2024
Facebook continues insisting on being an awful Internet citizen.
Surreptitiously scraping data to train its AI models since 2017unless legislation existed to prevent this.
This company’s moral compass is not even misaligned; it isn’t working at all.
11 September 2024 — French West Indies
What a wonderful sunset we had tonight.
I was tempted to get the camera out and take a picture postcard photo.
But something told me to sit, relax, and just enjoy it.
Not everything needs to be photographed and shared.
5 September 2024 — French West Indies
Please stop using the word content, as in “content creator”, “creative content”, or “content”.
You are commoditising your work, your time, and your skill. You are being exploited by devaluing its worth.
You don’t make “content”. You make art. You make music. You make films. You make blogs, articles, reports, and other beautiful things that enhance this existence.
You make value. Don’t let anyone steal it.
6 August 2024 — French West Indies
I’m currently reading Number Go Up by Zeke Faux.
Anyone who is deep into, holds, uses or otherwise is connected to the running of this “industry” is complicit in murder, slavery, torture, and organised crime, not to mention the destruction of the climate.
You rotten people.
5 August 2024 — French West Indies
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.