Digital technicalities: a reading list#

Following is a curated list of online resources related to digital technicalities, ranging from computational linguistics to AI, from philosophy of science to retrogaming, from digital humanities to cybersecurity, and more. The list is constantly updated and includes both the original link and a preservation link (through the Wayback Machine) to each resource. It also contains the publishing date of the resource (automatically retrieved, or set to “unknown” if the scraper fails to extract it from the HTML source) and the date the resource was added to the list. The majority of the resources are selected from two aggregators, Hacker News and /.Slashdot. Some materials may be behind a paywall (and the archived copy may consequently be unavailable); in such cases you may try using the browser extension Bypass Paywalls Clean available for both Firefox and Chrome.

Last update: 18/11/2024

Link

Published

Added

Archived

Misinformation: A Flawed Concept

20241028

20241118

When Machine Learning Tells the Wrong Story

20241109

20241118

Liberation technology: dreams, politics, history

N/A

20241118

Punctuation is dead because the iPhone keyboard killed it

20241110

20241118

Network Of Time

20190101

20241118

Visualizing 13 million BlueSky users

20241112

20241118

How a stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom

20241111

20241118

Meta Horizon Worlds Has Been Taken Over by Children

20241112

20241118

AI Chatbot Added to Mushroom Foraging Facebook Group Immediately Gives Tips for Cooking Dangerous Mushroom

20241112

20241118

Graph-based AI model maps the future of innovation

20241112

20241118

After Trump’s Victory, the 4B Movement Is Spreading Across TikTok

20241107

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The Open Source Project DeFlock Is Mapping License Plate Surveillance Cameras All Over the World

20241111

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Guardian will no longer post on Elon Musk’s X from its official accounts

20241113

20241118

The AI lab waging a guerrilla war over exploitative AI

20241113

20241118

Our brains are vector databases — here’s why that’s helpful when using AI

20241116

20241118

ChatGPT is Slipping

20241117

20241118

N/A

Super Weights in LLMs - How Pruning Them Destroys a LLM’s Ability to Generate Text ?

20241118

20241118

Drop #9. UDO: The Weird Magic of Digital Folkore

20240119

20241118

AI and Ways of Seeing: Q&A with Lauren Tilton

20241112

20241118

AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably - Scientific Reports

20241114

20241118

N/A

OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI

None

20241118

N/A

Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess

20241114

20241118

The metaphors of artificial intelligence

N/A

20241118

When ads shock: subtle ways that disgust can shape our buying habits

N/A

20241118

Academic papers retracted due to … software licensing?

20241114

20241118

The ambiguous “use” / GioCities

20241115

20241118

How AI Could Break the Career Ladder

None

20241118

The New Hatred of Technology

20241115

20241118

Despite its impressive output, generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world, researchers suggest

20241105

20241118

Misinformation really does spread like a virus, suggest mathematical models drawn from epidemiology

N/A

20241118

Sustainable Web Interest Group is Formed

20241104

20241118

Replicating GPT-2, the most dangerous NLP model (with Aaron Gokaslan) (Ep. 79)

20190923

20241118

Exploring Internet traffic shifts and cyber attacks during the 2024 US election

20241106

20241118

how a neuron learns

20240202

20241118

The images of Spain’s floods weren’t created by AI. The trouble is, people think they were

20241109

20241118

OpenAI’s new “Orion” model reportedly shows small gains over GPT-4

20241110

20241118

Teens learn a new conspiracy theory every week on social media, yet most schools aren’t teaching media literacy

N/A

20241118

IMG_0416

20241103

20241118

Anthropic hires its first “AI welfare” researcher

20241111

20241118

Apple AI notification summaries exist; rarely useful, often hilarious

20241112

20241118

Patterns in Information - Lachlan Gray

None

20241118

The Beginner’s Guide to Visual Prompt Injections: Invisibility Cloaks, Cannibalistic Adverts, and Robot Women / Lakera – Protecting AI teams that disrupt the world.

20241113

20241118

Releasing the largest multilingual open pretraining dataset

20241113

20241118

AI has a stupid secret: we’re still not sure how to test for human levels of intelligence

20241004

20241118

The Commoditization of LLMs – Communications of the ACM

20240912

20241118

AI search could break the web

20241031

20241118

The Internet Archive is even more essential than I realized

N/A

20241118

The Fairness of Fact-checking and Its Impact on Social Media / TechPolicy.Press

20241104

20241118

Generative AI Has a Massive E-Waste Problem

20241104

20241118

The Third-Party Script Breach That Shook The World

20201016

20241118

Seeing Like a Programmer (LambdaConf 2024) — Sympolymathesy, by Chris Krycho

20240507

20241118

AI overwhelmingly prefers white and male job candidates in new test of resume-screening bias

N/A

20241118

Despite its impressive output, generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world

20241105

20241118

Why the deep learning boom caught almost everyone by surprise

20241105

20241118

A global dataset of 7 billion individuals with socio-economic characteristics - Scientific Data

20241007

20241118

No, The Web Is Not Dead

20240523

20241118

AI is consolidating corporate power in higher ed (opinion)

20241106

20241118

Google admits massive document leak related to search algorithm is authentic

20240530

20241118

For fame or a death wish? Kids’ TikTok challenge injuries stump psychiatrists

20241106

20241118

Project Analyzing Human Language Usage Shuts Down Because ‘Generative AI Has Polluted the Data’

20240919

20241118

NaNoWriMo Says Condemning AI Is ‘Classist and Ableist’

20240902

20241118

You Can Now See the Code That Helped End Apartheid

20241018

20241118

It’s time to retire the term “user”

20240419

20241118

Everything we know about ‘shadowbans’ on social media

N/A

20241118

Planes, trains, and smartphones

20241015

20241118

Are LLMs Any Good at Ranking People? – Wilsons Blog

20241018

20241118

AI could help people find common ground during deliberations

20241017

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AI art: The end of creativity or the start of a new movement?

20241021

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How AI is generating a ‘sea of sameness’ in job applications

20240908

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You Should Probably Pay Attention to Tokenizers

20241021

20241118

Chatbot that caused teen’s suicide is now more dangerous for kids, lawsuit says

20241023

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Former OpenAI Researcher Says Company Broke Copyright Law

20241023

20241118

Feds Say You Don’t Have a Right to Check Out Retro Video Games Like Library Books

20241025

20241118

Thoughts on the New Digital Feudalism

20241026

20241118

Open Source on its own is no alternative to Big Tech - Bert Hubert’s writings

20241026

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N/A

Inside the U.S. Government-Bought Tool That Can Track Phones at Abortion Clinics

20241023

20241118

Instagram saves the best video quality for the most popular content

20241027

20241118

The Open Source AI Definition – 1.0

N/A

20241118

OpenAI says ChatGPT treats us all the same (most of the time)

20241015

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N/A

Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power.

20210328

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LinkedIn launches its first AI agent to take on the role of job recruiters / TechCrunch

20241029

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Make It Ephemeral: Software Should Decay and Lose Data

20241030

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Generative AI as an Icebreaker to Help Us Accept Other Ways of Thinking – Communications of the ACM

20241030

20241118

Embeddings are underrated

20241021

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wrestling the web from corporate control requires making it boring again

20000101

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How Everyone Got Lost in Netflix’s Endless Library

N/A

20241118

When Data Is Missing, Scientists Guess. Then Guess Again. / Quanta Magazine

20241002

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Beyond the link tax: journalism and the changing nature of the internet - Halifax Examiner

20240917

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Is big tech harming society? To find out, we need research – but it’s being manipulated by big tech itself

N/A

20241118

Man learns he’s being dumped via “dystopian” AI summary of texts

20241010

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Open-source AI definition finally gets its first release candidate - and a compromise

20241009

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Are humans the only ones that can be creative?

20241010

20241118

Cyber resilience act: Council adopts new law on security requirements for digital products

N/A

20241118

N/A

Amazon Dreams of AI Agents That Do the Shopping for You

20241009

20241118

FEMA adds misinformation to its list of disasters to clean up

20241008

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TikTok executives know about app’s effect on teens, lawsuit documents allege

20241011

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Maithra Raghu / The best AIs will be constructed not emergent

20240925

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This AI Pioneer Thinks AI Is Dumber Than a Cat

N/A

20241118

The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes

20241009

20241118

Lessons from Plain Text / rugu

20241013

20241118

Stop aggregating away the signal in your data

20220303

20241118

People are using Google study software to make AI podcasts—and they’re weird and amazing

20241003

20241118

Tech Innovations to make the Tibetan Language a First-class Citizen in the Digital World - Buddhist Digital Resource Center

20241010

20241118

N/A

Reasoning failures highlighted by Apple research on LLMs

20241012

20241118

AI is the new plastic

20241002

20241118

What is Code?

None

20241118

N/A

AI-Powered Social Media Manipulation App Promises to ‘Shape Reality’

20241016

20241118

AI Avatars Are Doing Job Interviews Now

20240927

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Google Serving AI-Generated Images of Mushrooms Could Have ‘Devastating Consequences’

20240924

20241118

RAG is not just text

20240928

20241118

An A.I. Model Helped Uncover 303 Previously Unseen Nazca Lines in Peru

20240927

20241118

If your AI seems smarter​, it’s thanks to smarter human trainers

N/A

20241118

AI and globalisation are shaking up software developers’ world

N/A

20241118

New study reveals positive mood changes during video game play

20240925

20241118

How ‘Embeddings’ Encode What Words Mean — Sort Of / Quanta Magazine

20240918

20241118

Vanishing Culture: Preserving Cookbooks / Internet Archive Blogs

20240930

20241118

A.I. Pioneers Call for Protections Against ‘Catastrophic Risks’

20240916

20241118

The Modern CLI Renaissance

20240904

20241118

The 1970s librarians who revolutionised the challenge of search / Aeon Essays

20230605

20241118

Delving into “delve”

20240331

20241118

On Opting Out of Copyright

20240429

20241118

We’re losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it?

20240916

20241118

Copyright Keepers Just Destroyed a Huge Digital Library

20240920

20241118

Technical writing is too important to leave to language models

20240709

20241118

Cold war spy satellites and AI detect ancient underground aqueducts

20240916

20241118

The Age of Software Artisans

None

20241118

Algorithms for the 21st Century

20060101

20241118

“Dead Internet theory” comes to life with new AI-powered social media app

20240918

20241118

The continuing tragedy of emoji on the web

20240917

20241118

Chatbots in science: What can ChatGPT do for you?

20240814

20241118

N/A

AI tool that can do ‘81 years of detective work in 30 hours’ trialled by police

20240923

20241118

Holy Hell, The Social Web Did Not Begin In 2008 - Bix Dot Blog

N/A

20241118

Please Don’t Ask AI If Something Is Poisonous

20240925

20241118

Google’s NotebookLM can help you dive deeper into YouTube videos

20240926

20241118

Project Overview ‹ AI-Implanted False Memories – MIT Media Lab

20240831

20241118

Greppability is an underrated code metric

20240829

20241118

Copyright Is Not a Tool to Silence Critics of Religious Education

20240828

20241118

The Imperial Origins of Big Data - Yale University Press

20240828

20241118

The /llms.txt file – llms-txt

20240903

20241118

Disappearing web and what to do about it.

20240816

20241118

Turn Your Code Into Pixel Art

20240102

20241118

US, Britain, EU to sign first international AI treaty

N/A

20241118

New AI model “learns” how to simulate Super Mario Bros. from video footage

20240905

20241118

GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation / HKS Misinformation Review

20240903

20241118

Google is losing its status as a verb

20240906

20241118

Bitten by Unicode – pyATL

20240901

20241118

LLMs produce racist output when prompted in African American English

20240828

20241118

Jeremy Couillard’s video games capture what it’s like to be alive right now

20240209

20241118

ON ALGORITHMIC WAGE DISCRIMINATION - Columbia Law Review

20231120

20241118

Inrupt, Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid, and Me

20200824

20241118

Can You Trust Dr. Wikipedia?

20240906

20241118

An AI Bot Named James Has My Old Local News Job

N/A

20241118

Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user’s public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option

20240910

20241118

The Network is the Territory

20240908

20241118

Grounding AI in reality with a little help from Data Commons

20241111

20241118

Did ChatGPT just message me… First?

N/A

20241118

The Tao of Unicode Sparklines

20210805

20241118

Move over, text: Video is the new medium of our lives

20240824

20241118

AI and the future of sex

20240826

20241118

Here’s how people are actually using AI

20240812

20241118

We need to prepare for ‘addictive intelligence’

20240805

20241118

A new public database lists all the ways AI could go wrong

20240814

20241118

The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age

20240819

20241118

How gamification took over the world

20240613

20241118

Algorithms are everywhere

20240227

20241118

Wikimedia’s CTO: In the age of AI, human contributors still matter

20240226

20241118

The online art catalogue that chronicles a stolen African heritage

20240104

20241118

Recapturing early-internet whimsy with HTML

20231221

20241118

The grassroots push to digitize India’s most precious documents

20231025

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Stephen Wolfram thinks we need philosophers working on big questions around AI / TechCrunch

20240825

20241118

The Psychology of Immersion in Video Games

20100728

20241118

Research shows more than 80% of AI projects fail, wasting billions of dollars in capital and resources: Report / Tom’s Hardware

20240828

20241118

When It Comes to Artificial Intelligence, ‘Big Data’ Isn’t Everything

20240828

20241118

I spent an evening on a fictitious web

20240828

20241118

How to build a terrible RAG system - jxnl.co

20240107

20241118

Under Meredith Whittaker, Signal Is Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong

20240828

20241118

Rearchiving 2 million hours of digital radio, a comprehensive process

20240828

20241118

Rediscovering the Small Web - Neustadt.fr

20200525

20241118

Google Thinks Beethoven Looks Like Mr. Bean

20240830

20241118

A new way to build neural networks could make AI more understandable

20240830

20241118

Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

N/A

20241118

Chatbots Are Primed to Warp Reality

20240830

20241118

Political posts on X could harm academics’ credibility, new study finds

20240828

20241118

What we can learn from vintage computing

20221213

20241118

Artificial intelligence is losing hype

N/A

20241118

Against nostalgia in computing

None

20241118

No one’s ready for this

20240822

20241118

Was Linguistic A.I. Created by Accident?

N/A

20241118

A Short History of Glitch Art: From Inception to the Present Day

N/A

20241118

Facebook Banned Me for Life Because I Help People Use It Less

20211007

20241118

More than calculators: Why large language models threaten learning, teaching, and education

N/A

20241118

Olivetti Programma 101: at the origins of the Personal Computer / Inexhibit

20170212

20241118

Capt. Grace Hopper on Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People (1982)

20240826

20241118

Inside the long quest to advance Chinese writing technology

20240826

20241118

What happened to BERT & T5? On Transformer Encoders, PrefixLM and Denoising Objectives — Yi Tay

20240716

20241118

We need new metaphors that put life at the centre of biology / Aeon Essays

20240712

20241118

The Elegance of the ASCII Table

20240721

20241118

Data For The Ages, Take Two

20201024

20241118

Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source

20240729

20241118

The Data That Powers A.I. Is Disappearing Fast

20240719

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Why AI Model Collapse Due to Self-Training Is a Growing Concern

20240724

20241118

Dirty Secrets of BookCorpus, a Key Dataset in Machine Learning

N/A

20241118

Tiktok LLM

20240624

20241118

The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins

20240724

20241118

Open File format in data analytics and AI - changing the international rules game

20240727

20241118

Data from deleted GitHub repos may not really be deleted

20240725

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Ethics of Local LLMs: A Response to Zuckerberg’s ‘’Open Source AI Manifesto’’

20240725

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The Backlash Against AI Scraping Is Real and Measurable

20240723

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New study on AI-assisted creativity reveals an interesting social dilemma

20240728

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Reimagining the Semantic Web: UCL’s Innovative Synthesis of AI and Web Science - Browser London

20240729

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How embedding models encode semantic meaning

20240803

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To preserve their work — and drafts of history — journalists take archiving into their own hands

20240731

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Free Software Needs Free Tools :: Benjamin Mako Hill

20100604

20241118

Has the AI bubble burst? Wall Street wonders if artificial intelligen…

20240804

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Debates on the nature of artificial general intelligence / Science

20240701

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Myspace celebrates its 21st birthday. Do we still need it? / TribLIVE…

20240806

20241118

N/A

The Great Open Source Shake-up

20190908

20241118

Google and Meta struck secret ads deal to target teenagers

20240808

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Demo: Predicting social science experimental results using LLMs

N/A

20241118

AI and the techno-utopian path not taken

20240801

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Is It Time To Version Observability? (Signs Point To Yes)

20240807

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How Algorithms Keep Workers Under Their Control

20240805

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Cannibal AIs Could Risk Digital ‘Mad Cow Disease’ Without Fresh Data

20240806

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Excess memes and ‘reply all’ emails are bad for climate, researcher warns

20240809

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Research AI model unexpectedly modified its own code to extend runtime

20240814

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Code as Art

20240817

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Markov chains are funnier than LLMs

20240818

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What If Data Is a Bad Idea?

20240818

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OpenAI’s latest model will block the ‘ignore all previous instructions’ loophole

20240719

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LLMs Know More Than What They Say

20240815

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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?

20180527

20241118

On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036)

20090512

20241118