Very important opinion piece from Cory Doctorow again. The trend was clear of an epistemic crisis brewing and generative AI basically put it on steroids. This is a real blow to our civilisation.

This truly makes me sad... The level of cynicism required to destroy rare books is just beyond me. All this to squeeze the last human made tokens available with no real gain in sight.

Excellent piece about code reviews. But it goes further than that and shows how our skills could improve. By tackling this question it does a good job showing we don't know where the ceiling is in terms of skills in our craft.

This is too often forgotten by developers. Our job isn't only about the technical side of things, we must also understand the domain the users are working in. It's a part of the craft.

Very interesting take. This gives very valid ground on why tech communities should reject AI based contributions. Not doing so will indeed hinder the commons communities rely on to exist and improve. This is a path to prevent getting better at inclusivity and diversity (which is really needed).

Ultimately, they just want people to stay on the pages they fully control and not have them visit anything out of their mall.

Knowledge management is hard. It's almost never a tool problem despite what people claim.

This piece is strongly worded but the logic is sound. We see many examples of power plays in guise of "innovation" which lead to killing openly sharing (and so killing real innovation). It's urgent to fight back and ensure things stay open.

One more example that it should be used for NLP tasks, not knowledge related tasks. The model makers are consuming so much data indiscriminately that they can't easily fine comb everything to remove the poisoned information.

Clearly the author is angry and he has every right to be. By closing platforms and fighting against tinkering, the big tech companies try to kill of the power user and hacker cultures. By letting this happen we all loose as a society.

Definitely required more preparation work than brainstorming. That said it's a nice alternative, maybe easier to get right.

I think I prefer friction as well. It's not about choosing discomfort all the time, but there's clearly a threshold not to cross. If things get too convenient there's a point where we get disconnected from the human condition indeed. I prefer a fuller and imperfect life.

Indeed, innovation is far from being a linear process. It's actually messy, the breakthroughs already happened already and we describe it after the facts.

Some areas of our industry are more prone to the "fashion of the day" madness than others. Still there's indeed some potential decay in what we learn, what matters is finding and focusing on what will last.

An old one and a bit all over the place. Still, plenty of interesting advice and insights.

If you're not recklessly accumulating technical debt, this is an interesting way to frame the conversation around it.

There's some truth in this piece. We never quite managed to really have a semantic web because knowledge engineering is actually hard... and we publish mostly unstructured or badly structured data. LLMs are thus used as a brute force attempt at layering some temporary and partial structure on top of otherwise unstructured data. They're not really up to the task of course but it gives us a glimpse into what could have been.

Very nice article on the Wikipedia success. Or why being boring and the ultimate process pettiness became the crucial part of the formula. This community really developed a fascinating culture which so far resists to mounting political pressure... But will the editors morale hold?

Looks like the writing is on the wall indeed... The paradox is that an important training corpus for LLMs will disappear if it dies for good. Will we see output quality lower? Or ossification of knowledge instead?

Quite some good advice in here. I like being around people who proactively communicate, mind the quality of the communication and look for new things to work on. Who wouldn't?