Links roundup for some time around September 14
Some links! Some links!
The main social media platform I’ve been using is going away, so unfortunately I won’t be linking the neat posts I’ve found on it of late. Instead here’s some other stuff.
generative ai
https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/random-finds-ai-image-upscale-collapse
Oops. Upscalers bad, it turns out. Well. They work great initially, until…
https://redeem-tomorrow.com/llms-wont-save-labor-when-you-use-them-like-this
As I’ve said many, many times – code review is the hardest part of writing software. I cannot imagine using an LLM to generate a benchmark, something where you need to be incredibly aware that you are testing the same thing. Perhaps this is why I’m not pulling in VC Startup Money.
https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/
I agree with Molly White pretty heavily here – it’s not that there are no use cases.
But the reality is that you can’t build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that’s kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who use it fully understand its limitations. And you certainly can’t justify the kind of exploitation, extraction, and environmental cost that the industry has been mostly getting away with, in part because people have believed their lofty promises of someday changing the world.
Exactly.
random things
https://modem.io/blog/blog-monetization/
How to monetize your blog! Patent pending.
https://press.invincible.ink/well-what-if-i-was-in-charge-of-pokemon-if-im-so-bloody-smart/
Talen Lee is incredibly smart and correct on what to do to Pokemon.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/monopoly-money/
Ed Zitron on the Google monopoly ruling and big tech in general. Honestly, I could probably include a link to Zitron’s blog every time I make one of these and not be phoning it in conceptually, just go read it.
transportation
https://surasshu.com/stop-signs-suck/
Did you know stop signs are terrible? It’s true. One of the things around Portland is that we have a few roads with … let’s call them aspirational street signs. I’m thinking of MLK/Grand. If you’ve ever driven north on MLK/Grand, you know it has long stretches of the speed limit being aspirational. That’s the only word to describe it. You have interstate width lanes, several of them, with zero calming of any sort, going perfectly straight for miles…. set at 30 mph. I won’t argue that 30mph is not a safer or more sustainable speed, because it fundamentally is, but every part of your brain that isn’t currently passing a stop sign saying otherwise tells you that you are on a road where the speed limit is 75 miles per hour.
Can’t have safer streets if the only thing you’ve applied is a “please” to them.