Five Links #107

1. Real or fake deepfakes quiz

This was a difficult quiz – I scored a little over half, but that was mostly guessing.

2. David Airey on Being Freelance

When I started freelancing, I ingested so many books and blog posts about good practice. David Airey’s Work for Money, Design for Love is a real standout from that time.

Listening to this interview, I was struck by how David seems to have stuck to the ethos of the book he wrote all those years ago. A clarity of thought and approach reminiscent of Cal Newport.

3. I believe in files

It’s possible I believe in files partly because I know how things are built in the cloud. Building things on clouds even sounds bad.

Reading this I was reminded of one of my biggest Figma bugbears: there’s no way to automate regular exported backups of projects or files. Fingers crossed, everyone!

4. What is a dickover?

You know what a dickover is, even if you didn’t know what to call it (until now). If you use the Internet, you encounter them every day. They’re popovers, but dickheaded. The web is absolutely lousy with them, and mobile apps present them too, with increasing frequency.

5. Extinction-level capitalism

This is a long read, but a good one:

AI is inher­ently polit­ical tech­nology. If AI works as intended, it will grad­u­ally corrode our liberal democ­racy, risking an irre­versible shift into another polit­ical and economic config­u­ra­tion. Among AI risks, this one deserves more consid­er­a­tion, because it requires no addi­tional condi­tions like malign actors or AI malfunc­tion. AI only needs to amplify existing trends, espe­cially around concen­tra­tion of capital. This damage will occur even assuming that in the near term, AI will broadly improve mate­rial well-being.

I particularly enjoyed the “Intermission”. That broadly aligns with my view of where these LLMs will land after the dust settles.

Ulti­mately, Big AI is constrained by an incon­ve­nient truth. Today, they need us more than we need them. As long as that remains true, we the people have the upper hand.

What am I up to?

• I published an updated piece on why I bill on a time and materials basis on my studio site
• I have a couple of projects wrapping up and have some availability for new projects
• Recently published my own answers to the design process questions
• My next available Unoffice Hour slot is 5 August

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Until next time,

Dave