(2023-02-25) Sloan Buoyed By The Flood

Robin Sloan: Buoyed by the flood.

Here’s an inter­esting app called feeeed, beautifully presented. The app’s creator, Nate Parrott, writes: More aspirationally, it’s an app that lets you “follow anything,” including data sources that are personal to you, like your step count, weather, and anything you wish to remind yourself of from time to time.

The “anything” extends to arbitrary portions of web pages, which you can clip and “follow” live — like magic peepholes across the web. This feature is built into the Arc web browser, too — Nate works at The Browser Company, so I suspect this is no coincidence — and, in both places, I find it very appealing and provocative. Transclusion-y, even!

Anyone who adds one of those email newsletter pop-ups to a website demeans them­selves and makes the world worse for everyone else.

This is a collec­tive action problem. Any of these decisions, consid­ered separately, is rela­tively inoffensive … and those penguins ARE in rough shape … but all together, they produce a web that is shock­ingly ugly and rude.

The philoso­pher Immanuel Kant reasoned his way into a hot-rodded version of the Golden Rule: treat humans as ends unto them­selves, never means to an end.

So many choices — moral, economic, aesthetic — are vexing, ambiguous, legit­i­mately challenging. This choice is easy. The pop-up increases newsletter subscriptions, and even­tu­ally sales: so what? Let them go. Earn that attention and business in better ways. Partic­i­pate in the produc­tion of a shared space that is beautiful and respectful, rather than the opposite.

ChatGPT is the product that launched a thousand essays! Good: because this is exactly what we ought to be writing about, and worrying about, and arguing about. The terrain of the fast-moving AI is aesthet­i­cally rich, polit­i­cally fraught, econom­i­cally consequential; the perfect setting for wide-ranging discussion.

Here’s my humble addition to the “wot I did with the AI” genre:

I was recently on the hunt for a telescope that would be good for planet-viewing

The Google search was a riot of images, prices, capabilities, availabilities

In the end, I made a great selection, one that I’m happy and excited about.

In parallel, I asked ChatGPT for recom­men­da­tions

It was basically like asking a sales associate at a physical shop. That raises the question: do I rely on sales as­so­ciates at physical shops? I absolutely do not! The very idea seems unhinged to me. What do you mean, you’re going to show me three alternatives? I want to see thirty!

For my part, I would not forsake the power of full-spectrum, multi-tab search for an AI’s neat recommendation, just as I would not forsake it for a human’s neat recom­men­da­tion  … not unless I really trusted that human: their expertise and independence. I’m thinking of those terrific telescope reviews I found, deeply nerdy, rich with context. What would it mean to trust a ChatGPT-alike in that way? It doesn’t feel possible, presently.