stories
Aleks pointed me to this sort-of ARG involving authors in London. Could be good fun.
Fiction Liberation Front--The Goods
Science-fiction author Lews Shiner is releasing many of his short stories online for free (HTML or PDF).
Coming Soon: Mobile Web Design, The Book (authored by Cameron Moll)
Cameron is writing a book. You know it's going to be good.