Blog

  • Will it hurt anyone, can I trust it, and will it make me look stupid?

    The views in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organisation that I am associated with. I feel very uncertain about where we are with AI in practical use. It is unavoidable (literally, every time I open Illustrator, I get prompted to use generative AI) and certainly convenient.…

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  • Threads

    I joined Mastodon during one of the waves of user migrations after Elon Musk took over Twitter, and I have to say, I like it there. So I didn’t really know what to make of Threads when people started talking about it.

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  • A More Complete Picture on New Tech and Society

    I’ve had a few interesting conversations in the last couple of weeks that have ended up at the same conclusion: we can talk tech until the cows come home, but the really interesting debates—the debates that are too often absent, especially from the Silicon Valley perspective—are not from the sciences.

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  • Media literacy

    https://points.datasociety.net/you-think-you-want-media-literacy-do-you-7cad6af18ec2 I’ve had this link in my reading list for a while, but it is quite timeless. I think we have a sense of the media landscape having found its footing after the upheaval of the internet’s arrival, but really, I think the last 20 years have only been the beginning of our reckoning of…

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  • Building a Block Theme

    I’ve been [badly] writing WordPress themes for this blog since sometime around 2006 or 2007. With new block themes supported, I’ve tried an experiment to recreate my classic theme for full-site editing.

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  • Everyday AI

    I got the idea to try these weekly posts after realising how many links I was saving while browsing the Web. It isn’t my goal with this little project to provide a comprehensive exploration of an area, more of a stroll through the bits that interest me just now. So with my excuses out of…

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  • Hypertext

    I’m trying something new here. Rather than write a screed about how we should all get on bicycles and take up blogging again, I’m going to share some links to things I found interesting on the Web this week. It might become a (kind of) weekly thing and probably will go out on Thursdays. So,…

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  • Digital Public Parks

    Until a few days ago, it is safe to say that I spent too much time on Twitter. I’ve had my account there for long enough that I’ve seen the platform evolve from the SMS-based, fail whale infested, early days, right up to today’s algorithmic hellscape.

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  • The End of a Long Chapter

    The Queen died yesterday. Even though I have felt an increasing republican sentiment over the last few years, her death feels like the end of a very long chapter for Britain. Elizabeth became Queen of a Britain that most politicians for the last decade have held up as the ideal. The Platonic Britain was draped…

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  • Ghosts in the Machine

    Humans can see faces in anything, so it’s not much of a surprise that we can be fooled into seeing sentience in a chat-bot.

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