The HTML cat is out of the Web Audio bag. I've finally released HYPERBLAM.

It’s my system for sampling, processing, and sequencing sound and music directly in HTML.

https://hyperblam.how

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/david-monniaux/blog/300526/les-calculs-sont-pas-bons-kevin

L’attention légitime aux coûts écologiques du numérique nous fait oublier les coûts bien supérieurs d’autres aspects de notre mode de vie, qui nous emmène droit dans le mur. En klaxonnant.

A friend sent me this interesting article, and yes, I’ve experienced things like that myself during my career.

https://howtocenterdiv.com/beyond-the-div/nobody-pushed-back

"But you can't deny that it's useful" is what I hear often when I criticize "AI". But that's not the argument because everything is useful to someone for some purpose usually at someone's cost. "Child labor" is _useful_.

Question is: Do the uses bring more social value than the cost?

I’m still processing what’s going on in tech at the moment. I used to feel at home in that world. It used to feel incredibly creative and positive. Now it’s increasingly full of bugs, dark addicting patterns and AI slop.

I’m not sure how to change that. We need to provide a better vision for the future than what’s currently pushed by most tech companies. They have a lot of power and (e.g.) many politicians listen to them. That’s why different narratives are important.

https://2ality.com

When I was young, I learned, and was taught, how to make the computer to work efficiently and correctly, in my computer science degree.

Now it is the opposite. Do brute-force search using giant farms of computers, using a huge amount of energy and water, and get results that are not guaranteed to be correct any more.

And I was discussing with a colleague this morning that my 2001 laptop ran faster than my current top-range computer for everyday tasks. Of course, it had a much worse CPU and much less ram. And of course the software for things we still do *now* was much faster *then*.

I still have that laptop from that time running Ubuntu 4.10 from 2004 in my personal museum of computers. You would be amazed how responsive the system is for everything we do every day with a computer. I recently tested it with my son, because he was curious to see how things were then.

So we are using more powerful hardware for getting a poorer experience.

The new computers are much better for some things, such as running Agda. But, for everything else I happen to do, they were just as fast, because people programmed them in a more efficient way (they had to - there was no other way).

RE: https://mastodon.social/@tef/116434852505143872

This thread is worth your while, especially if you’re on the fence about “AI”.