You never heard of the Brutalist Easter Bunny in Jyväskylä, Finland? Me too, so here you go.

Scary!

https://www3.jkl.fi/taidemuseo/veistokset/veistokset/042.html

"GLOSS on the face of it shares little in common with a library. Instead of shelves of books, the room is lined with strange and wonderful electronic instruments: Moog Grandmothers, Korg MS‑20s, an Elektron Digitakt II sampler and a Roland TR‑808 drum machine …"

The UK’s first electronic music library is on a mission to make the synthesiser accessible to all:

https://www.bigissue.com/culture/music/synthesiser-glasgow-library-of-synthesised-sound/?ref=thetonearm.com

RE: https://mastodon.social/@SteveRudolfi/116279083767770070

"If there’s one insight we all need to focus on most, it’s this: your job is no longer to build a destination. It’s to build a parts library. And one that’s well documented so that when an AI agent re-assembles those parts for the human on the other side, the parts are put together in a way you wish to be represented.

The web has always evolved in ways that reduced brand control over the user journey. Ads replaced organic rankings. Featured snippets replaced clicks. AI Overviews replaced visits. This patent is the logical next step in that progression. The question isn’t how to stop this from happening, it’s how to make sure your parts are the ones AI wants to work with."

In short, this sounds like part of what the Semantic Web & Linked Data vision was about, also heavily based on autonomous software agents crawling, querying, extracting & re-assembling information on demand for a user. But the issue here is the plan to take Google's hyper-centralized and ubiquitous rent-seeking to whole new levels, pushing for the replacement of entire websites with essentially just machine readable repos of data/asset descriptors and then generating filtered/personalized/optimized websites on the fly, obviously for a more or less mandatory fee (not partaking likely ends up in invisibility)...

It's component-driven and reactive design taken to its ice cold logical conclusion... Queue a whole new set of "industry standards" (agreements between the main AI companies), frameworks, breathless consultants and an economy for "agentic arbitration", "agentic SEO", heck even "agentic premium themes" etc. arising around this... An army of human and machine middlemen all just to mediate the biggest middleman of all! It's the on-demand, ephemeral realtime web we've always dreamed of!

Zero permanence.
Zero record/archive.
Zero accountability.
Zero shared reality.
Zero leverage.

(Ps. After 15+ years, maybe even https://schema.org will have its time of glory on the horizon as part of this all...)

#AI #SemanticWeb #LinkedData #Google #WebDesign

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.