it is dochs oars, sûnt 2001

“Sex and the City”

Paul Ford gives his impressions of a TV series he never has seen.

[I] prefer to imagine the show as a black-box play from the 1970s with Beckettian overtones, three women on an empty stage, looking at the audience, speaking in monotones:

1: I doubt I am fecund.
2: I have eaten so little.
3: Where are the men?
1: There are no men.
2: I will pay a woman $40 to caress and decorate my toes with varnish. I will wear shoes that cost more than the weekly wages of a restaurant worker, with tips.
3: What kind of tips?
2: Not on the shoes, for the restaurant workers.
1: I am hungry. I will not marry.
2: Talk about the shoes.
3: The shoes!
Unison: Shoes.

Close to these things

” [W]hile I am cognizant of the effort that went into building the code I use daily, I feel no fundamental human connection with these programmers; there is no clear “I” of the programmer who addresses me, no way of reading Photoshop as I might read a Graham Greene novel. The programmer’s face is the interface, the features of the face the windows and buttons of an application. We name our tools PhotoMunger, not “Donald” or “Mordecai”. They are qualified by their utility. And yet we name our computers, their hard drives, assigning our personality to them, making them mirrors of our quirks, or of our need for order. “

Paul Ford, More and more like the machine.

So that’s where Paul Ford hangs out these days

The Morning News’ staff write about those summer vacations gone horribly wrong.

Short [war]

• Paul Ford crashes a Reblican party:
  

  “The band knows, right?” I said.
  “They have to know,” Steve said.

• James Carroll on the Bush Crusade.

Slimme technology | 0602

De feed van Martin Bril’s website is al een tijd niet meer bijgewerkt. Wat wilt u met uw abonnement op deze feed doen? zo vraagt het leesprogramma;
Houd alles maar zoals het is, click ik na een korte aarzeling aan;

Technologie is dus weleens te intelligent;

Standaardvoorbeeld van de opdringerige technologie is de paperclip in Microsoft Word; een eeuwigheid geleden trouwens al voor eeuwig belachelijk gemaakt door Paul Ford;
En Microsoft wil ook altijd maar weer de bureaubladen van mijn computers opruimen, terwijl daar niets op staat dat ik er niet bewust heb neergeplant;

Als Microsoft zijn besturingssystemen nu eens zo inrichtte dat die gewoon de onderdelen deïnstalleerden die een half jaar nooit gebruikt zijn…
In plaats van alleen maar vetter en trager te worden;

Of als UPC nu eens bijhield welke zenders me niet interesseren, om deze vervolgens te wissen, en de abonnementsprijs navenant aan te passen…

Ik bedoel, er zijn zeker wel toepassingen te verzinnen waarin de intelligentie van slimme technologie kan lonen;
En tegelijk zal niemand dezelfde slimme vondst intelligent vinden;

Ik moet toch niet denken aan een e-mailprogramma dat uit zichzelf waarschuwt: van dit adres heeft u al drie jaar geen post meer ontvangen. Wissen dus maar?

Of een telefoon die gaat nadenken, en meldt: dit nummer heeft u al jaren niet meer gedraaid. Verwijderen?

Quote of the Day | 0201

In those 15 years I’ve learned that the web has countless ways to say “no,” or to say “meh.” It has fewer ways to say “yes.” Readability looks like a way to say “yes” to people doing hard work—whether they’re journalists, essay and fiction writers, publishers, editors, fact-checkers, illustrators, photographers, proofreaders, circulation specialists—or the people who write the checks. The web needs more “yes.”

Paul Ford, FTrain: Notice of an Advisory Relationship

Quote of the Day | 0205

The Web started out as a way to publish and share documents. It is now an operating system: a big, digital sensory apparatus that can tell you about your phone’s battery life, record and transmit your voice, manage your e-mail and your chats, and give you games to play. It can do this all at once, and with far less grand of a design than you might assume. That’s the software industry: it promises you an Ellsworth Kelly, but it delivers a Jackson Pollock.

Paul Ford, ‘The Group That Rules the Web’

Quote of the Day | 0211

For the civilian, there’s no reason to lose sleep over scary robots. We have no technology that is remotely close to superintelligence. Then again, many of the largest corporations in the world are deeply invested in making their computers more intelligent; a true AI would give any one of these companies an unbelievable advantage. They also should be attuned to its potential downsides and figuring out how to avoid them.

Paul Ford, ‘A true AI might ruin the world
—but that assumes it’s possible at all.’