I love the small web, the clean web. I hate tech bloat.
And LLMs are the ultimate bloat.
So much truth in one story:
They built a machine to gentrify the English language.
They have built a machine that weaponizes mediocrity and sells it as perfection.
They are strip-mining your confidence to sell you back a synthetic version of it.
A short piece of speculative fiction.
A URL shortener that’s dodgy by design.
I really liked this short story.
Primer was a film about a start-up …and time travel. This is a short story about big tech …and time travel.
A beautifully Borgesian fable.
I’m really enjoying these sci-fi short stories that Terence is publishing on his site—one for every day of the month.
Dave’s short’n’sweet sci-fi stories, collected in one place.
Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:
I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
Annalee Newitz:
When we imagine future tech, we usually focus on the ways it could turn humans into robotic workers, easily manipulated by surveillance capitalism. And that’s not untrue. But in this story, I wanted to suggest that there is a more subversive possibility. Modifying our bodies with technology could bring us closer to the natural world.
This short story feels like a prequel to Maneki Neko.
A short documentary that you can dowload or watch online:
The film explores how image banks including Getty gain control over, and then restrict access to, archive images – even when these images are legally in the public domain. It also forms a small act of resistance against this practice: the film includes six legally licensed clips, and is downloadable as an HD ProRes file. In this way, it aims to liberate these few short clips from corporate control, and make them freely available for viewing and artistic use.
Licensed under aCreative Commons 0: “No rights reserved” license.
As flies/cats to wanton boys are we to the gods/Kardashev Type II civilisations—they play with us for their sport.
Twelve short stories of solarpunk cli-fi “envisioning the next 180 years of equitable climate progress.”
Whether built on abundance or adaptation, reform or a new understanding of survival, these stories provide flickers of hope, even joy, and serve as a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.
The format of a Wikipedia page is used as the chilling delivery mechanism for this piece of speculative fiction. The distancing effect heightens the horror.
Black Mirror meets Henrietta Lacks in this short story by Erik Hoel who I had not heard of until today, when I came across his name here and also in a completely unrelated blog post by Peter Watts about the nature of dreams.
A very affecting short story by Ben. I look forward to reading more of these.
A blog post from the future. I’m on board with the subgenre of speculative blogging.
Heydon is back on his bullshit, making extremely entertaining and occassionally inappropriate short videos about web stuff.
WEBBED BRIEFS are brief videos about the web, its technologies, and how to make the most of them. They’re packed with information, fun times™, and actual goats. Yes, it’s a vlog, but it isn’t on Youtube. Unthinkable!
The pilot episode is entitled “What Is ARIA Even For?”