Hey there,

I’ve not posted in months. That was unplanned, but I should hopefully be back to somewhat regular emailing.

Looking back over the past few months, there’s been three big shifts happening in tech: AI is still in a hype cycle, the social web is changing, and spatial is a distant promise of the future.

AI

The hype cycle for AI is still turning. But as we're all using it more in many of our everyday products, how it actually will change our lives is becoming increasingly fuzzy.

The promise that AI has no labor costs is turning out to be untrue (for now), and the assumption of a text interface being the UI shift may very well not be the final form factor. That said, there’s still a very real threat that lower quality, AI generated content will make browsing the web worse, and Google are pushing some of the biggest changes to search I’ve seen in years in reaction.

A survey conducted by The Verge highlights how we’re using AI. What’s becoming clear, to me at least, is we should think about AI as a feature, not a product:

One complicating factor, though, is that the definition of an AI tool is extremely fuzzy. We asked respondents about dedicated AI services like ChatGPT or Midjourney. But many companies are adding AI features to established software, whether that’s image generation in Photoshop or text suggestion in Gmail and Google Docs. And as the joke goes, AI is whatever computers haven’t done yet, meaning yesterday’s AI is, simply, today’s expected features.

— Hope, fear, and AI (The Verge / Jacob Kastrenakes and James Vincent)

Social web

There’s a lot happening in the social web, and it’s hard to tell if it’s collapsing or just going through a cycle of change.

The increase in interest rates has put a focus on how these companies make money - which to date has only really been achieved by Meta. Twitter and Reddit are going through whirlwind shifts with their communities. And there’s a real decentralized movement with open protocols like ActivityPub. Plus there’s always new social apps of the moment popping up.

Despite all these movements it doesn’t seem like anybody has solved the moderation problem. Maybe the negativity is just inherent to social media:

No design of social media can get rid of what I like to call the “semantic nadir,” which is what you’ll inevitably experience if your tweet ever goes viral, wherein eventually someone will take your tweet in literally the worst possible way (there’s some classic examples of this, as generally if you say “I love cheesecake” it won’t be long before someone reaches to “Oh, so you hate regular cake”—that’s the semantic nadir).

— Stop trying to make a "good" social media site (The Intrinsic Perspective / Erik Hoel)

Spatial

The third is spatial, which has mostly been spurred by Apple’s Vision Pro announcement. Although, Meta’s Quest hasn’t gone away.

Right now Vision Pro is still a version of VR, but with Apple they’re betting on a new form factor as the future of computing, and they’re going to develop that in public:

[T]o a large extent, this is what Apple does. It launches a minimal, barely viable version of a new product category targeted at early adopters and Apple fans eager to see what the fuss is about. Then Apple iterates on that hardware, year after year, until the price comes down and the features go up enough to reach a truly enormous audience.

— What to make of Apple’s intriguing $3,499 Vision Pro headset (Ars Technica / Kyle Orland)

💩 Cool shit

And for some cool links I’ve found:

AI Sims - An “Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior” using generative AI.

Landscape of biomedical research - A stunning visual map showing how research papers are interconnected.

See your identity pieced together from stolen data - A brilliant but utterly terrifying interactive piece showing how your stolen data is used.

Darc Room Photography - The unique UI on this site is what got my attention.

Ambient Garden - A wonderful interactive generative piece. Moving through the 3D space also moves you through the music.

Optimus Prime with CSS Transform - What the title says. It’s just cool.

Sub Rehab - Reddit basically consolidated web forums. This site lists alternate places to find those communities during the ongoing Reddit protests.

//trashFiles - A digital archive of our trash.

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