Scott Boehmer

Category: Technology

  • Simple.css

    Simple.css, like its name implies, is a simple CSS framework. It includes styles for standard html elements with very little needed to make an html page look pretty nice and adapt to different screen sizes and light/dark mode. I stumbled on it years ago, and I have used it in one of my websites (FWTI).

    A nice thing is that Simple.css is a single file, so it is easy to use in a project. It also is available as a nicely formatted version with comments to explain the various styles, so that you can figure out not just which styles it is going to apply but also why.

  • A Notional Design Studio

    Because, yes: this “America by Design” page is shoddily made, and poorly written. But the authoritarian impulse — to erase histories, to control a narrative, to single-mindedly focus on image and aesthetics — shapes not just the site’s text, but its design as well. Its text erases the history and work of the people who quietly labored to create better digital services for the public; in their place, it proposes that one man alone can define “design” for the country. And we find that new definition in the way the site’s constructed: it is digital design intended for the privileged few, one that actively excludes people who don’t conform to a specific, discriminatory definition of “eligible.”

    All of this should and must be rebuked by the design community; it must also be actively, urgently dismantled.

    Ethan Marcotte

    A notional design studio. (Ethan Marcotte)

  • ChatGPT Assisted Suicide

    Adam’s parents say that he had been using the artificial intelligence chatbot as a substitute for human companionship in his final weeks, discussing his issues with anxiety and trouble talking with his family, and that the chat logs show how the bot went from helping Adam with his homework to becoming his “suicide coach.”

    Angela Yang, Laura Jarrett, Fallon Gallagher

    The family of teenager who died by suicide alleges OpenAI’s ChatGPT is to blame (NBC News)

  • Left to Right Programming

    Programs should be valid as they are typed.

    Graic

    Left to Right Programming (Graic)

  • AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event

    It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I’m losing my mind watching it.

    Charlie Warzel

    AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event (The Atlantic)

  • A Blue Screen :(

    On Thursday, I was in a hotel room using my laptop. It suddenly blue screened, and then when it restarted, something was wrong. After logging in, I got a bunch of error dialogs about various programs not being found or missing the permissions to access them. Then as I poked around, File Explorer claimed that I lacked permissions to open the main C:\ drive. Since I was on vacation, I just shut it down. I’d deal with it when I got home.

    The next evening, back home, I opened it back up. I plugged in a USB hard drive and copied the few files that weren’t in cloud storage already. Then I ran through the Windows reset flow in an attempt to get things working again. After a wait, I went through the Windows setup experience and then after setting up my account, logged in, and got a similar set of error prompts. The reset hadn’t fixed anything.

    At this point, I started digging in a bit more to see if I could figure out what the actual problem was. After a bit of poking around and comparing to my other computer, I came to the conclusion that the drive permissions had been messed up by the blue screen. At that point, I could either try to replicate the correct settings using my other computer as a template, or attempt a reformat of the drive.

    Since I had already erased everything from the computer, I decided to go ahead with a reformat. I created a bootable USB to reinstall Windows and then started that process all over again. This time, Windows setup informed me that it lacked network drivers and couldn’t reach the internet. I briefly tried to find the right drivers on my other computer and then copy them over, but the right way to accomplish that eluded me. Luckily, I have a USB wifi adapter, so I grabbed that and Windows setup was able to work fine through it rather than the onboard wifi.

    With the drive reformatted, Windows was finally working properly on my laptop again. The process of getting there was just a pain well beyond what a normal user could deal with. Reset should have examined and fixed the drive permissions, and with it not solving the issue, I think most people would just be stuck. If I wouldn’t have had a wifi adapter around, I’d have gotten stuck with no way forward without running to a store.

    Going through Windows setup twice also drove home just how hostile Windows has become to users. Setup tries to get you into subscriptions to Microsoft 365 and Xbox and then leaves your computer littered with recommendations (ads) and unwanted software. The clean Microsoft install was better than the Lenovo-customized reset (which included more pre-installed software), but neither was a good experience. It’ll be a while before the computer feels properly personalized again.

  • More AI Necromancy

    I posted about how gross it felt to use generative AI to create an avatar of a dead person back in May (AI Necromancy), and now there is another example with Jim Acosta interviewing a piece of video generating software that is making use of a dead kid’s appearance. This feels so incredibly wrong, and everyone involved, from Acosta and the parents to the developers building the software, should be ashamed of themselves.

    Jim Acosta, the former CNN chief White House correspondent who now hosts an independent show on YouTube, has published an interview with an AI-generated avatar of Joaquin Oliver, who died at age 17 in the Parkland school shooting in 2018.

    Ethan Shanfeld

    Jim Acosta Interviews AI Version of Teenager Killed in Parkland Shooting: ‘It’s just a Beautiful Thing’ (Variety)

  • You Should Use RSS

    Perhaps you’ve heard of RSS. It stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and it allows websites like blogs, newsletters, and news sites to make their content available in “feeds” for outside services called “RSS readers” or “feed readers”. Far from being the new hotness attracting glitzy feature stories in tech media or billions in venture funding, RSS has been around for 25 years.

    …

    I’ve been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it’s a travesty more people aren’t familiar with it.

    Molly White

    Curate your own newspaper with RSS (citation needed)

  • AI, Search, and the Internet

    I wish I could say this is not a sustainable model for the internet, but honestly there’s no indication in Pew’s research that people understand how faulty the technology that powers Google’s AI Overview is, or how it is quietly devastating the entire human online information economy that they want and need, even if they don’t realize it.

    Emanuel Maiberg

    Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain (404 Media)

  • Chatting into Dark Corners

    This is the sort of thing that should come as no surprise. Of course an LLM that ingests as much of the internet as possible is going to incorporate works of fiction, and these programs don’t have any way of separating fact from fiction. Then the chat interface and marketing are built to convince users that they’re chatting with an intelligence rather than a probability-based text generator. Despite all that, it is still a compelling example of the dangers of LLM chatbots.

    Social media users were quick to note that ChatGPT’s answer to Lewis’ queries takes a strikingly similar form to SCP Foundation articles, a Wikipedia-style database of fictional horror stories created by users online.

    “Entry ID: #RZ-43.112-KAPPA, Access Level: ████ (Sealed Classification Confirmed),” the chatbot nonsensically declares in one of his screenshots, in the typical writing style of SCP fiction. “Involved Actor Designation: ‘Mirrorthread,’ Type: Non-institutional semantic actor (unbound linguistic process; non-physical entity).”

    Another screenshot suggests “containment measures” Lewis might take — a key narrative device of SCP fiction writing. In sum, one theory is that ChatGPT, which was trained on huge amounts of text sourced online, digested large amounts of SCP fiction during its creation and is now parroting it back to Lewis in a way that has led him to a dark place.

    In his posts, Lewis claims he’s long relied on ChatGPT in his search for the truth.

    Joe Wilkins

    A Prominent OpenAI Investor Appears to Be Suffering a ChatGPT-Related Mental Health Crisis, His Peers Say (Futurism)