Baldur Bjarnason

@baldurbjarnason.com

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Writer, web developer and consultant based in Hveragerði, Iceland. Lapsed Interactive Media Academic. Webby Tech Stuff and webby book stuff.

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/
https://softwarecrisis.dev/

Posts Replies Media

“HeHealth’s AI app that screened ‘dick pics’ for STIs has shut down - The Verge” www.theverge.com/2024/7/16/24... > but now it’s shut down after an inquiry by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) As I've mentioned several times in the past, AI companies have a history of fraud and false promises

The app that promised to ‘use AI to weed out daters with STIs’ has been shut downwww.theverge.com Calmara called itself “your intimate bestie for unprotected sex.”

“Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content - Vincent Schmalbach” www.vincentschmalbach.com/google-now-d... If selective indexing—curation—is the future of search, then we deserve more variety in curators, each focusing on serving a specific niche well.

Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Contentwww.vincentschmalbach.com Picture this: It’s ten years ago, and you’ve just launched a new WordPress blog. Within hours, sometimes even minutes, your content is indexed by Google. You search for a unique sentence from your…

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Baldur Bjarnason

Having any tweet or thread go viral gives you a good lesson in "what's the most uncharitable possible interpretation of what I said?"

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Baldur Bjarnason

This week's newsletter: It's time to call BS on generative AI and demand that companies like OpenAI actually provide useful, helpful software, and actively reject the growing coterie of hucksters using AI as a marketing tool to get media headlines. www.wheresyoured.at/put-up-or-sh...

Put Up Or Shut Upwww.wheresyoured.at I feel like the tech industry is currently in the midst of the most bizarre cognitive dissonance I've ever seen — more so than the metaverse, even — as company after company simply lies about their in...

Google thinks Hveragerði is in the US again. Youtube ads and recs are all American again Although, weirdly enough, not with the access that came before as I don't have access to US-based videos like before and can still watch the European stuff This random buggy shit does not inspire confidence

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Baldur Bjarnason

What happens to a largely US-controlled internet after fascism? I'm hoping we don't find out, but do these now, not later: - Make sure that you have ways to contact your core groups outside of social media. - Back up everything you don't want to lose online.

“Make kin not nets | everything changes” everythingchanges.us/blog/make-ki... > But I think all of this elides the real and justified reasons for feeling icky about networking: the act, as it’s usually discussed, distills human relationships into resources to be mined.

Make kin not nets | everything changeseverythingchanges.us Caretaking beats value capture every time.

“Adactio: Journal—Ad tech” adactio.com/journal/21285 > But the idea that behavioural advertising works better than contextual advertising has no basis in reality.

Ad techadactio.com It is not the job of browser makers to prop up business models, especially ones that don’t even work.

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Baldur Bjarnason

The best meme, whoever created this is doing the lords work

“Why genre hopping is good for you as a writer” suwca.substack.com/p/why-genre-... I found this to be a really hopeful read as I've spent much of my career as, effectively, a generalist pretending to be a specialist.

Why genre hopping is good for you as a writersuwca.substack.com Variety makes you a better writer, even though agents and publishers want you to specialise.

“Knowledge workers | A Working Library” aworkinglibrary.com/writing/know... > Taylor’s model of workplace productivity depended entirely on deskilling, on the invention of unskilled labor—which, heretofore, had not existed.

Knowledge workers | A Working Libraryaworkinglibrary.com In 1898, Frederick Taylor was hired as a consultant by the Bethlehem Iron Company with the stated mission of improving the efficiency of the workers. It was there that Taylorism morphed from the wh...

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Baldur Bjarnason

Why would a parent want to offload this “job?” www.cnet.com/tech/service...

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Baldur Bjarnason

This is a very good look at the way that the public, in general, dislikes AI and AI boosters, whilst tech folks are in love with it and think it's the future. I'm desperately hoping that the public wins through before AI-adoring devs do too much damage to the tools we all depend on.

The sentiment disconnect on 'AI' between tech and the public: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/sentiment-disconnect/

Reply to

Suw

Yup. The fun part was when they complained about stuff that's in pretty much every newsletter. So I'm guessing they hadn't opened one in several months 😆

Reply to

Nihl L'Amas

Endless fun. 😝

That feeling when you send out a newsletter that not only gets a few immediate unsubscribes, one of them even felt compelled to write me an email explaining how disappointed they were in me Ugh.

“Fake AWS Packages Ship Command and Control Malware In JPEG Files” blog.phylum.io/fake-aws-pac... Malware has a long history of really inventive obfuscation.

Fake AWS Packages Ship Command and Control Malware In JPEG Filesblog.phylum.io On July 13, 2024, the Phylum platform alerted us to a series of odd packages published to the npm package registry. At first glance, these packages appear entirely legitimate; however, as our system a...

The sentiment disconnect on 'AI' between tech and the public: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/sentiment-disconnect/

Links (15 July 2024): https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/links-25/

“LLM vendors are incredibly bad at responding to security issues – Pivot to AI” pivot-to-ai.com/2024/07/12/l...

LLM vendors are incredibly bad at responding to security issuespivot-to-ai.com IT consultant Mark Pesce was building an LLM-based similarity finder for a legal client. He discovered a prompt that reliably caused multiple LLMs to go nuts and output complete gibberish: “it desc…

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Baldur Bjarnason

Somewhat spicy headline this time, but seeing a feature I rely heavily on get worse made me realize: it feels like "GitHub", the traditional website, is being treated as a legacy product from corporate's perspective. www.mistys-internet.website/blog/blog/20...

"GitHub" Is Starting to Feel Like Legacy Software - The Future Is Nowwww.mistys-internet.website I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes …

“The coming storm, part 2 - Charlie's Diary” www.antipope.org/charlie/blog... Hoo, boy.

The coming storm, part 2 - Charlie's Diarywww.antipope.org

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Baldur Bjarnason

And this has always been the case. So many of the "literary greats" of the last 200 years of commercial publishing were in dire financial straits much of their careers. The Paris scene popped because the city was cheap between the wars. The Algonquin Round Table was there because of cheap pierogies.

The majority of people flatly do not understand — and would be honestly shocked by! — how little money most publicly known writers make

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Baldur Bjarnason

“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.” That quote is almost always misattributed to Mark Twain. It was actually Clarence Darrow who originally said it. I mention this for no reason whatsoever.

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Baldur Bjarnason

Christopher Walken grips your wrist with a vice-like strength. "Next Tuesday you're. Going to pet, your cat. But. Your cat, is gonna bite you."

Reply to

conrad potao 🍉

I think it might be! 🙂

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Baldur Bjarnason

A message from Pivot to AI: send us money! pivot-to-ai.com/2024/07/13/a...

A message from Pivot to AI: send us money!pivot-to-ai.com As humans and definitely not robots, we enjoy the continued consumption of oxygen and (checks notes) “food.” Acquiring these resources is most efficiently achieved using your our human social ratio…

My sister has been archiving my granddad’s photos, scanning them into digital and one revelation were the photos we’d never seen Turns out he had always had a habit of taking photos everybody thought were weird—that they made fun of—so he left them out of all of the albums and slideshows

Turns out many of those pics were just so much fun, and that he had exactly the same photographic sensibilities as me, but I never knew it while he was alive

“Intel is selling defective CPUs - Alderon Games” alderongames.com/intel-crashes > Over the last 3–4 months, we have observed that CPUs initially working well deteriorate over time, eventually failing.

Intel is selling defective CPUs - Alderon Gamesalderongames.com We have been encountering significant problems with Intel CPU stability. Despite all released microcode, BIOS, and firmware updates, the problem remains unresolved.