Johnny Dot Com

very succinct breakdown of the limits of computers. goes into human-in-the-loop systems and how to know when something just needs to be done by a person. hint: it’s a lot more often than many want to admit.
The author, Dr. Meredith Broussard, wrote a deeper dive into dumb computers in Artificial Unintelligence. That book’s been on my list for a hot minute, so if you check it out and like it let me know.

Project Cybersyn is criminally underdiscussed in the tech and lefty circles in which I’ve found myself. the chilean people democratically elected a socialist in 1970 (albeit narrowly) and the president directly appointed a team to modernize the economy using IT.
though a classic US backed coup preceded by brutal economic blockades and sanctions ended Allende’s presidency in a series of firing squads, the project remains inspirational. at least to me
if you want a deeper dive, Professor Eden Medina wrote a wonderful book on the project called Cybernetic Revolutionaries.

the first director of post-revolutionary Cuba’s national library in Havana wanted the biblioteca popular to take an active approach to educating and enriching the lives of Cuban residents. they drove buses out to the farms and indexed books banned by previous regimes. they also made leaps and bounds in library IT, making huge contributions to the field that would become information science.
it’s so thrilling and motivating to see people around the world fight so hard to build better worlds for themselves and their people in the face of such hardship, especially through computing. the field doesn’t have a huge reputation for freeing the masses though many coders may wanna believe that.

a moderately peeved Ursula K. Le Guin critiques many SciFi enthusiasts’ superficial and one-dimensional understanding of technology. one reviewer desribed her as “not a hard SF writer”, “technology is notably absent”.
perhaps the story this person reviewed didn’t feature faster than light travel or hoverbikes, but after reading the Dispossessed I’d be pretty off base calling Le Guin a soft SciFi writer.
as she lays out in just a few paragraphs, technology is everything people do to interact with their physical environment. It’s not just what’s happening in an R&D lab.
on top of that, just as if not more interesting than how the machines in any fictional universe work is how their societies work. she covers that too

There’s definitely a lot of charged writing you can find out there on AI, in either direction. What I like about Ted Chiang’s AI writing is that I think it’s on point (He’s underwelmed by it, as am I), but he’s incredibly measured and deliberate in his explanation of Gen AI’s shortcomings. I personally have no problems with the more vitriolic takedowns (the hype cycle we’ve been through since ChatGPT has been very trying), but there are some valuable nuggests in the AI craze. Machine learning in general I think is a very valuable field for Medicine and Health as well as very data intensive fields like Astronomy. Helpful to have writers like Chiang be specific about where it falls short. He has at least one other New Yorker essay on Gen AI that is also very worth reading.

my local library actually had a copy of the book reviewed in this piece. Largely agree with the author here. AI Snake Oil laid out solid critiques on predictive AI and content moderation, but was far too soft on Generative AI.

pretty good faith critique of the level of decentralization of bluesky. it’ll be interesting to see what else gets built using the AT Protocol that Bsky runs on. Currently, the bsky.social instance that most people use and the AT protocol are controlled by the same company. I think the bsky creators intend to allow people to create their own feeds, instances, and such.

not a super uplifting read, but important to understand how tech companies drive to grow profits no matter what makes the products worse the the producers worse off