Medium, Centralized Publishing and the Future of the Blog
Medium ist das neue Medium (hust). Zumindest ist es die Blogging-Plattform, die im Moment en vogue ist: Einfache Bedienung, großartiges Design und viele namhafte Autoren, die dort publizieren. Doch es ist nicht alles rosig. Martin Weigert beschreibt die Nachteile, die sich aus einer zentralen Plattform ergeben, sei sie auch noch so verführerisch, und plädiert für dezentrale Blogs. Hooray!
„While Medium thrives, the yearly “is blogging dead?” meme goes into another round. And while even this time the answer has to be a clear “no”, which anyone who actually reads blogs will realize, there is a risk that blogging in the sense of a democratic, decentralized publishing system, might die out for real. Not because of a lack of interest in the creation of digital content, but because everybody will have moved to a few centralized platforms. Even this has been a discussion almost as old as blogging itself. But with Medium, this free, high-quality, elegant, usable publishing platform that comes with an effective built-in distribution mechanism, there is now a centralized publishing system with an allure never seen before.“
20 Pictures That Change The Holocaust Narrative
„Seriously, how is this image not beyond famous by now? Depicting a woman at the shortly after her liberation, so skinny you can hardly see her, her face is aglow and alive. As if she was never imprisoned.“
via Raphael Raue
The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence
Ich übernehme mal David Bauers Empfehlung:
„Ein atemberaubend guter Text und eigentlich Pflichtlektüre für alle, die planen, noch zwei, drei Dekaden auf diesem Planeten zu verbringen.
Man liest ja viel von künstlicher Intelligenz und denkt dann an den reichlich beschränkten Siri oder hört von Fantasten, die von Singularität und Unsterblichkeit reden. Dieser Text ist der erste, der mir verständlich gemacht hat, wie der Weg vom einen zum anderen verläuft.“
Ein Zitat aus dem Text, der aber nur ein ganz kleiner Ausschnitt der Aspekte ist, die besprochen werden:
„Build a computer that can multiply two ten-digit numbers in a split second—incredibly easy. Build one that can look at a dog and answer whether it’s a dog or a cat—spectacularly difficult. Make AI that can beat any human in chess? Done. Make one that can read a paragraph from a six-year-old’s picture book and not just recognize the words but understand the meaning of them? Google is currently spending billions of dollars trying to do it. Hard things—like calculus, financial market strategy, and language translation—are mind-numbingly easy for a computer, while easy things—like vision, motion, movement, and perception—are insanely hard for it. Or, as computer scientist Donald Knuth puts it, “AI has by now succeeded in doing essentially everything that requires ‘thinking’ but has failed to do most of what people and animals do ‘without thinking.’”