McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: July 17th 2023 Edition

• A talk: How To Find Things Online. Great essay from v buckenham about the history and possible future of sharing and finding text on the Internet.
• Permission. An interesting proposal from Jeremy Keith: should we stop Google et al. from indexing our sites? I wonder what a co-operative, opt-in search engine would look like instead; or whether we could build communities of federated search engines where I and friends of friends visit?
• Fruit Of The Poisonous LLaMA? It seems that Facebook (and others?) might have used a pirated copy of my book (and lots of others) to train its AI. Maybe my publisher consented to that, but I suspect not. I definitely didn't consent to it.
• On Technology and Degrowth. I think "degrowth" is a poorly-chosen name; I'd incorrectly assumed it was nearer to the hair-shirt environmentalism of the 70s, but it seems that's not the case and it's more sensible. "This brings us to a critically important point. We must be clear about what growth actually is. It is not innovation, or social progress, or improvements in well-being. It is very narrowly defined as an increase in aggregate production, as measured in market prices (GDP). GDP makes no distinction between $100 worth of tear gas and $100 worth of health care. This metric is not intended to measure what is important for people, but rather what is important for capitalism."