Bluesky CEO Jay Graber isn’t ruling out advertising | TechCrunch:

“I think the ways we would explore advertising, if we did, would be much more user intent-driven,” said Graber on stage Wednesday at TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco. “We want to keep our incentives aligned with users and make sure that we’re not turning into a model where the user’s attention is the product.”

I think we’re shift into magical thinking territory here. How do you create an ad-driven platform where user attention isn’t the product? Is there one example of this anywhere across the web?

Suchir Balaji on When does generative AI qualify for fair use?:

Model developers like OpenAI and Google have also signed many data licensing agreements to train their models on copyrighted data: for example with Stack Overflow, Reddit, The Associated Press, News Corp, etc. It’s unclear why these agreements would be signed if training on this data was “fair use”, but that’s besides the point.

Suchir Balaji was found dead in his home from apparent suicide earlier this week. I don’t want to lend credence to the air of murder mystery mystic by some news blogs. I’m starting to think these types of narratives only help corporations sell more widgets—if it’s worth killing over, it must be really good!

There’s only one post on Balaji’s blog, and it’s about fair use and ChatGPT. I think it’s worth the read.

I hope you found peace, Suchir Balaji.

OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji found dead in San Francisco apartment:

Balaji’s death comes three months after he publicly accused OpenAI of violating U.S. copyright law while developing ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence program that has become a moneymaking sensation used by hundreds of millions of people across the world.

The most egregious part of this article, other than the heavily implied murder mystery conspiracy, is the claim that ChatGPT makes money.

Re: Re: Bluesky and Decentralization – Dustycloud Brainstorms:

Perhaps Bluesky matches this version of decentralization, but if so, it is because it is an incredibly weak definition of decentralization, at least taken independently. This may well say, taken within the context it is provided, “users of this network may occasionally not rely on a gatekeeper, as a treat”.

If you’re a fan of internet philosophy then it doesn’t get much better than the Bluesky vs ActivityPub series.

2024 Is the Year Creators Took Over | The New Yorker:

In each case, creators exerted their newly appreciated superpower to reach their audiences directly, without the approval of traditional media gatekeepers. Whether hippopotamus or tradwife, they are self-contained celebrity machines, merging recognizability with online-distribution capacity.

I believe it was Katherine Dee of Default Blog who said that eventually, trad media will try to pouch these creators and we’ll start to see a bundling like with cable. I don’t know which situation is worse/better.

Edit: yup, it was Katherine Dee in a post called We Already Solved Subscription Fatigue:

A lot of small time creators, and I’m including myself here, don’t offer enough value to justify even $5/month. Which is why I think for people like me, we’ll probably see a return to bundling or networks, in one form or another.

Now that I think about it, why aren’t more writers just doing this independently? There are no real technology barriers. What’s stopping five or so popular bloggers from “bundling” their work? Keep the price at five bucks with the hopes of attracting more paid subscribers.

Did I just invent the newspaper?

OpenAI introduces “Santa Mode” to ChatGPT for ho-ho-ho voice chats - Ars Technica:

The conversations with Santa exist as temporary chats that won’t save to chat history or affect the model’s memory. OpenAI designed this limitation specifically for the holiday feature. Keep that in mind, because if you let your kids talk to Santa, the AI simulation won’t remember what kids have told it during previous conversations.

As an uncle who would spend money on the Santa Clause app every year in an attempt to spark a little magic, this is cool. As a person who lives and breathes, eh. I don’t want my nephew’s voice bouncing around some GPU for all eternity as part of a training set.

Petition · Bluesky Must Enforce its Community Guidelines Equally - Canada · Change.org:

Now is a critical moment in the growth of the Bluesky platform to avoid the clear and obvious mistakes made by other social media platforms in the past.

I signed this petition, which now has 17k signatures, to be a part of something-anything-that attempts to hold social media companies accountable.

That said, Bluesky was built off a free speech manifesto that had very little to say about privacy and safety. Techno-libertarianism is built into the network’s core. The whole idea is to do less; to “empower” the user to handle moderation themselves. I don’t think many folks realize it’s a feature not a bug.

Last February, AI.com forwarded to a Marques Brownlee video about Open AI’s new video generation tool Sora. I vaguely recall some rumblings that Elon Musk might own the domain, which didn’t make much sense since he has his own AI offering.

AI.com now forwards to ChatGPT.com so it’s probably safe to say that Sam Altman & Co. own the address.

Good interview with Ed Zitron.

They end the interview with “What happens when consumers reject AI after all this infrastructure investment?”

My guess—With a little help from regulatory capture, Meta pivots to cloud services and then 4 companies own the internet.

It’s probably time for an updated write-up, but I talk more about that prospect here.

WordPress CEO Rage Quits Community Slack After Court Injunction:

“I’m sick and disgusted to be legally compelled to provide free labor to an organization as parasitic and exploitive as WP Engine. I hope you all get what you and WP Engine wanted.” His username on that Slack has been changed to “gone 💀”

Is there anyone from the web’s old guard who’s normal?

Last Week in the ATmosphere – 2412.b – The Fediverse Report:

During an interview earlier this year with Wired, Graber said that Bluesky would not ‘Enshittify the Network With Ads‘. In this week’s interview with TechCrunch, Graber did not rule out advertising completely either, saying that “the ways we would explore advertising, if we did, would be much more user intent-driven”.

Here we go.

Reddit Is Said to Sign AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO - Bloomberg:

The San Francisco-based firm told prospective investors in its IPO that it had signed the deal, worth about $60 million on an annualized basis, earlier this year, the people said. Reddit’s agreement with an unnamed large AI company could be a model for future contracts of a similar nature, one of the people said.

Regardless of the order we publish, we do not own our content if it lives on for-profit platforms.

Bluesky social network drops invite-only sign ups - The Verge:

Even with ActivityPub taking off, Bluesky is ready to have its moment in the spotlight again. Starting this week, the app is removing its invite system and throwing open its doors to anyone who wants to sign up. And later this month, it plans to begin letting outside developers host their own servers on its underlying AT Protocol that’s designed to rival ActivityPub.

Since Threads, this has always felt more like Jack vs Zuck, than ActivityPub vs AT Protocol.

There’s a growing curiosity and invigorated appreciation for physical buttons. Apple, with its crusade to eliminate moving parts, is in a bit of a jam. My guess is the 2016 Macbook Pro was a step too far, and now people are slowly revolting.

What Meta’s Fediverse Plans Mean for Threads Users | WIRED:

“It really does feel like we’re kind of on the verge of this new era of social media,” Lambert says. “We have some ideas of what it might look like, but there’s still so much for us to learn.”

This idea Meta and its affiliates push that Zuck is kinda just winging it with some napkin thoughts is very very silly. And it’s doing nothing to build trust with the Threads interpolation

Netflix Architecture: How Much Does Netflix’s AWS Cost?:

Netflix uses AWS for almost everything cloud computing. That includes online storage, a recommendation engine, video transcoding, databases, and analytics. So most of the $1 billion Netflix plans to spend on cloud services will go into Amazon Cloud Services.

If a FAANG company uses AWS, surely there’s a market for social media cloud services. hashtag-Meta.

Critical vulnerability in Mastodon sparks patching frenzy • The Register

Using specially crafted media files could have allowed attackers to create or overwrite any files, allowing for denial of service or remote code execution.

Huh.

Critical vulnerability in Mastodon sparks patching frenzy • The Register

“This is one of the major trade-offs between Mastodon and a centralized social media company like Meta or Instagram, there’s just not the same investment in security because there’s not massive revenue supporting the platform, and each owner of an instance has to perform security management on their own. 

Here it starts.

The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism - The Atlantic:

They tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own.

I linked to this article before, but this quote is also worth highlighting. It’s a hair to the right of the pro-Meta / Threads discourse.

Re: Here’s a look at what Keynote looks like on Apple Vision Pro.

The thing is, this looks fine. Super cool. But I get unreasonably irritated knowing that this is what Cupertino spent the last five years making instead of fixing Siri.

What do we do with our “please” and “thank you’s”?

I find myself thanking ChatGPT when it provides a helpful answer to my question. I know that’s weird, but it feels rude otherwise.

I’m reminded of Computers are Social Actors, a 1994 study that (if my memory serves) lead to the creation of Microsoft’s Clippy.

We tend to treat things that behave like humans, as humans. That includes being polite. What a time to be alive.

A few studies conducted by #facebook / #meta I’ve bookmarked over the years:

Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior

Facebook language predicts depression in medical records

Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks

Determining user personality characteristics from social networking system communications and characteristics

I have a big gripe with #Mastodon CEO’s letter to anxious minds about #Threads:

It’s not about whether Meta can track us across the web. They don’t need to the moment we start generating content for them.

Meta has proven time and again that it has no problem with using people’s own data to affect their moods and actions.

We can sugar coat it all we want but #Meta has more data on #activitypub users today than it did yesterday.

Instagram’s #Threads steps into the #Fediverse eighteen days after these two stories dropped:

Instagram’s Algorithm Delivers Toxic Video Mix to Adults Who Follow Children - WSJ 11/28/203

At Meta, Millions of Underage Users Were an ‘Open Secret,’ States Say 11/27/203

The vibes I get from this are worse than when Kendal got in the car with that waiter from Shiv’s wedding. I’ll tell ActivityPub the same thing I shouted at my tv— never carpool with a billionaire.

The most popular site on Facebook right now is a… blog? I mean, it’s a Catholic fundamentalist blog, but still one for our side I guess, right?

The dude who writes it must have a big readership… right?

Nope.

Ryan Broderick for Garbage Day:

And, as you might expect, there are hundreds of Catholic Fundamentalism blog posts that would be deeply controversial in most religious circles (“A protestant is a person who willfully disobeys Any Word of Christ” is a doozy). But the way they’re shared on Facebook means that next to no one is actually clicking through to read them. In fact, according to the site’s own traffic counts, that anti-Protestant post only has 23 views, but its Facebook post has over 7,000 reactions and a thousand comments. And it’s those thousand comments that are the key here.

Weird Christian infighting aside, those figures are wild. I mean, if you told me that 23 people accidentally clicked on his post I’d believe you.

This tells me two things:

1. Rage bait is a poor way to generate an audience.
2. People who spend too much time in rushing streams of content are incapable of enjoying anything longer than a headline.

Anyway, I think it’s time to reread The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral.

From Sam Altman’s Weird Eyeball Scanning Crypto Tech Comes to Minecraft:

If you haven’t heard of Worldcoin before, buckle up. Worldcoin is the OpenAI CEO’s cryptocurrency project, which aims to redistribute wealth to the people after artificial intelligence captures all the world’s money. You sign into Worldcoin with a scan of your eyeball through a giant metal orb (stay with me), so the company hopes to also become the internet’s default verification system. Users of mainstream internet platforms like Minecraft and Shopify can now “verify their humanness” with the World ID, and Altman’s vision for Worldcoin got one step closer to reality.

I miss the old tech billionaires who did questionable shit for good ol' fashioned share holder value. Capitalists, at least, I understand.

This is giving “guy stroking a cat and laughing vibes.” Real big “twisting my mustache” energy.

From Vice: Apple Just Confirmed Governments Are Spying on People’s Phones With Push Notifications:

The process by which push notifications are generated requires the phone company to serve as a “digital post office,” Wyden wrote. Push notifications are sent through Apple and Google’s servers, which means that the companies “serve as intermediaries in the transmission process,” and can therefore be made to hand over information to governments that request it.

According to Wyden’s letter, the information that can be gleaned from push notification requests is mostly metadata. This includes information “detailing which app received a notification and when, as well as the phone and associated Apple or Google account to which that notification was intended to be delivered,” Wyden wrote. In some cases, requesters may even receive unencrypted content such as the text that was delivered in the notification.

The senator said that companies can therefore “be secretly compelled by governments to hand over this information.”

It would be so dope if we jumped on stories like this with the same tenacity and vigor as when an iMessage blue bubble story breaks.

Telecom companies are the most user-hostile in the biz.

Another “Neo-Braun” design. Mechanical keyboard by Lofree

Increasingly fascinated by boutique search engines like Marginalia.

Because when was the last at time you searched on Google and didn’t land on a website rife with ads? Have you ever clicked on a Google search result, and it was just some dude’s site where they write about a topic you’re interested in?

There’s a whole other internet out there that Google won’t show us because it doesn’t make money from it.