Who's Who of AI

Tim Carmody

186 trust @tcarmody.bsky.social · 13,072 followers
Ex-liontamer, writer/editor/strategist. I used to work for Wired, The Verge, The Atlantic, The Message, Adweek, and Amazon Chronicles. I also host sometimes at Kottke.org. Call me he/him. PHL. Everything changes; don’t be afraid. https://timcarmody.com
What they're sharing

Articles & links

Funny because Massachusetts quite famously has a tax on high earners — MA taxes income, not wealth like California would, but still www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

bloomberg.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 3 ↻ 1 ↩ 2 · 21d ago

Cognition is a promising startup, but it's wild to me that new AI companies are RAISING a billion dollars in a single round. That's a whole Instagram purchase price! www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

bloomberg.com
View on Bluesky · ♥ 3 ↻ 0 ↩ 0 · 22d ago
↻ Tim Carmody reposted
@kottke.org

Eric Rodenbeck on AI as a Design Medium. “In my class, the first principle is simple: Do not take what comes back from prompts at face value. Interrogate it. Iterate on it. Stay with it longer than feels efficient.” [harvarddesignmagazine.org]

AI as a Design Medium harvarddesignmagazine.org View on Bluesky →
↻ Tim Carmody reposted
@zeblarson.bsky.social

Software development is a weird oral tradition. We have an ambivalent relationship with documentation, but high turnover in the industry means that the info is always on the verge of dying out. AI is making those dysfunctions worse, and I wrote about that for Fast Company.

fastcompany.com View on Bluesky →
Their own posts

Recent commentary

AI companies' race for compute is very scary, because: 1) data centers are going up very fast 2) there's not enough clean electricity to make them sustainable 3) the companies have to take on debt to pay for them It's all leveraging the future against the present, and it could all fall down fast

View on Bluesky · ♥ 113 ↻ 28 ↩ 3 · 16d ago

I made an app, Humanist, to convert PDFs to EPUBs and edit them, but now it has many more features: you can ask your books questions using local/open-weights LLMs, you can manage an e-book library, share between devices, read/take notes on e-books. All AI features optional. LMK if you want to test!

View on Bluesky · ♥ 73 ↻ 8 ↩ 8 · 18d ago

I wonder what the temperature around AI would look like if we’d had a few more warm-up years where companies emphasized smaller gains rather than deeply transformative ones. Eg, it makes OCR better. Remember mail merges? They’re easier now. Instant audio and visual translation. But the thing is…

View on Bluesky · ♥ 26 ↻ 1 ↩ 5 · 20d ago

I would like more people to know that AI output almost always uses straight quotes and apostrophes rather than curly ones BECAUSE 1) it's true 2) people are always looking for ”AI tells” and this is a good one 3) It’s relatively easy to fix, and I like good typography

View on Bluesky · ♥ 12 ↻ 3 ↩ 5 · 16d ago

Reading Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action and thinking about chatbots, and folks, it’s not looking good for chatbots

View on Bluesky · ♥ 17 ↻ 3 ↩ 1 · 5d ago

AI intelligences don’t need to be identical to human ones to be worthy of ethical consideration and protection from abuse. Animals are intelligent and conscious and they have a wide range of rights depending on their status. What we need is something closer to kosher law than liberal human rights

View on Bluesky · ♥ 9 ↻ 1 ↩ 5 · 14d ago

When did “the singularity” (in tech) start referring to achieving AGI and not humans uploading their consciousness into machines and living forever? Because those two may be related but they’re quite different things (Don’t get me started on how this relates to black holes and cosmology)

View on Bluesky · ♥ 12 ↻ 0 ↩ 1 · 19d ago

Today I read two different articles crediting AI with inflationary pressure: - memory costs more, so computers, phones, game systems, and *anything that uses them* cost more - big IPOs/stock market boom driving up housing, especially in California Gasoline prob hurts more but these don't help

View on Bluesky · ♥ 5 ↻ 0 ↩ 4 · 7d ago

There will be a lot of schadenfreude when companies who've laid off workers and said "we'll replaced them with AI" collapse — but this probably fails to account for how many of these companies would have collapsed anyway. AI is a hail mary at best, a fig leaf at worst.

View on Bluesky · ♥ 7 ↻ 2 ↩ 1 · 19d ago

I miss when Amazon let you download copies of your own Kindle books and — if you were clever — you could edit or convert them and use them however you wished I wonder if locking down was a response to other AI companies buying and training on books or if it was a fuck-you to their customers or both

View on Bluesky · ♥ 5 ↻ 0 ↩ 2 · 23d ago
Their network

In Tim Carmody's orbit

Center = Tim Carmody. Left = members they follow (green edges). Right = members who follow them (blue edges). Top = mutual follows (orange edges, slightly larger). Drag any node to reposition; click to open that profile.