2024-05-17

Items of Interest, May 17, 2024 - June 7, 2024

I’ve been slow to post again! This encapsulates three week’s worth of posts I found wort preserving and referencing.

Let’s start off with something that you can turn off to make your web experience better. Ernie Smith at Tedium describes how you can get rid of a lot of junk by making Google Web Search your default search engine:

But in the midst of all this, Google quietly added something else to its results—a “Web” filter that presents what Google used to look like a decade ago, no extra junk. While Google made its AI-focused changes known on its biggest stage—during its Google I/O event—the Web filter was curiously announced on Twitter by Search Liaison Danny Sullivan.

Follow the instructions as best you can, and enjoy a somewhat more usable Google again.

‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity? - Francis Beckett, The Guardian. The article, intended to highlight Beckett’s own play “Tom Lehrer Is Teaching Math and Doesn’t Want to Talk to You”, doesn’t give any definite answers but offers a good overview of the great man’s life. But reading this familiar quote again in 2024 just about broke me.

“You had to admire these folk singers,” he says on the live LP. “It takes courage to get up in a coffee house or a student auditorium and come out in favour of the things everyone else is against, like peace and justice and brotherhood, and so on.”

Oh, honey. Oh, sweet summer child.

For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point

• Brian Merchant, Blood In The Machine

By attaching the new product to a popular speculation, especially one with built-in dramatic tension, the founders can elevate a buggy, unproven, or partially conceived technology into the cultural firmament, even if only briefly. It’s a cheat code, a way of getting us to relate to a future that’s already been culturally prototyped, and it can be quite successful. To wit: The day after admonishing tech companies for using Her as a benchmark for their products, Roose dedicated his column to explaining how AI’s ‘Her’ Era Has Arrived — thus further entrenching the link between OpenAI’s aspirational technology and its attendant useful dystopia in the public consciousness. Hell, my own story about the grim origins of the metaverse probably made Facebook’s deeply lame Horizons VR product seem orders of magnitude cooler than it turned out to be.

Independent Repair Shops to Share Customer Data, Snitch on People Who Use Aftermarket Parts, Leaked Contract Shows - Jason Koebler, 404 Media. There are no good large tech companies. There are no less-bad large tech companies.

Frontaal Naakt keeps calling things by their proper names: Waarom ik Wilders (en Van der Plas, Yesilgöz en Omtzigt) gewoon extreemrechts blijf noemen (Dutch):

Het fascisme van nu heeft een andere verschijningsvorm dan dat van toen, al verbaast het me hoeveel overeenkomsten er toch zijn, tot aan de racistische retoriek, dezelfde obsessies met LHBTI’ers en de verheerlijking van boeren aan toe. Maar het ís gewelddadig fascisme, onmiskenbaar. In plaats van te mieren over de naam die we eraan geven, is het beter dat te bestrijden.

Hey, some good news! Repeat COVID-19 vaccinations elicit antibodies that neutralize variants, other viruses - Tamara Schneider, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

Unlike immunity to influenza virus, prior immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, doesn’t inhibit later vaccine responses. Rather, it promotes the development of broadly inhibitory antibodies, the researchers report.

A Grand Unified Theory of the AI Hype Cycle by Glyph at Glyph.im tells us about how these things have historically gone:

1. Scientists do some basic research and develop a promising novel mechanism, N. One important detail is that N has a specific name; it may or may not be carried out under the general umbrella of “AI research” but it is not itself “AI”. N always has a few properties, but the most common and salient one is that it initially tends to require about 3x the specifications of the average computer available to the market at the time; i.e., it requires three times as much RAM, CPU, and secondary storage as is shipped in the average computer. And so on.

A two-fer on journalism’s enabling of the far right: Peter Breedveld documents how the Dutch media have dug their own grave by spending the past two decades slobbering over far-right messiah figures like Geert Wilders (Dutch), and hounding anyone who criticized that slobbering; and Marisa Kabas looks at the far-right ownership of pretty much all media in the US. Disheartening reading.

Your weekly palate cleanser: On the one hand, the new old new old new old The Hooded Crow song is… a bit of an oddity. While I enjoy “She’s No God” as a song and have re-learned it recently, adding another 6 minutes of it to the two versions we already have (only one of which is on YouTube, but the other exists and is also quite long) is maybe a little too much when there are still several completely unreleased songs out there. On the other hand, remember that we recorded all this stuff in the 1990s, on cheap equipment and without a click. Tempo-matching and synchronizing two, maybe three completely different recordings of the song must have taken quite a bit of effort and skill. Unless I’m misremembering again and the songs did have a click, or the full-band version was built on top of the unreleased all-Michel Bouma demo. Anyway, hearing Patrick’s voice over Pieter’s bass in this long version was a joy. Worth it for that alone.

And speaking of making old songs new, the work that Johan has done on this is remarkable: