Category Archives: Tech
Why everyone should pay attention to Stable Diffusion
Many of the people in my circles hadn’t heard of Stable Diffusion until I told them, and I was already two days late. Heralds of new technologies have a tendency to play up every new thing, however incremental, as the … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Tech
Tagged AI ethics, artificial intelligence, artificial neural networks, autoencoder, DALL-E 2, deepfake, diffusion model, Emad Mostaque, Gaussian noise, Imagen, img2img, LAION, machine learning, OpenAI, Parti, Stability.ai, Stable Diffusion
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When a teenager wants to solve poaching with machine-learning…
We always need more feel-good stories, but we need those feel-good stories more that withstand closer scrutiny instead of falling apart, and framed the right way. For example, Smithsonian magazine published an article with the headline ‘This Teenager Invented a … Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Tech
Tagged animal products, elephant-poaching, ivory smuggling, machine learning, poaching, Smithsonian magazine, techno-optimism
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The 5ftf blunder
Automattic owner Matt Mullenweg recently made a scene on Twitter when he called out GoDaddy as a “parasitic” organisation for profiting off of WordPress without making a sufficient number of contributions to the WordPress community and for developing a competitor … Continue reading
Posted in Tech
Tagged 5 for the Future, Automattic, GoDaddy, Matt Mullenweg, WordPress
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The problem that ‘crypto’ actually solves
And why that makes cryptocurrencies hard to beat. Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Tech
Tagged Coinbase, Coinbase Tracer, cryptocurrencies, decentralisation, DeFi
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Tech solutions to household labour are also problems
Access to leisure is crucial in the climate crisis era, and technological solutions bereft of social change won’t help. Continue reading
Posted in Analysis, Tech
Tagged care work, caregiving, climate crisis, household appliances, household labour, industrialisation, patriarchy, switch cost
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Hosting a Ghost blog on Fly.io
A noob’s guide Continue reading
Thoughts on the WordPress.com ‘Starter’ plan
WordPress.com announced a new ‘Starter’ plan for its users on May 25 after significant backlash from many members of its community of users that a previous price revision had completely disregarded the interests of bloggers – by which I mean … Continue reading
Posted in Life notes, Tech
Tagged blogging, Dave Martin, Matt Mullenweg, WebP, WordPress.com
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Nothing cryptic about another ‘crypto’ disaster
Earlier this month, a cryptocurrency token called Luna crashed in price – an event that also brought down the value of bitcoin, became the biggest crash in cryptocurrency history thus far, earned the person or persons who (probably) orchestrated this … Continue reading
Posted in Tech
Tagged bitcoins, blockchain, decentralised finance, Do Kwon, George Soros, Luna, shorting, stablecoins, Terra
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Why there’s no guarantee that Musk’s Twitter will resemble Dorsey’s
Many folks are saying they’re not going to leave Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition because Musk and Jack Dorsey aren’t different. Continue reading
Posted in Culture, Op-eds, Tech
Tagged Elon Musk, free speech, Jack Dorsey, Parag Agarwal, social media, Twitter
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To be better at being anti-crypto
Molly White has a difficult read, one that I’m forced to agree with in spite of my vehemently anti-cryptocurrency position. Three representative paragraphs from her post: I … think that [cryptocurrency-based financial solutions] are enormously attractive to people who see them … Continue reading
Posted in Op-eds, Tech
Tagged cryptocurrencies, Molly White, NFT, upper caste, upper class
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