Links #154

Eleanor Robins on memorization as an act of resistance. Loved this. “The premise of the memory club is that bringing stories and poems to live inside our bodies might be an act of resistance. Originally, I thought of this as a resistance against AI—against the invitation to outsource our very thinking to the large-language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence, which are essentially externalised memory banks. By internalising the things we wanted to know deeply, I hoped we might bring at least some of this meaning-making back into human hearts and heads.”

Scott Shambaugh on how an AI agent blogged a hit piece on him after he turned down a matplotlib pull request from the agent. Apparently innocuous intentions aside, I worry how much damage and chaos these agents are going to cause across the internet.

Sophie Koonin on AI-generated code. “As I see more and more people generating code instead of writing it, I find myself wondering why engineers are so ready and willing to do away with one of the good bits of our jobs (coding) and leave themselves with the boring bit (reviews).”

Secrets of Privacy on ads in AI chatbots. Disturbing. Yet another reason to avoid LLMs.

Joe Crawford on how we’re in a web renaissance now. And it’s a wonderful thing. Visiting people’s personal websites is, for me, so much more delightful than social networks ever were.