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I had a whole pitch for an art gallery ready for the Australian government back in 2019 which hinged around exactly this idea. The concept being that at the time there was zero interest from the Aus government in funding AI research and we were definitely going to be left behind in this space as a country, so instead I wanted to start an AI lab, focus on machine automation in the long term, and back it with arts funding and philanthropy based around a front that makes fun interactive "art" for the public using AI.

For some boring reasons the pitch was never was completed (Covid was a big factor) but I can't help but wonder if it did happen, whether I would be a billionaire by now or if the whole thing would have crashed and burned when the anti-AI movement gained traction.

Facebook actually became my preferred social site for a month or two recently - I had a relatively fresh account and managed to direct the algorithm towards mostly serving me interesting archeology, local groups, and some cute pet videos.

Then one day out of the blue it decided to serve me straight up white nationalist content out of the blue. It only happened for a day but the fact that it happened at all is horrifying when you think about that occurring on a global scale.

Now I only open maybe once a week for a minute to check messenger and I hope soon to be able to delete the app of my phone for good. I really worry about what we've unleashed on the world letting these billionaires capture our digital commons.

There was a really great writeup by someone who worked in that Disney animation shop on a blog I once stumbled on - he wrote about how he took on the 'job of a lifetime' as a teenager while his mother was terminally ill and how that impacts your priorities.

Incredibly moving read that I unfortunately can't find now, but it covered how the Sydney office ended, from memory it was a combination of CGI changing the industry, and cost - Australian wages weren't cheap and the studio was mostly used for producing direct-to-video sequels which was a market that dried up.

The actual big influence on the Australian-American cross pollination though, I suspect, was Rupert Murdoch's expansion into the American film and TV industry. For all his faults, he was a big champion of talent from his homeland in both his movies and Fox TV network. Even the infamous Simpsons Australia episode was likely influenced by the big influence of Australians at Fox at that time.

Not to be too pessimistic, but it strikes me that in a worst case scenario, severing a cable might scale to severing global digital communications which is itself a massive worst case scenario even if we removed AI from the picture.

If the worst case outcome is we have to even temporarily shut down global shipping, banking, transport, health services, communications and national infrastructure to contain a self-propagating misaligned AI that can evolve itself and work its way into any sufficiently large computer system to escape humans preventing it from finishing its task, that seems like something we should be trying very hard to avoid.

All I know is that in the 80s a scientist I respect predicted that coral would be bleached by changing global climate on a specific timeline which turned out to be spot on, and his advice then and now was that we need to seriously curb carbon emissions to avoid worse outcomes for life on earth. Until someone opposed to this suggestion comes up with a prediction equally as long range and impressive I'm afraid I can't really take their protests too seriously.

It does seem bizarre that major AI development (and autonomous robot development) hasn't been nationalised yet and treaties drafted up around producing it. Commercial incentives just seem totally at odds with the public good when it comes to controlling and regulating something like this.

Even if not for the sake of avoiding a mitigable disaster, there's a huge benefit in simply pacing development so as to not completely freak out society as they stare down the barrel of mass job market changes without time to adapt or prepare. Nobody wants to live in a world where they might wake up in a month and find their entire industry has been automated overnight.

We've tackled much bigger global issues successfully in the past and the US still has enough pull that it could probably get most western nations to march in line. It seems like the biggest issue is belief in the right of governments to govern.

It's not exactly trained on a neutral set of data. Engagement algorithms have ensured that a good chunk of content on the web these days is inflammatory and skewed towards the extreme (in fact in the last few months a good portion of the world has actually deemed it illegal for kids to consume because this content is so damaging to a developing brain).

Showing my ignorance, but the only thing I can picture when I hear 'math battles' is akin to the 'street Countdown' scene from the IT Crowd

The trick I started using for those infinite scroll apps (that are basically digital crack) is that I made a pact that I had to close the app the moment something appeared that was obviously trying to make me angry, upset or indignant.

It was initially an attempt to train the algorithms away from emotionally exploitation, but for the most part that was never fixed while my screen time dropped to almost zero.

As an upside I'm now also much more aware when a post is trying to manipulate my emotions, and I've come to realise how a majority of reddit posts are designed to undermine basic faith in society and your fellow humans. Horrifying to think about the implications, but glad I at least have a personal handle on it now.

This is what killed Gemini for me. The model might well be great, but the ecosystem Google has built around them is a confusing maze of not-quite-there products.

As a hobbyist teen I built my own itunes clone for PC from scratch and remember getting so excited when Apple posted a job for someone to port iTunes officially.

I remember getting so excited, then depressed when I realised a hobbyist teenager could never compete with the people Apple would have applying. Later seeing how bizarrely bloated iTunes for PC turned out, guess I probably could have.

Australia's competition watchdog sued Google over this about 10 years ago, and lost the case on appeal. Google's winning argument was that it was the ad buyers that were responsible for breaking the law, not Google who were just acting as a conduit.

I'm not really convinced these kinds of "we're just the platform" arguments stack up that well anymore when we see the harm these kinds of unregulated platforms have done to society. Unfortunately though the precedent is already set, so it will be fairly had to backtrack.

In the case of sharing a link I have to remember/find where it is in each app, likely scroll through a long list of messaging (and for some reason non-messaging apps) to find the correct app, select the contact, and then pray that the link sent actually works for them and contains the correct information I'm seeing (very often the link will actually direct them to a web version of the app I'm using, then put a modal popup in front of the information asking them to use the app, then either send them to the app store, or send them to the app but strip out the actual information I linked and send them to a blank map).

Screenshots are clunky and unideal, but at least they're fast and I know that they don't fail or break or send the wrong info to my contact.

If it were a one off message, this wouldn't be an issue, but if you zoom out on the issue and see you're sending up to a hundred messages a day, points of failure become major life frictions and you're trained out of using things like links in messaging apps.

There needs to be some kind of "murphy's law" for this style of comment. "For any comment on the internet where someone points out an issue they've encountered with technology, there will inevitably be a reply from someone else sharing that they haven't personally experienced it."

Confidently wrong summaries are the bane of Google search, and unfortunately I'm finding the AI seems to bleed into the actual search results too now, often turning up pages that back up what the summary is (wrongly) suggesting instead of surfacing actually relevant results for what I'm asking.

Always found it odd that Apple don't let you have a second separate business profile to switch your phone to for work - especially when you don't necessarily want to be bringing browser history/personal apps into your workplace or wifi. Having your iphone locked to your personal account also hobbles their continuity features if you work on a business computer with its own work account (as most businesses do).

Facebook is equally bad on this front - requiring you to use your personal account to administrate business pages (don't even get me started on how they forced large businesses to use a custom 2FA method they then phased out - locking people out of their personal accounts forever).

A related problem is people not understanding where AI is/isn't of use.

A news article I read today said they asked Claude whether a song's lyrics were AI generated - as if it were some kind of legitimate authoritative test.

There's enough problems already with the existing 'AI detection' tools for text, but this was a big red flag - its the journalist clearly assuming these AI tools have some unique insight into the text they generate, which was deeply concerning to see being used in an article that had a real bearing on the reputation of the person they were accusing of using AI.

As a kid with no cash but a lot of passion, I spent months cobbling together a fully working version of Photoshop 7 (pre-CS days) from various files extracted from free demo and upgrade installers. Technically did nothing illegal and ran that single version for a good 18 years across various PCs, eventually powering a large media company's output with it (in fact there's a very good chance anyone reading this will have seen some of my Photoshop work given the reach of that company).

The main reason I never upgraded was that it was FAST, and until Adobe started rolling out AI features around 2020 there were almost no notable additions made to Photoshop other than new versions seemingly getting slower and arguably uglier. To this day I'll still occasionally boot up the old Photoshop 7 if I don't need to use content-aware fill, and I'll marvel at how zippy it feels.

Very interesting read. Always love learning how new media tackles old media processes, I'll be interested to see how the zine fares long term.

I actually built my own InDesign clone just before wrapping up with my last employer (inspired by Photopea) given how fed up I was with InDesign and its quirks.

It was a pretty neat little product - ingested all our website stories and automatically laid them out into a newspaper, which could be further edited in the browser or output as print ready PDFs that would go straight to the printers' FTP server.

I'm willing to bet there's a huge market out there that's itching to jump ship from InDesign as soon as Affinity proves its worth. Adobe has squandered their moat. I've already worked with companies that now do all their desktop publishing in Canva - still get an eye twitch from that, but it worked and staff preferred that mess over InDesign.