Weeknotes 2023.47
What a week. By the end of it, the energy was failing me a bit. I needed half of Saturday and all Sunday to recover. As such, I wasn’t able to watch most of the Macau GP weekend live. It was a spectacle as usual, especially when GT3 and F3 hit the streets. Meanwhile on the other side of the earth, F1’s Las Vegas GP went off to a rocky start, but recovered with a decent race, judging by the highlights. To me, it doesn’t matter what F1 is doing when Macau is on, it’s just that more important.
On the technology side of things the Sam Altman OpenAI drama surely overshadows everything else. Will we see another movie or limited series about a startup soon? 🍿
This week I spent more on the artistic side of technology, playing with fonts, colours and generative art.
The changelog
- Quite a few changes to the site, mostly behind feature flags for now. Open Props and WebC continue their expansion and additional components are added to help with authoring more complex content.
- I resurrected an abandoned project around colour and OKLCH. I thought it was obsolete when I discovered Open Props already had OKLCH based colour props in the repo, but there was a reason why they are not yet documented. So let’s get back into colour spaces 💖
- I started getting back into generative art. Not the AI kind, but the procedural, algorithmic, sometimes random kind. Much has changed since the last time I did that, but old friends like Processing and Lindenmayer are still around.
- I’m still adding finishing touches to the article on Open Source and I realised in order to have the editorial design I’m aiming for, the articles need more time to publish. One week ain’t enough.
The linklog
Design
Forgot to include them last week. We’re getting spoiled these days with high quality open source typography. Github and Vercel added Monaspace and Geist respectively to the list that is now getting so long, you need to start having a short list 🤯. I was briefly tempted by the Geist super-family of Sans and Mono to replace my font stack on this site, but I’ll stick to my Inter setup (with DIN 1451-ish options) with JetBrains Mono. I predict we will see plenty of sites left, right and centre pop up with Geist.
AI
What started with this bombshell on Friday evening / Saturday morning, continued all through the weekend. By Sunday evening I had like 15 different links in my notes with all the development. I’m talking of course about the ousting of Sam Altman from OpenAI. I guess we will see more to unfold over the next few days. Luckily the Verge has a neat summary.
To be continued, I guess…
Meta is the next company to dismantle their Responsible AI team. Basically everybody is taking off the gloves in terms of responsible AI in order to get out on top. I sometimes joke it might be better for AI not to be responsible: what if the responsible thing to do may be the ending of humanity?
Joking aside, with all the rumours coming out of the Sam Altman thing, I wonder if this is just a coincidence or whether we see AI and companies at a crossroad and Sam Altman’s firing is just a symptom.
Operations
Signal sheds some light on their operational cost. This is an interesting read for founders and users alike. The $$$ numbers are massive, but so are their number of users. Take-away for founders: growing to a massive number of users and only then figuring out how to get profitable is a stupid gamble, especially if you try it on a shoestring. You need a monetisation plan A from the start. Take-away(s) for users: spending as little as two bucks per year can keep your favourite service running and running securely. Maybe this is worth it, as free and freemium turned out to have massive downsides for users that cost them way more than $2 per year. I will certainly factor this information in for future products.
Security
At first I thought it was a joke, but ransomware groups are now filing complaints with the SEC. It’s like robbing the keys to safe-deposit boxes in a bank and then reporting the bank for not reporting the crime to authorities. Mind boggled. I wonder when we’ll see the first instance of digital Inside Man job.
That’s all for now. Have a great week!