here’s my beat for beat commentary on the WWDC25 event icyi. https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3lr6tm62rpc2h

David pulled it all together perfectly here. It’s amazing how well it fits the hook model, whether they intended it or not

New webbed brief from Heydon

https://briefs.video/videos/introducing-webbed-sites/

very much agree with this

Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience

https://archive.is/20250419163054/https://www.ft.com/content/5d06bbb4-0034-493b-8b0d-5c0ab74bedef#selection-2009.350-2009.663

Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.

ICYI I posted a new vid/pod this week and an accompanying thread about: Everything Is Work Now — Tech products have a work/life balance problem

• Vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_os9Pp3AYW4
• Pod: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/7cdb9dc1/everything-is-work-now
• Thread masto: https://hci.social/@fasterandworse/114352163970046171
• Thread bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/fasterandworse.com/post/3lmykmxv6qs2w

Here’s my audio/video dispatch about framing tech through conservation of energy to kill the magical thinking of generative ai and the like podcast ep: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/968a91dd/kill-magic-thinking video ep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLHmtYWzHz8

ICYI here’s me getting a bit ranty about generative ai products https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5MQb-uNf2U

how much is templated now? reckon it’ll be 3hrs every time?

I get where you’re coming from but we’re talking about two completely separate layers of abstraction.

If you define data as a material, which you can, then software is going to be a very good means for working with data. It’ll be the best!

But for that to happen you have to have decided that data is the key to whatever purpose you are aiming to satisfy. You’re saying that all purposes are a matter of data manipulation.

I don’t actually say that software cannot be a product, I say that it can’t be categorised as a product in itself. As in, it doesn’t make sense to have “furniture products, exercise products, data products, surveillance products, and SOFTWARE products” - that doesn’t mean something made out of software can’t be a product.

BTW I’m not claiming this is novel, in fact I know it’s not. I’m also not taking it personal, feedback is why I post this shit.

I don’t know what part of my post you are responding to

LB creeps me the f out (sorry, not much else to add)

imagine if actual roadmaps just said “we want to tell you how to get there” “we hate giving you bad directions” “we will make sure you get there at some time in the future”

hay guys, sorry for spam - I just want to shill my videos/audios i’m trying to put out twice a week (I’ve already done 9!). They are 3-5 mins long and all around one particular theme of tech crit

video versions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwvAAoSdsXWxHwFbULgbpVGiLmJZv4X1g audio versions:

• apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/faster-and-worse/id1792154689
• spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/62Q7vclARxKjMAOtwXfOIu
• they are also in all the other major podcast platforms. Let me know if you’re interested but can’t find it.

Let me know if you like it/hate it

out of curiosity once I tried to ask it to make a colouring picture from a photo of a toy for my kids and it just ran what seemed like imagemagick filters over the photo to convert to black and white and pump up contrast to only show the hard lines - just like all the free convert to outline web tools that have existed forever. I asked it to try again but without the filters, instead to identify the object, and to draw it in a colouring book outline style, and it spat out some shitty stylised mishmash derived from all the illustration IP it stole and ingested. I still feel guilty for trying even that

My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.

See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320

I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.

The fediverse has randomly placed wormholes

What the fuck happened here?

it all stinks so much. He calls it “opt-in” but the official description of that opt-in is:

If you try to use Proton Scribe, you will be prompted to chose between local and server-side. So, technically, it’s not active until you decide how, and if, you want to use it.

as you can see here: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/112807462045101580

there is opt-in and then there is dangling an expired hotdog

not sure how legit that account is, actually. It’s not the one I @'ed - this one was created in Jan 2024 - either it’s his low-key alt or a bot

perhaps his plausible deniability account.