RIP Real Life

I realized this week that the Real Life magazine shut down towards the end of last year. In the recent months, as discussions around ChatGPT and LLMs spread like wildfire, I kept opening my RSS reader in hopes that a new essay had been published. My wish (and perhaps discomfort) was somewhat assuaged by thoughtful discussions throughout Hacker News and Mastodon.

Real Life was a great source to assess the impacts of technology from a wide array of angles. And it still is! Technology does not exist in a vacuum, and thus it is never neutral. It is essential that as technologists we recognize and attempt to remediate the biases and blind-spots which often plague us.

Godspeed Real Life.