Sculpted robo-goldfish, a rainbow office building, and a look inside click farms
Five-ish things that I loved this week.
I made a Chill Space-Roving Robo-Goldfish / Transforming Junk into Cosmic Wonders (video)
The attention to detail on this sculpture is stunning.
Digital walled gardens (blog post)
I really enjoyed this short post about walled gardens vs. digital gardens. It compares traversing through personal blogs to wandering through open, welcoming gardens. A few days later, I read "Following Links", which shares similar thoughts about surfing the web. Following links wherever they may lead is more interesting than relying on an algorithm.
That's one of my main motivations for Friday Faves. I want to present the most interesting links I've found by following links through the IndieWeb or through one of my RSS subscriptions.
Speaking of walled gardens and algorithms...
Photographer steps inside Vietnam’s shadowy ‘click farms’ (article)
In this interview, photographer Jack Latham recalls what he experienced researching "click farms" in Vietnam for his book "Beggar's Honey". These businesses are able to simulate thousands of user interactions which are easily used to manipulate popular opinion.
While researching, Latham said he found that algorithms — a topic of his previous book, “Latent Bloom” — often recommended videos that he said got increasingly “extreme” with each click.
“If you only digest a diet of that, it’s a matter of time you become diabetically conspiratorial,” he said. “The spreading of disinformation is the worst thing. It happens in your pocket, not newspapers, and it’s terrifying that it’s tailored to your kind of neurosis.”
I generally like to post feel-good things in my faves, but I found this too fascinating to pass up. I think if more people realized how easily algorithms can be manipulated... well, honestly, I think many people do understand, at some level, that everything they see on social media is artifically manipulated. They just don't care.
A Rainbow Office Building Brightens Up the Tokyo Streets with Prismatic Color (article)
A beautifully-designed office building featuring sheets of rainbow-painted glass. The details are minimal but the photos are gorgeous.
Bob Cassette Rewinder: Hacking Detergent DRM for 98% Cost Saving (article/git repo)
I don't think I've ever seen a README with so much detail before, it really is a blog post in itself. I've also never heard of this Bob dishwasher before, but I really enjoy this story. Buying replacement dishwasher "cassettes" is expensive and wasteful, so dekuNukem, who seems to do a lot of reverse-engineering, figured out how to refill and reset the cartridges so they can be reused. While they spend a lot of time dumping data to figure out how to manually reset the wash count on the chip, they even go as far as figuring out the diswashing detergent formula used for the cassettes. It's a fascinating read.
Special 6th thing! My Post-AI Writing (blog post)
In response to being asked about the effect of AI on writing, the author explains how AI makes writing less fun and thoughtful. In a world where you can have AI gather your thoughts and polish your writing, there's something extra freeing about just letting words fall out onto the page.
"But AI has had an indirect positive and enjoyable effect on my writing: It has made me lower my craftsmanship standards, which were never very high to begin with. This is one reason I’m writing a lot more this year. The causal chain from AI is subtle, and AI is not the whole explanation for changes in my writing, so let me try to unpack the part that is."
I really enjoyed this. It mirrors my thoughts about writing and organizing thoughts publicly. There is a time and place for AI-assisted writing, as the author notes. Whenever a high amount of polish is required, and you can't run it by an editor or trust your self-editing, maybe running your writing through an AI for some final touches is the way to go.
However, when writing is for fun or being used as a way to gather your thoughts, AI just doesn't cut it. I've tinkered with using AI to help spark ideas, but it always comes up clinical and flat. I come up with more genuine ideas by consuming quality content, sitting quietly with it, and thinking.