Simon Willison's Weblog: cory-doctorow

Quoting Cory Doctorow

2025-12-07T21:28:28+00:00

Now I want to talk about how they're selling AI. The growth narrative of AI is that AI will disrupt labor markets. I use "disrupt" here in its most disreputable, tech bro sense.

The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.

That's it.

That's the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It's why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family's financial security.

— Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

Tags: cory-doctorow, ai, ai-ethics

Quoting Cory Doctorow

2025-08-14T20:39:28+00:00

NERD HARDER! is the answer every time a politician gets a technological idée-fixe about how to solve a social problem by creating a technology that can't exist. It's the answer that EU politicians who backed the catastrophic proposal to require copyright filters for all user-generated content came up with, when faced with objections that these filters would block billions of legitimate acts of speech [...]

When politicians seize on a technological impossibility as a technological necessity, they flail about and desperately latch onto scholarly work that they can brandish as evidence that their idea could be accomplished. [...]

That's just happened, and in relation to one of the scariest, most destructive NERD HARDER! tech policies ever to be assayed (a stiff competition). I'm talking about the UK Online Safety Act, which imposes a duty on websites to verify the age of people they communicate with before serving them anything that could be construed as child-inappropriate (a category that includes, e.g., much of Wikipedia)

— Cory Doctorow, "Privacy preserving age verification" is bullshit

Tags: cory-doctorow, law, politics, privacy

Quoting Cory Doctorow

2023-08-23T14:26:15+00:00

Here's the thing: if nearly all of the time the machine does the right thing, the human "supervisor" who oversees it becomes incapable of spotting its error. The job of "review every machine decision and press the green button if it's correct" inevitably becomes "just press the green button," assuming that the machine is usually right.

— Cory Doctorow

Tags: cory-doctorow, ethics, ai, ai-ethics

Quoting Edd Dumbill

2007-09-04T00:21:38+00:00

Ideas rot if you don't do something with them. I used to try to hoard them, but they rotted. Now I just blog them or tell people about them. Sometimes they still rot, but sometimes someone finds them useful in one way or another.

— Edd Dumbill

Tags: blogging, cory-doctorow, edddumbill, ideas

Quoting Cory Doctorow

2007-02-12T14:05:15+00:00

Please, fanboys, don't send me dumb notes averring that Apple's failure to police this use of its mark will lead to the end of its ability to stop manufacturers from producing rival MP3 players and calling them iPods. That's a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their kids when they want to reassure them that they'll have a healthy college fund.

— Cory Doctorow

Tags: apple, boingboing, copyright, cory-doctorow

Cory Doctorow switching to Ubuntu

2006-06-30T12:43:25+00:00

Cory Doctorow switching to Ubuntu

Another high profile defector.

Tags: cory-doctorow, linux, ubuntu

More fun with the monkey

2005-09-17T19:44:56+00:00

Cory Doctorow points to America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945, with the following observation:

Unfortunately, the organizational back-end for this is so primitive (especially in comparison with modern image-sharing and organizing sites like Flickr) that it, too, seems to hail from 1939-1945, making the site a real pain to navigate and use.

Thanks to Greasemonkey, great content spoiled by poor navigation is a solvable problem.

americanmemoryfixer.user.js includes the following improvements:

Changes the colour scheme to black-on-white, and the typeface to Verdana.
Removes all table borders.
Adds headings to some pages, and fixes various title tags.
Sets the default gallery view to be a set of thumbnails, rather than a list of names.
Displays a large image (as opposed to a thumbnail) when you view a photograph.

The scariest hack in the script is the way in which subject page titles are passed around. In the current site, if you visit a category page (such as Sharecroppers) the title of the category is not displayed on the page - even though it has been passed as a parameter in the URL. If you click a link (say to the Galley thumbnail page) the information in the URL is lost as well.

My solution was to extract the subject from the URL on that first page, then rewrite the other links to include an additional "&subject=Sharecroppers" parameter. This new parameter is ignored by the CGI scripts that power the site, but my Greasemonkey script watches out for it on subsequent pages and uses it to display a title (and further propagate it to other links on the page). It's not a very robust solution, but it's good enough.

There's plenty of scope for further improvement - if you want to use my script as a starting point, please feel free.

Tags: cory-doctorow, greasemonkey

Copyright vs Community with Cory Doctorow

2005-01-26T21:43:40+00:00

Copyright vs Community with Cory Doctorow

If you haven’t seen Cory speaking before, watch this.

Via Boing Boing

Tags: cory-doctorow

Eastern Standard Tribe (Wired November 2001)

2004-03-21T19:55:21+00:00

Eastern Standard Tribe (Wired November 2001)

The origin of the idea for Cory’s most recent novel?

Via Cory Doctorow's Nonfiction

Tags: cory-doctorow

Short stories

2003-09-08T20:28:27+00:00

Cory Doctorow has a new book of short stories coming out, and has released six out of nine of them under a creative commons license following the success of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I just finished reading Craphound and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Tags: cory-doctorow

An interview with Cory

2003-03-01T14:06:53+00:00

An interview with Cory Doctorow, via Leonard. Provides some great background insight in to the world described in Down and Out, along with Cory's thoughts on such topics as the recording industry and the Disney corporation.

Tags: cory-doctorow

Google aquire Blogger

2003-02-16T22:02:19+00:00

Lots of analysis around the blogosphere today of Google's surprise aquisition of Blogger. Cory Doctorow's analysis is (in my opinion) especially worth reading. Personally, I just hope Google do something about Blogger's revolting archive URLs :)

Tags: cory-doctorow

NPR again

2002-06-22T16:26:31+00:00

More on BoingBoing about NPR's link policy. It seems NPR are reconsidering their policy, but in the mean time they have posted a defence of it which Cory Doctorow criticises at length.

Tags: cory-doctorow