Interesting Things on the Internet: April 17th 2023 Edition

• Smoke Screen. An essay by Mandy Brown on the narrative power of AI or machine learning.
• The age-appropriate rubber dinghies of the sunlit uplands. The Online Safety Bill is a mess and already being abused by this Government. It should be thrown out.
• On Snowballs, Napoleons, and sharks. This matches my experiences. I've never understood the "business networking" events, or the multi-day huge "business" conferences that we seem to have annually in Liverpool, where the folk (tangentially) involved in putting them on exhort me to attend because somehow spending a few days alongside a bunch of other folk trying to sell me things I'm not interested in will somehow help me sell them things they aren't interested in. I similarly lament the loss of the late 2000s tech meetup/unconference scene; and at some point I'll start doing something about it.

And via Alex, a great video of bike culture in London. We often gain groups of scallies on mountain bikes when we’re out Joyriding. Maybe we need to start running some video-editing or bike-pimping workshops round here too…