Links, May 30, 2025

§Music Is Too Important To Be Left To The Marketplace

Author Liz Pelly talks about her new book (which I haven’t read) Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist:

If this app is on in the background all day, then we can see it as valuable to the customer based on how many minutes they spent listening. In the same way, a lot of the algorithmic recommendation systems, not just with Spotify, are focused on this metric of session length. How can we extend session length?

The book seems interesting enough to warrant a read, but my queue is already quite full. The interview is a great read, however.

§You Can Choose Tools That Make You Happy

A short post encouraging your tech impulses, in moderation. I’m not going to quote it because I can’t do so without spoiling it.

§Can’t and Won’t

Mandy Brown’s blog has come up here many times, but I feel this one:

a question is lurking in the minds of many workers, cautious and careful, afraid to poke its head out of the den it has safely hid in until now, but each day getting a little braver, a little more certain that now is the time: what if I cannot fucking do this anymore?

If you work in tech you should subscribe to her blog. In her next piece, Alive, she writes:

 even if you believe that shackling yourself to the machines is the only way to keep food on the table, you’re still coming to harm. Any choice you make here isn’t between safety and harm but between different kinds of harm. And maybe the threats are just that—sneering words spit from the mouths of bullies. Maybe it’s time to call their bluff.

§reasons to be cheerful

Every time you read a news article anymore, you have to roll 1d4 for psychic damage if you fail a saving throw. News sites like this can help mitigate that. They have RSS Feeds for the whole site or just particular topics; find a topic you care about and subscribe, a regular dose of good news will be useful.

§The Who Cares Era

Speaking of caring, Dan Sinker on the current zeitgeist:

At a time where the government’s uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care. Care loudly. Tell others. Get going.

Anil Dash makes another appearance this week, this time on a growing disconnect:

 Nobody asks for anything, they just take it. There’s not even an acknowledgement, that any of this stuff is happening let alone a conversation about it.

Meanwhile, we’ve been telling our kids that the standard for decent people is enthusiastic consent. That’s very evidently not the case for the tycoons running the technology industry.

LLMs Are Going Just Great

§Toolmen

Speaking of Mandy Brown, I don’t normally link to two things by the same person in a week but this was published today and is a must-read:

the technocrats have labeled any and all manner of engineering practices as “AI” and riddled their products with sparkle emojis, to the extent that what we mean when we say AI is, from a technology standpoint, no longer meaningful

I won’t spoil for you what she says “AI” is instead. Go read it. It is particularly relevant in light of the news that LLM bullshit is being used to justify harmful public policy. A teaser, however:

Proving the superiority of some humans over others has repeatedly failed; what better way to continue the effort than the deployment of technology that makes proof of anything impossible, such that making something true requires only the right person to declare it so.

§Pivot To AI

If you’re looking for the equivalent of Web3 is Going Just Great, here it is.

§The Shifting Power Dynamics of AI

Johnathan Zdziarski wrote this a few months back, and if you care about ethics, politics, or accountability, it’s worth a read.

What I think most people are afraid of – perhaps without realizing it – is the massive, unbalanced shift in power dynamics that AI stands to create if we are not careful.

An example:

This sounds sensible to a bureaucrat yet consider what it means: the government may one day require, through regulation, technology that will save the lives of the occupants of government officials given a particular situation, yet sacrifice the occupants of your vehicle in the same situation.

And like I’ve been saying for a while, it eventually comes back to accountability:

At the beginning of this essay, I posed the question: “how can one hold math accountable?”. Clearly, it’s not the math that is to blame, but those behind the complex systems when they fail.

§People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.”

We need to teach people how to recognize and defend against cult indoctrination techniques. We shouldn’t need to, but here we are.

§A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine

McSweeny’s does it again:

Hey team. It’s your CEO. I know your time is valuable, so I’ll cut right to the chase: It’s come to my attention that some of you have been bad-mouthing the Giant Plagiarism Machine™.

Note this supports the assertion laid out in Mandy’s Toolmen article mentioned previously.