Tags: art

10 Thoughts On “AI,” February 2026 Edition | Whatever

1. I don’t and won’t use “AI” in the text of any of my published work.
2. I’m not worried about “AI” replacing me as a novelist.
3. People in general are burning out on “AI.”
4. I’m supporting human artists, including as they relate to my own work.
5. “AI” is Probably Sticking Around In Some Form.
6. “AI” is a marketing term, not a technical one, and encompasses different technologies.
7. There were and are ethical ways to have trained generative “AI” but because they weren’t done, the entire field is suspect.
8. The various processes lumped into “AI” are likely to be integrated into programs and applications that are in business and creative workflows.
9. It’s all right to be informed about the state of the art when it comes to “AI.”
10. Some people are being made to use “AI” as a condition of their jobs. Maybe don’t give them too much shit for it.

Towards the end of 2025, I wrote:

I think I might change things up in 2026. Instead of waiting until the end of the year to write all the little reviews at once, I think I should write a review as soon as I finish a book. Instead of holding onto my reckons for months, I can just set them free one at a time.

I’ll get the ball rolling with the first book I read in 2026.

I’ve mentioned before that one interesting lens to apply to modern retellings of the Greek myths is how they treat deities. Are gods and goddesses real in this story? Or is it a non-interventionist tale with a purely human cast? In her book The Shadow Of Perseus, Claire Heywood wrote about Perseus, Medusa, and Andromeda without any supernatural characters. Having been impressed by that, I figured I’d go back to investigate her debut, Daughters Of Sparta.

The framing device is one I hadn’t come across before. It follows the diverging stories of sisters Helen and Clytemnestra, flipping back and forth between the two throughout their lives. I’ve read plenty of takes on the Trojan war, and I’ve read plenty of takes on Clytemnestra’s revenge, but I think this is the first time they’ve been combined like this.

Overall, it works. There are inevitable time jumps. Some time periods are bound to get more attention than others. And at some point, the narrative just has to wrap up, even though we know there’s pleny more that follows afterwards.

All in all, a good addition to the list of modern retellings of classical Greek stories.

Accessibility For Everyone by Laura Kalbag

Laura’s classic book is now a web book that you can read for free online.

Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

That’s it.

That’s the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It’s why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family’s financial security.

Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.

But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money.

Alchemy - Josh Collinsworth blog

I am interested in art—we are interested in art, in any and all of its forms—because humans made it. That’s the very thing that makes it interesting; the who, the how, and especially the why.

The existence of the work itself is only part of the point, and materializing an image out of thin air misses the point of art, in very much the same way that putting a football into a Waymo to drive it up and down the street for a few hours would be entirely missing the point of sports.

Layoutit Terra - CSS Terrain Generator

It’s wild what you can do with CSS these days!

Frank Chimero · Beyond the Machine

The transcript of a very thoughtful talk by Frank.

A cartoonist’s review of AI art - The Oatmeal

Stick with this. It’s worth it.

Life Is More Than an Engineering Problem | Los Angeles Review of Books

A great interview with Ted Chiang:

Predicting the most likely next word is different from having correct information about the world, which is why LLMs are not a reliable way to get the answers to questions, and I don’t think there is good evidence to suggest that they will become reliable. Over the past couple of years, there have been some papers published suggesting that training LLMs on more data and throwing more processing power at the problem provides diminishing returns in terms of performance. They can get better at reproducing patterns found online, but they don’t become capable of actual reasoning; it seems that the problem is fundamental to their architecture. And you can bolt tools onto the side of an LLM, like giving it a calculator it can use when you ask it a math problem, or giving it access to a search engine when you want up-to-date information, but putting reliable tools under the control of an unreliable program is not enough to make the controlling program reliable. I think we will need a different approach if we want a truly reliable question answerer.

While I’ve been listening to Hounds Of Love, I’ve also been reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey.

Here’s a passage from an early chapter as the crew of the International Space Station watch a typhoon forming:

How wired and wakeful the earth seems suddenly. It’s not one of the regular typhoons that haphazardly assault these parts of the world, they agree. They can’t see it all, but it’s bigger than projections had previously thought, and moving faster. They send their images, the latitudes and longitudes. They are like fortune tellers, the crew. Fortune tellers who can see and tell the future but do nothing to change or stop it. Soon their orbit will descend away to the east and south and no matter how they crane their necks backward at the earth-viewing windows the typhoon will roll out of sight and their vigil will end and darkness will hit them at speed.

They have no power – they have only their cameras and a privileged anxious view of its building magnificence. They watch it come.

The penultimate track on Hounds Of Love is the magnificent Hello Earth with its eerie Georgian chant for a chorus, and magnificent uilleann piping from the late great Liam Óg O’Flynn on the bridge. It too features a narrator watching from space:

Watching storms

Start to form

Over America.

Can’t do anything.

Just watch them swing

With the wind

Out to sea.

All you sailors, (“Get out of the waves! Get out of the water!”)

All life-savers, (“Get out of the waves! Get out of the water!”)

All you cruisers, (“Get out of the waves! Get out of the water!”)

All you fishermen,

Head for home.

Matching the song to the book feels like pairing a fine wine with a delicious morsel.

How to Make Websites That Will Require Lots of Your Time and Energy - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

1. Install Stuff Indiscriminately From npm
2. Pick a Framework Before You Know You Need One
3. Always, Always Require a Compilation Step

The history of album art || Matthew Ström, designer-leader

An enjoyable guided tour of album artwork starting at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Build It Yourself | Armin Ronacher’s Thoughts and Writings

We’re at a point in the most ecosystems where pulling in libraries is not just the default action, it’s seen positively: “Look how modular and composable my code is!” Actually, it might just be a symptom of never wanting to type out more than a few lines.

It always amazes me when people don’t view dependencies as liabilities. To me it feels like the coding equivalent of going to a loan shark. You are asking for technical debt.

There are entire companies who are making a living of supplying you with the tools needed to deal with your dependency mess. In the name of security, we’re pushed to having dependencies and keeping them up to date, despite most of those dependencies being the primary source of security problems.

But there is a simpler path. You write code yourself. Sure, it’s more work up front, but once it’s written, it’s done.

MS Edge Explainers/Performance Control Of Embedded Content / explainer.md at main · MicrosoftEdge/MSEdgeExplainers

I like the look of this proposal that would allow authors to have more control over network priorities for third-party iframes—I’ve already documented how I had to use a third-party library to fix this problem on the Salter Cane site.

Severance Is the Future Tech Bros Want - Reactor

The tech bros advocating for generative AI to take over art are at the same level of cultural refinement as the characters in Severance. They’re creating apps to summarize books to people, tweeting from accounts with Greek statue profile pictures.

GenAI would automate Lumon’s cultural mission, allowing humans to sever themselves from the production of art and culture.

How Indie Devs and Small Teams Can Win in a Tech Downturn - The New Stack

In which Rich nails Clearleft’s superpower:

“Clearleft is a relatively small team, but we can achieve big results because we are nimble and extremely experienced. As strategic design partners, we have a privileged position where we can work around a large company’s politics,” Rutter said. “We need to understand those politics — and help the client staff navigate them — but we don’t need to be bound by them. We bring a thoroughly user-centered approach to our design partnership, and that can be something novel to companies. By showing them what good design looks like (not so much the interface, as the actual process of getting to really well-designed products and services), we can be disruptive within the organization and leave them in a much better place.”

What happens to what we’ve already created? - The History of the Web

We wonder often if what is created by AI has any value, and at what cost to artists and creators. These are important considerations. But we need to also wonder what AI is taking from what has already been created.

Taking RWD To The Extreme — Smashing Magazine

Some really great advice here:

• Use native layout systems
• Start with semantic HTML
• Use fluid type with fluid space
• Always bet on progressive enhancement
• Trust the browser
• Ditch the “physical” CSS

Authors Apart

Another handy list of where you can get works published by A Book Apart authors.

Yesterday when I mentioned my paranoia of third-party dependencies on The Session, I said:

I’ve built in the option to switch between multiple geocoding providers. When one of them inevitably starts enshittifying their service, I can quickly move on to another. It’s like having a “go bag” for geocoding.

(Geocoding, by the way, is when you provide a human-readable address and get back latitude and longitude coordinates.)

My paranoia is well-founded. I’ve been using Google’s geocoding API, which is changing its pricing model from next March.

You wouldn’t know it from the breathlessly excited emails they’ve been sending about it, but this is not a good change for me. I don’t do that much geocoding on The Session—around 13,000 or 14,000 requests a month. With the new pricing model that’ll be around $15 to $20 a month. Currently I slip by under the radar with the free tier.

So it might be time for me to flip that switch in my code. But which geocoding provider should I use?

There are plenty of slop-like listicles out there enumerating the various providers, but they’re mostly just regurgitating the marketing blurbs from the provider websites. What I need is more like a test kitchen.

Here’s what I did…

I took a representative sample of six recent additions to the sessions section of thesession.org. These examples represent places in the USA, Ireland, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Spain, so a reasonable spread.

For each one of those sessions, I’m taking:

• the venue name,
• the town name,
• the area name, and
• the country.

I’m deliberately not including the street address. Quite often people don’t bother including this information so I want to see how well the geocoding APIs cope without it.

I’ve scored the results on a simple scale of good, so-so, and just plain wrong.

• A good result gets a score of one. This is when the result gives back an accurate street-level result.
• A so-so result gets a score of zero. This when it’s got the right coordinates for the town, but no more than that.
• A wrong result gets a score of minus one. This is when the result is like something from a large language model: very confident but untethered from reality, like claiming the address is in a completely different country. Being wrong is worse than being vague, hence the difference in scoring.

Then I tot up those results for an overall score for each provider.

When I tried my six examples with twelve different geocoding providers, these were the results:

Geocoding providers

Provider	USA	England	Ireland	Spain	Scotland	Northern Ireland	Total
Google	1	1	1	1	1	1	7
Mapquest	1	1	1	1	1	1	7
Geoapify	0	1	1	0	1	0	3
Here	1	1	0	1	0	0	3
Mapbox	1	1	0	1	1	-1	3
Bing	1	0	0	0	0	0	1
Nominatim	0	0	0	0	-1	1	0
OpenCage	-1	1	0	0	0	-1	-1
Tom Tom	-1	-1	0	0	-1	1	-2
Positionstack	0	-1	0	-1	1	-1	-2
Locationiq	-1	0	-1	0	0	-1	-3
Map Maker	-1	0	-1	-1	-1	-1	-5

Some interesting results there. I was surprised by how crap Bing is. I was also expecting better results from Mapbox.

Most interesting for me, Mapquest is right up there with Google.

So now that I’ve got a good scoring system, my next question is around pricing. If Google and Mapquest are roughly comparable in terms of accuracy, how would the pricing work out for each of them?

Let’s say I make 15,000 API requests a month. Under Google’s new pricing plan, that works out at $25. Not bad.

But if I’ve understood Mapquest’s pricing correctly, I reckon I’ll just squeek in under the free tier.

Looks like I’m flipping the switch to Mapquest.

If you’re shopping around for geocoding providers, I hope this is useful to you. But I don’t think you should just look at my results; they’re very specific to my needs. Come up with your own representative sample of tests and try putting the providers through their paces with your data.

If, for some reason, you want to see the terrible PHP code I’m using for geocoding on The Session, here it is.