Reading Response 3

The Web’s Grain

Frankly speaking, I like the over complication and absurdly fancy websites that occupy the cyberspace. Albeit could be true that all the scrollbar handled animations and large hero images are not exactly what websites are supposed to do, but who says we cannot explore the boundaries of every engineer's nightmare anyway? Furthermore, I must say that I am a big fan of whatever Chimero is a fan of. I found myself so intrigued by every one of his analogies. When he introduced Hockney's work as a comparison to web design, I was absolutely enthralled. Especially the part where he talks about Hockney's portrait piece saying how one would interpret it "not as a two-headed man...[but] two glances at one face -- facets of the same thing" which is exactly what he compares later as a mirror to the web design world. More specifically, it conveys exactly the same meaning that media queries and breakpoints in responsive design delievers. The same head at a different angle showing the same things but organized not just differently but in a new perspective that adds to the piece altogether. Then again when Chimero presents another amazing piece by Hockney with a collection of 6 photographs, and as he says is akin to a comic strip, but what I see is the same extravagent website Apple Mac Pro website that is trying to break out of the strict borders and static poses that every other website has been restricted to.

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

When Chiang makes the comparison of a poor quality image to ChatGPT, I admit I was lost. However, it became much more apparent as to how exactly he is interpreting the two when he added how in spite of the blurriness, the picture does not lose it's sharpness. It was then I knew that Chiang was referring to ChatGPT or for all LLM's cases biggest downfall, it's consistent spread of misinformation. Chiang explains the way ChatGPT "hallucinates" similar to how compressed images reconstructs missing pixels by searching nearby pixels and finding their average. That said, as impressive of an engineering feat these LLM are, like the 10GB of cache weighing down your pc, the compression or more accurately frabrication of facts is not sustainable as a reliable source of information and thus should be discarded.

Heavy Lies the Digital Cloud

Woah, it hit really hard when Manges pointed out how we will be the first generation to leave behind a complete footprint. This article heavily relates back to the one we read previously about Infrastructure. The mention of "The Cloud" brings back the pitfall that we dug ourselves and are lying in. The way that the once necessary public obscurity from the public and companies of these optic fiber wires are harming the funding of it's regulation. Manges brings up how our identities are extracted by not just some big obsolete system but real corporate servers that prioritize profit over everything else. It's so easy to forget such information can have a real impact in your lives, but that is exactly what these large revenue coorperations want. They distract you with a shiny new button or a bigger more automated algorithm so that you won't even care to notice what is going on behind the scenes.