2024s
Despite the discussion about LLM training data and the rights to train this data, a fundamental question about consent is often ignored. Much of the tech industry has flipped over into a non-consensual model: Take, then defend/contest later.
They are coming up against resistance in the form of regulation, particularly in the EU. But they have no idea just how bad it will get for them if the general public gets on board with resistance.
It is going to be, at the very least, interesting to see how this plays out. I don’t give much of a chance to the tech firms in the long term.
15 July 2024 — French West Indies
With news that Threads has reached 175 MAUs, this is an interesting waypoint in its life worth keeping an eye on.
Currently, Thread is an ad-free and watered-down attempt at building a Twitter replacement, but that is about change when Meta decides to turn on ads, as they have alluded to in recent interviews with the tech press.
This will only incentivise the worst behaviour from both Meta and its real customers, the advertisers. The enshitiffication cycle has started.
Watch carefully and you will see it unfold in clarity.
Social Media and general online commentary are about to get even more vacuous, irrational, wrong and just plain stupid.
With around 50% of new iPhone sales being the Pro model and therefore potentially able to produce Apple LLM-generated slop, from text to images (🤢), the Internet will be dirtier than the rivers the water companies are deliberately polluting.
Not exactly the most positive thought for the day, but that’s how I feel.
The long-term outcomes and the impacts on the economy, society, and politics clearly show that neoliberalism has failed. It has been a disaster and a complete abdication of responsibility by the political class and the wealthy.
From the point of view of the rich, everything is fine. They’re even more well off. From the point of view of the rest of us, times are as hard as they’ve ever been with no respite in sight.
This is the calm before the storm unless things change fundamentally.
And no, “giving them a go” (referring to the right, extreme right and ultra-right) is not the answer. The violence and suffering that that would cause will be of a magnitude not seen since the last world wars.
In other words, Threads likely wants to be a monetization center for online creators and eventually compete with Patreon.
Human Generated Content: Patreon Belongs in the Fediverse
Embrace, extend and extinguish. This will not turn out to the benefit of artists.
Heads up. Here’s the real reason the Caribbean cannot dig itself out of the hole that it has been forced into for over 400 years:
SIDS drowning in debt and ‘running on empty’, warns Guterres in Antigua
We can talk all we like about innovation, technology, SDGs, entrepreneurship. It’s all bullshit until the region can live without the shackles of debt that is destroying generation after generation of potential.
Never forget.
Cory Doctrow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr), writing on pluralistic.net:
Together, they represent a multi-front war on the very idea that four billion people should have their digital lives controlled by an unaccountable billionaire man-child whose major technological achievement was making a website where he and his creepy friends could nonconsensually rate the fuckability of their fellow Harvard undergrads.
3 May 2024 — French West Indies
Blogrolls are cool again
I’ve tried blogging on and off for years, possibly decades. It has never stuck. These last couple of years or so, I have been more consistent and blogged a lot more.
I’ve had to move platforms, so much of the old stuff is badly linked these days, and I even had a post promoted by a software house mere days before I moved platforms again, rendering their link to my blog useless 😰 —I didn’t have the heart to ask them to update the link.
One thing that stuck out in the later stages of the earlier blogging period was a list of recommended blogs that bloggers would share on their posts/pages. It got a bit nepotistic eventually, but the idea was solid —You like my blog, why not try these?
They died out when microblogging sites like Twitter and other social media walled gardens railroaded the Internet. The algorithm replaced the recommendations, not to help you find more interesting things to read and learn about, but to monetise you through invasive and often illegal advertising malpractice.
But blogging is making a comeback. People are starting to feel the real harm social media is doing to us. And yes, I know there are studies that say there’s nothing wrong with social media, and others that feel it is literal digital cancer. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, or at least more nuanced than those arguments —that are, by the way, very “social media” in construction by being as binary as that.
And so with (real) blogging making a comeback, so are blogrolls. These are the real algorithms of the Internet. One’s that are much better, much saner, less clickbait-y… more human, and humane.
Long live blogrolls. Mine is a work-in-progress, and you can find it from the menu.
2 May 2024 — French West Indies
Au revoir Apple Watch
I’ve bought three Apple Watches since its introduction, spending a total of around 1000 € not including a few bands that I bought to change things when wearing it for sleep, sport or out for dinner.
I may be a little slow in realising this, but I’ve just purchased a mid-range Swiss movement automatic watch for quite a bit less than I spent on Apple Watches over the last 9 years. My current Apple Watch doesn’t a whole day any more as the battery is hosed. Although I could replace the battery —in theory— it requires even more money thrown at a watch that will be declared obsolete shortly, and then become a contribution to the world’s ever-growing pile of eWaste because a corporate manager has ordained it so. I’m not that comfortable with that prospect.
My new watch will last decades and will be something I can pass down to my son in years to come, unlike an obsolete wrist computer with a swollen fire hazard battery. And it’ll still tell the time as wells it did when I bought all those years ago.
I don’t think I’ll buy a new Apple Watch anytime soon.
However, it is an “au revoir” because I’m still going to use the Apple Watch for exercise and sleep tracking, or if I know I’m going to have a particularly active day. But I don’t see myself re-spending the kinds of sums required just ot have the time on my wrist and a couple of notifications.
I’ll be looking into other options for sports and sleep.
27 April 2024 — French West Indies
No Logitech, I don’t want or need an AI prompt system attached to the mouse software wasting GPU uselessly. At least make it so we can switch that crap off if we want! FFS!
Logi Options uninstalled, and I’ve gone back to a basic mouse for the time being. I miss the MX Master 3, but I don’t want everything ChatGPT-ified.
23 April 2024 — French West Indies
When Facebook (or Meta if you believe they have changed purpose) first proposed the EU-only pay-for-no-ads subscriptions to their “products”, there was something that rubbed me up the wrong way but I couldn’t articulate it.
Now they have climbed down a little, in a tactic to see where the line is for the EU in accepting such a scam.
And that’s what it is… a scam.
And this is what I was trying to articulate previously but couldn’t. What really irks me is that the “proposition” from Facebook comes from a point of view that they are entitled to this money.
No they’re fucking not! They’re entitled to some money if they actually provided a real service, rather than a global surveillance network with added crappy AI ads and vacuous “Influencers”.
The litmus test, as I wrote about years ago, is forcing them to ask EVERY user to pay for the service, then we’ll see what “service” is essential for all.
16 April 2024 — French West Indies
Normal person reading Science Fiction novel: “Oh wow, cool story. Not reality however because of a million and one flaws and oversights in physics, sociology, politics and human nature.”
Billionaire Tech Bro reading Science Fiction novel: “Oh wow, cool story. I got all this money and I can make this reality because number go up. It’s like they’ve created a user manual for me.”
15 April 2024 — French West Indies
Every now and again, I get to show people around this Island in the middle of the Caribbean. I have friends over from the UK at the moment and I got to take them up the killer volcano. OK, I’m dramatising, but it is a volcano that killed around 30,000 people in 1902!
I love going up there but haven’t done it for several years. The night before the walk, I didn’t sleep well. I was anguished and couldn’t stop thinking about all the bad things that could happen during my attempt at sleep. I do that sometimes. I can’t help it. It contributes to me losing a lot of sleep. But on the bright side, at least I’m up early to prepare in time.
An early start of around 6 a.m. allowed us to be among the first groups to start the climb of nearly 500m of vertical ascension from the car park to the deuxième réfuge. The weather wasn’t with us, and visibility was limited, and even very limited at times, but the walk was really enjoyable and gave me the taste for doing more walks in the future.
I was worried about my fitness level, but I had no reason to worry as I was fine, apart from a slight knee pain while descending. I’m getting older, so it is to be expected.
I plan on going on more walks and possibly taking my dog along for the experience. She’d love it.
6 April 2024 — French West Indies
If you’ve been following along the Beyoncé/Country Music thing, I recommend reading this article:
Vason named the rodeo in honor of Bill Pickett, a Texas native of Black and Cherokee descent who invented “bulldogging,” now known as steer wrestling, where he wrestled a steer to the ground.
I can’t help thinking that a lot of the people that have no idea about the culture they hold so dear —the origins and who actually built much of it— would lose their shit if they ever found out how popular Country Music is in Saint Lucia.
29 March 2024 — French West Indies
From TechCrunch: Facebook (Meta) is essentially a cybercriminal organisation *My headline
In 2016, Facebook launched a secret project designed to intercept and decrypt the network traffic between people using Snapchat’s app and its servers. The goal was to understand users’ behavior and help Facebook compete with Snapchat, according to newly unsealed court documents. Facebook called this “Project Ghostbusters,” in a clear reference to Snapchat’s ghost-like logo.
These are exactly the same techniques used by cybercriminals to extract data, usurp identity, and ultimately steal things to make money. This is what is called a man-in-the-middle attack.
Even Facebook’s own security engineers were weary about this project:
I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay. No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works, …
I continue to argue that If you work at Facebook, you should examine your moral compass to ask if you are comfortable with your role in what has only enriched the biggest fratboy prick in the entire world.
Remember: Facebook started out as an app to rate the fuckability of college girls. That set the tone for the next couple of decades of Facebook’s sinking into the morally defunct swamp.
27 March 2024 — French West Indies
Just 24% said they were satisfied with the NHS in 2023, with waiting times and staff shortages the biggest concerns.
That is five percentage points down on last year and a drop from the 2010 high of 70% satisfaction.
The poll - the gold-standard measure of the public’s view of the health service - has been running since 1983.
This is the result of an age-old strategy of making things progressively worse, with one aim —to privatise— and get the architects and their friends rich off the spoils. This is nation-level short selling on an industrial scale and should be illegal or, at the very least, highly regulated.
27 March 2024 — French West Indies
Burning the planet to a cinder is the answer to getting fans to buy your music?
This is such an extraordinarily bad take. Repeat after me: blockchain is not the answer.
26 March 2024 — French West Indies
I spent the weekend replacing an ageing Apple Airport wifi network with some fancy gear from Ubiquiti.
I should have done this ages ago, but I’m glad I waited for this generation of Wi-Fi device. The configuration options are much better than those in my previous kit.
18 March 2024 — French West Indies
So much of the Internet is now a Hobson’s choice, that we’ve lost what its purpose was.
7 March 2024 — French West Indies
Generative AI accountability
Should owners of GenAI machines be made responsible for their outputs?
I’m not sure whether I entirely agree with that statement, but I think a more nuanced interpretation could be considered for regulation or rules of use. Something like: If you can’t precisely describe how the algorithm produces its results in a methodological and repeatable manner, then perhaps you shouldn’t be operating them, and at the very least, you should be held responsible for their output.
These are not like search engines or social media platforms, despite the concerted effort to portray them as in the same category. The implication is that Section 230, therefore, shouldn’t apply.
TLDR: No one knows ‘how’ these systems work.
6 March 2024 — French West Indies