If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Over the weekend, I did an interview about my forthcoming book The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI (a book about being a better AI critic), and the interviewer said she was surprised that I wasn't an AI booster, based on my demographics and work history:
I could see where she was coming from. I encountered computers in the mid-seventies, as a small child. My first computer was a CARDIAC, a working, Turing-complete, mechanical computer made entirely of cardboard, that I spent endless hours with:
Then I graduated to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler connected to a minicomputer at the University of Toronto. My mom, a kindergarten teacher, used to smuggle home 1,000' rolls of paper towel from the kids' bathroom. I'd get 1,000' feet of computing up one side, then another 1,000' down the other side, then I'd carefully re-roll the paper towel so she could put it back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on.
After that, I got an Apple ][+ in 1979, and shortly thereafter acquired a modem, and that was it: I was hooked for life. I became an amateur programmer, then a professional programmer. I hosted forums on dial-up BBSes where I distributed software and offered support to strangers who wanted to connect their computers to the internet. I got a job as a gopher developer, then a web developer, then a CIO-for-hire, helping wire up small businesses and connect them to the net. Eventually, I co-founded a free/open source software startup, before transitioning to 25 years as a digital rights activist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And for most of that time, I was energetically writing science fiction, eventually becoming associated with a school sometimes called "post-cyberpunk":
The force that energized all this work was a dialectical one, the contradiction that powered cyberpunk literature itself. For all that cyberpunk was undeniably enamored with the coolness and combustibility of new technology, it was also terrified of how technology could be a force for oppression, surveillance and control. As William Gibson says, "cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion."
Gibson's more famous quote, of course, is "the street finds its own use for things." In Gibson's novels (and in my own life in technology) all the most interesting things happen when users of technology (often without formal training or credentials) find ways to adapt the technology they use to suit their needs:
This is why I remain an ardent fan of Hypercard, Scratch and other meta-tools that are designed to allow non-programmers to write software that exactly conforms to their desires. Whatever the apps produced by these tools lack in sophistication and efficiency is more than offset by the fact that they give everyday people the power to directly control the tools they rely upon.
If "epistemic humility" means anything, it means acknowledging that no amount of "requirements gathering" can capture the needs of people totally unlike yourself as faithfully as those users can capture their own needs. Giving people the tools to produce their own software is always going to make tools – vernacular, idiosyncratic, homespun – that are more suited to their own hands and minds than anything a technologist working on their behalf could make.
The ancient dictum of "nothing about us without us" – born in 16th century Poland and taken up by the modern disability rights movement – asserts the right of people to control their own living conditions, and also the unique capacity of people to understand their own needs. You know what's even better than being consulted on the design of the technology you use? Having direct control over that technology!
This is why I was so suspicious of the iPad. The iPad's much-lauded "ease of use" was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation. This is cyberpunk as a demand, not a warning:
The technology I've championed all my life is technology that gives more control to its users. One of my immutable precepts is that people who are different from me know things I can't know, and the only way I can get the benefit of their unique knowledge and perspective is if they are free to make and share things that matter to them. As Dan Gillmor said, back when he was inventing the study of citizen journalism, "My readers know more than I do":
And while I am broadly very skeptical of AI, and deeply alarmed by the proliferation of "vibe coded" software in production environments, vibe coding for personal projects is a useful and exciting addition to the lineage of tools that let computer users decide how their computers will work. For people making personal projects, vibe coding extends the power of shell scripting, cron jobs, Applescript, and other desktop automation tools to a wider audience.
One of the journalists I spoke to last week about my book described how he had vibe coded an app that showed him an alert every time a plane flew over his house, giving the tail number and other details of the flight. This is information that I have no need for, no interest in, and that I'm therefore excited to learn about, because its very existence affirms that the world is full of people who are delightfully, irreducibly, amazingly different from me, and moreover, that their unique needs can be directly met using their imaginations and their personal computers.
I recently sat down with my colleague Naomi Novik, a brilliant author who also co-founded Archive of Our Own. Naomi demoed her followup to AO3 for me: Wreccer, a system to help you find small groups of people with taste similar to your own, in order to facilitate media recommendations within that group – a kind of personal, relationship-driven alternative to massive, centralized, monolithic algorithmic recommendation systems:
https://github.com/wreccer
Naomi told me that Wreccer was being built using the same design ethos that the original Twitter embraced. When Twitter launched, it was an API first, and the official Twitter front end was built on that API – but anyone could build their own front end for Twitter that worked in the way they wanted it to. Now, the word "anyone" is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because most people don't even know what an API is, and of the people who do, most of them were not capable of writing their own software front end for Twitter.
But Wreccer is being designed for the age of vibe coding, and the API will really allow anyone who uses the service to design their own interface to the system, one that elevates and centers the features they find useful and tucks away the ones they're not interested in. Your personal, custom front end could also bring in other data-sources – pulling in your Mastodon messages, for example, or even showing you an alert with the tail-number of any plane flying over your home.
This is the part of vibe coding that I'm quite excited about, but it's not the part the industry focuses on. Instead of hearing about how personal, homemade software utilities can be an end unto themselves, we hear about vibe coded projects as prototypes for commercial production code. We hear about clueless bosses vibe coding software products and services that run fine for one user on a siloed desktop computer, and then demanding to know why it takes 50 engineers a year to make the same thing work for millions of users on the public internet. We hear about people who vibe code and submit patches to free/open-source software projects with millions of users, overwhelming project maintainers with slop code that is riddled with security vulnerabilities.
Of course, there's an obvious reason why the industry wants to focus on the potential for vibe coded software to replace production code. The AI bubble has burned up $1.4t to date, while bringing in mere tens of billions of dollars per year, even as its unit economics grow steadily worse:
To keep the bubble inflated, AI hucksters must promise massive economic returns to the technology. They want investors to believe that vibe code is about to replace working programmers, who are skilled, high-waged, high-demand workers. Their pitch is that for every million dollars' worth of programmers that an AI salesman and a boss conspire to fire, half a million dollars will go to the AI company whose bots shit out that vibe code.
That's par for the course with the AI bubble, whose focus is entirely on how AI can centralize, control and homogenize our lives. Whereas early desktop publishing, web publishing and social media gave us a glorious higgledy-piggledy of chaotic, weird and transgressive hobbyist media and retina-searing designs, AI art and design are instantly recognizable at a thousand yards, and it all looks the same, boring, and washed:
AI companies have released open weight/open source models that can run on your own computer, but these are treated as side-shows and toys and demos. The real action, we're told, is in "frontier models," which is industry-speak for "a piece of software whose running costs exceed the GDP of most countries":
Perhaps this is why the dynamics of AI are so different from the early dynamics of the web. Early web users were workers, who demanded that their bosses allow them to use the web and so devolve more power to people doing their jobs. By contrast, today's most ardent AI boosters are bosses, who threaten workers who don't use AI enough in the course of their duties:
Where we do see idiosyncrasy emerging from AI usage, it's often terrible. AI can help you create a folie-a-un in which you and a chatbot team up to reinforce your delusions and drive you deeper into a world of dangerous mirage:
There's a (false) story that's told about people who championed the early internet: that we were blithely certain that technology could only be a force for good, and negligently disinterested in the possibility that technology could control, extract and harm. That's demonstrably untrue: recall cyberpunk's dualism of "the street finds its own use for things" and "cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion."
More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation:
History isn't finished. Long after the AI bubble pops, there will be local models and people vibe coding homemade software that respond directly to their needs. The stuff we make on our own computers, for ourselves, is deplatformed from its inception. It's part of the life we can build in technology's "shadowy corners" that we used to just call "technology." The fact that this stuff is utterly unsuited to be production code makes it inherently unmonetizable. It's how the street finds its own use for things:
An acquaintance of my sister wanted to immigrate to the US for years now. This "refugee program" afforded then the opportunity.
But they are landed somewhere that they have no choice about, with 3 days worth of notice before having to leave, and no chance of getting work beforehand. And with no time to pack.
The guy objected because has several guns he has to sell before being able to move. They are decidedly middle class compared to the majority of the country.
They are being treated as refugees, and they are absolutely not in the more normal sense of the word. It's a shitty deal for everyone, them, the community they get thrown into, except for the politicians trading on this narrative.
This is third hand info I got in a short conversation, so I'm definitely missing detail.
oh. i’m sure its fine and normal that a video investigating the massive bot farm/slop channel shell company connections to the russian mafia and youtube’s own implication by allowing it to continue for profit has mysteriously vanished with no word from op.
Opening my author email these days really is just some variation of "hello influencer, we have noticed your [product] and that you are very good at it. We would like to talk to you about a way you can expand your audience using our unique subscription service training people how to self publish there book," and that's great and all, but I'm doing that shit for free.
Anyway, in light of Draft2Digital implementing fees for new authors or authors who do not make the yearly threshold of sales (I get why they're doing it, and it's still less expensive than Ingram by a country mile. But it still sucks for the people affected by it and it will drive more people to Amazon :/), you can publish your digital media directly through Kobo.
They do not offer paperbacks or hardbacks at this time.
But their digital market has the same e-book and audio market reach as D2D/Ingram and allows for library lending. So if you are an indie author who was mostly using D2D for that library access, and for whom the maintenance fees would be prohibitive against your earnings, you can use Kobo for free.
I haven't used it, because I'm not affected by the D2D fees and I didn't want to mess up my market listings by having duplicates, but when I heard about the D2D fees, I started researching so I could hopefully find a free alternative with comparable market reach. And good old Kobo was there.
Also, to any authors still using Kindle Unlimited, I'd highly suggested thinking about moving over the Kobo+.
It allows for the same subscription model as KU, but doesn't enforce an exclusivity clause, so you can still mass sell through the global market and also be hosted in libraries.
I know it seems risky when KU is so established, but Kobo+ subscriptions are increasing quite a bit as even the most stalwart of Kindle fans get sick of Amazon, and my Kobo+ numbers are starting to eclipse Kindle, which is delightful.
The more we as authors push readers to Kobo+, the more freedom we'll have, so I think it's a worthwhile endeavor, for us and them.
Anyway, that's your two bits of free indie advice for the weekend.
Your Kobo numbers are outpacing your Amazon? That's great! (sorry, librarian here with a vested interest in Kobo XD)
I switched to them last year after Amazon pulled its 'no more side loading bullshit' and have been watching them closely. They were already Amazon's primary competitor before but last year saw them really starting to get up there, I feel. If they keep going how they are (and if bookshop.org finally does their Kobo support) finally there might be something that takes a hard bite out of Amazon's monopoly at least in the e-book department.
There's been a real jump to Kobo over the last year or so!
It's always been a bigger source of income for me in Europe compared to Euro/UK Kindle sales, but there's been a marked increase in that revenue compared to previous years overall. It's an encouraging trend to watch :)
You have been given a bottle that is infinitely refilling (it fills up completely on the hour every hour). What do you want in it?
water (any type: fresh, salt, diluted, mineral, filtered)
caffeinated drink (any type: coffee, tea, energy drink)
sports drink (any brand)
soda / pop / cola (any brand)
juice (any flavor, any brand, can be combo flavor)
milk (any type of milk including plant based milks)
broth (any type of soup broth)
Voting ended onApr 29
It must be something safe for humans to consume. It must be liquid with no impurities big enough to be filtered out with a coffee filter. The liquid must be watery and cannot be thick.
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We have now wrapped up fieldwork at our second site, the incredible rainforests of Ranomafana. Our goal there was to find individuals of another extremely small frog, actually described alongside Mini, namely Anodonthyla eximia. This particular species is especially interesting, because it represents yet another instance of independent evolution of miniaturisation in Malagasy narrow-mouthed frogs (family Microhylidae, subfamily Cophylinae); much smaller than all other Anodonthyla, and apparently totally terrestrial, unlike all of its arboreal cousins! It was described from an area called Maharira, a significant distance into the forest. This frog has previously been known only from a single specimen, so we knew this was an ambitious goal before we even set out.
Getting to Maharira was an arduous affair. An hour on good road followed by an hour on horrendous road, where we frequently got stuck, followed by six hours of hard hiking on terrible paths for about 18 km of up and down and up and down, through rivers up to our thighs, partly in the rain, with 21 porters to carry our equipment and food—it certainly was an adventure!
But we finally got to the campsite used before by a few different teams, and set ourselves up for work. Alongside A. eximia, we were continuing the herpetofaunal inventory of this rather remote area, and searching for a few other taxa for the GEMINI project as well. Already the first night was a productive one, although we hardly strayed away from the campsite. Heavy rain had brought out quite a few frogs to sing happily into the night.
Our time in Maharira was limited to just four nights, so we put in hard work to try to capture as much of the diversity as possible. But at the back of my head was always the problem of A. eximia. We just couldn’t find them. Finally, on the third day, we set out before six in the morning, because knew that they should be calling in the morning. We hiked for a ways down a path until finally we heard small whistling calls that could only be them or other miniaturised microhylid frogs. We set ourselves to it, and finally, after almost an hour, we caught the first specimen, after slowly lifting leaf after leaf to find it in the litter. And indeed this was A. eximia! The second I found not long after, and managed to record it calling. What a thrill! To be the second person in the world to catch these frogs was amazing. And they are truly remarkable creatures.
Were it not for their unusual skull, hands, and pectoral girdle, they would be almost impossible to tell apart from Mini and Stumpffia. Even their behaviour is practically the same. But in this forest we found no trace of either of those other two genera, so it looks like this was just opportunity for them to explore an otherwise unoccupied niche. This is such a remarkable case of convergent evolution of both size and ecology, which I hope the GEMINI project will help shed light on through high-quality genomes.
That same night, we went for a walk into the forest and found Plethodntohyla inguinalis—possibly the largest microhylid in the world. Seeing the contrast was incredible. But I didn’t dare put the two side-by-side for fear of the larger eating the smaller—they’re voracious and indiscriminate predators.
Ironically, on the morning of the following day we realised that we could hear A. eximia calling just a few metres from our tents; the early morning hike hadn’t been necessary at all. But still, it was very much worth it to have a better understanding of their distribution and ecology. Fascinating little frogs!
The rest of the work was much more relaxed after this success, and we were able to continue the survey with full energy. The final night, after almost everything was packed, I went to look what frog was calling behind our toilet. It turned out to be almost certainly a new species of Anodonthyla!
The next morning we had to hike back out of the forest, this time in the scorching heat. But we were buoyed by the success of our search!
Now we have made our way back to Antananarivo, and today we will continue on to the Andasibe area for the third and final leg of our trip, searching for still more extremely miniaturised reptiles and amphibians!
Geek from the African South @mandarb - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
