This week's notable links
This is my regular digest of links and media I found notable over the last week. Did I miss something? Let me know!
Heat pumps outsold gas furnaces again last year — and the gap is growing
"Americans bought 21 percent more heat pumps in 2023 than the next-most popular heating appliance, fossil gas furnaces." Quietly, the way we heat our homes is changing - and it has the potential to make a big impact.
Because heat pumps use around a quarter of the energy of a conventional furnace, and don't necessarily depend on fossil fuels at all, the aggregate energy savings could be really significant. Anecdotally (I have a steam furnace that I hate with the fire of a thousand suns), it's also just a far better system.
It might not seem like a particularly sexy technology, but there's scope to spend a little effort here on UX in the same way that Nest did for thermostats and make an even bigger impact. #Climate
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Can ChatGPT edit fiction? 4 professional editors asked AI to do their job – and it ruined their short story
"We are professional editors, with extensive experience in the Australian book publishing industry, who wanted to know how ChatGPT would perform when compared to a human editor. To find out, we decided to ask it to edit a short story that had already been worked on by human editors – and we compared the results."
No surprise: ChatGPT stinks at this. I've sometimes used it to look at my own work and suggest changes. I'm not about to suggest that any of my writing is particularly literary, but its recommendations have always been generic at best.
Not that anyone in any industry, let alone one whose main product is writing of any sort, would try and use AI to make editing or content suggestions, right? Right?
... Right? #AI
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Journalism Needs Leaders Who Know How to Run a Business
"We need people with a service mindset, who understand how to run a business, but a business with a mission that’s more important than ever. We need leaders who embrace new revenue models, run toward chaos, and are excited to build new structures from the ground up. We need leaders who are generous, who nurture the careers of their employees, and who are serious about creating diverse and inclusive workplaces. And we need leaders promoted for their skills and their thoughtfulness, not their loud voice, charisma, or pedigree."
A lot of these values have been championed by some of the more progressive organizations in tech that I've seen, as well as other kinds of workplaces that have thought hard about the conditions that actually lead to productive work that matters.
What doesn't work: reverence for old models, or treating journalism as if it's somehow completely special and different. There's a lot to learn from other sectors and people who have tried hard to improve their workplaces everywhere. #Media
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Opinion: I'm an American doctor who went to Gaza. I saw annihilation, not war
"On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived."
There is no justification for this horror. This is not a solution; this is not an acceptable response. It has to stop.
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Paying people to work on open source is good actually
"My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions. We need to stop criticizing maintainers getting paid, and start celebrating. Yes, all of the mechanisms are flawed in some way, but that’s because the world is flawed, and it’s not the fault of the people taking money. Yelling at maintainers who’ve found a way to make a living is wrong."
Strongly co-signed. Sure, I have a bias: around a decade of my career in total has been spent working directly on open source projects. But throughout doing that work, I encountered people who felt that because I was releasing my work in the open, I didn't have a right to earn a living. I reject that entirely.
I agree with every part of the argument presented in this post. If people can't be paid to work on open source, only people with disposable time and income will get to do so. The result is software that skews to people from wealthier demographics who don't have families, or that can't be sustainably maintained - and I don't think that's what we want at all.
There are people who say "we need universal basic income!" or "the solution is to get rid of money entirely!" and that's lovely, in a way, but people need to eat today, not just in some future post-capitalist version of the world.
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Leaked Emails Show Hugo Awards Self-Censoring to Appease China
"A trove of leaked emails shows how administrators of one of the most prestigious awards in science fiction censored themselves because the awards ceremony was being held in China."
What's remarkable here is that they weren't censored by the government - instead this trove of emails suggests it was their own xenophobic assumptions about what was necessary to be acceptable in a Chinese context that shut authors out of one of the most prestigious prizes in science fiction. This includes eliminating authors whose work that would have been eligible was actually published in China.
There's a dark comedy to be written here about a group of westerners who are so worried about appeasing a government they consider to be censorial that they commit far more egregious acts of censorship themselves.
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The text file that runs the internet
It's hard to read this without feeling like the social contract of the web is falling apart.
And when social agreements fall apart, that's when we start having to talk about more rigid, enforced contracts instead. As the piece notes:
"There are people on both sides who believe we need better, stronger, more rigid tools for managing crawlers. They argue that there’s too much money at stake, and too many new and unregulated use cases, to rely on everyone just agreeing to do the right thing."
I think it's inevitable that we'll see more regulation and a more locked-down web. Probably, past a certain point, this was always going to happen. But I'll miss the days of rough consensus and working code.
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Building Slack: Day 1
Catnip for me: the first blog in a new blog that tells the story of building Slack from the ground up, by two of its former employees.
This was surprising to me, although I guess I don't really know why: "We used the tried and true LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). We were all deeply familiar with these conventional tools, and Cal and the Flickr team had defined a framework for building out and scaling web applications using them (called flamework for Flickr framework)."
[Link]
Caribou High School to use fingerprinting to track student attendance
"[The ACLU] publicly challenged the school district in a statement to media outlets stating that it has filed a public records request seeking more information about the district’s decision to [a firm] to track student attendance and tardiness by having students place their fingers on a biometric scanner."
So many questions: how anyone thought this was a good idea to begin with; how the data is stored and processed; whether this is legal; what the software company providing this platform could possibly be thinking. Nipping this in the bud feels like a good idea.
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Extending our Mastodon social media trial
The BBC extends its Mastodon experiment for another six months: "We are also planning to start some technical work into investigating ways to publish BBC content more widely using ActivityPub, the underlying protocol of Mastodon and the Fediverse."
The BBC's approach has been great: transparent, realistic, and well-scoped. I suspect we'll see more media entities exploring ActivityPub as the year progresses - not only because of Threads, but as activity as a whole on the social web heats up.
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