What Breaking Up Google’s Search Monopoly Could Do to AI
Making it harder for Google to give its own products preferential treatment might not actually drive people away from the company’s search engine–but it could make them second-guess Gemini.
Good! Gemini is still terrible. The fact that Google already has that “sprawling ecosystem and user base” means that they can slap it on all of their hardware and suddenly they look like a legit AI company with as many users as anyone else.
Being a skeptic is boring
Last night my partner and I got into a silly little debate about ghosts. Earlier that day, we watched the Demon House documentary and then followed up in the evening with a Netflix movie based on the same story: The Deliverance.
Small scale is the best scale – Manu
I can’t help myself thinking that I’m getting to the point where the bigger you are the more unappealing you become to my eyes.And that’s true not just for social media platforms but for creators and personalities in general. I’m an absolute nobody in this world. My blog’s not famous, my work doesn’t spread around. And that’s a good thing. Because it means I can still do the things that matter and that is taking the time to interact with every single person that gets in touch with me.
I’ve been feeling this a lot lately too. You can have 1000+ followers somewhere and 99% of your interaction is Likes and Reblogs with little meaningful conversation, if any.
Or you can have five followers and make five legitimate friends.
Or maybe you have no idea how many followers you have, or how many people like your posts because you’re on something like Micro.blog. That’s been the most rewarding and engaging community I’ve ever found online, and it does it without internet points. Small indie web communities are where it’s at <3
I hate holiday get togethers. When I was younger I was more rebellious and just skipped them. I don’t know exactly when or why I started going back. One thing’s for sure though, they always make me appreciate my own family a lot more. That’s what I’m thankful for this year: my real family.
Walmart made a whole Christmas movie just to sell you stuff
Walmart is linking up with Roku to release a full-length Christmas movie that will let viewers buy products on their TV during specific parts of the story
The film is titled Jingle Bell Love and stars Joey McIntyre, a member of the boy band “New Kids on the Block…”
What a fun spin on late stage capitalism!
I’ve been on Bluesky a lot lately because I’m a sucker for riding hype trains but Micro.blog still blows my mind daily. It’s kind of brutalist isn’t it? No likes or reposts, or follower counts, just a feed and a blog. I like brutalism.
Elusive deer spotted wearing high-vis jacket in Canada: ‘Who is responsible?’
I, for one, think it’s great the deer are taking traffic safety more seriously.
Mark Zuckerberg meets Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago
“Mark was grateful for the invitation to join President Trump for dinner and the opportunity to meet with members of his team about the incoming Administration.”
Well I guess the foreseeable future was about two months, eh?
After facing significant backlash over the past few years, Zuckerberg has chosen to distance both himself and Meta from political involvement for the foreseeable future. - via ColumbiaOne, September 26, 2024
Orcas start wearing dead salmon hats again after ditching the trend for 37 years
Orcas off the coast of Washington State are balancing dead fish on their heads like it’s the 1980s, but researchers still aren’t sure why they do it.
I love these guys. They’re just as intelligent as we are. Probably more so.
Ohio governor signs bill limiting bathroom use by transgender students
I fucking hate this. We’re making leaps and bounds in the wrong direction. Fuck DeWine.
I recently switched from namecheap to name.com for my domains. Transferred out of Micro.blog just because, and it was INSTANT since that’s what MB uses for domains purchased here. No fee either! Their dash is a lot cleaner and less cluttered, I’m really digging that too.
Cranberry Bogs Use Spiders Instead Of Pesticides
You see, cranberry farms have been moving towards more organic farming methods which preclude the use of pesticides and so to keep the insect population down, the farmers encourage wolf spiders to live in the bogs.
I’m not particularly… comfortable around spiders, so to speak, but wolf spiders are one of my favorite species. They’re like little shy tarantulas. Still wouldn’t be caught dead on a cranberry farm but I’ll take spiders over pesticides.
Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for ‘Machine Learning Research’
The data isn’t anonymous. In the dataset, each post is listed alongside the users’ decentralized identifier, or DID…It’s also noteworthy that it’s a “snapshot” of time on Bluesky, meaning it could, and probably does, include since-deleted posts.
I mean in a way, it’s similar to the Internet Archive. But they never really archived social media accounts did they?
This dataset could be used for “training and testing language models on social media content, analyzing social media posting patterns, studying conversation structures and reply networks, research on social media content moderation, [and] natural language processing tasks using social media data,” the project page says.
This is literally made for training AI right? I guess it’s just a matter of whether or not the resulting chatbot is publicly released but then the actual data is already available anyway.
“A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data. We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so,” - Bluesky, official account
I don’t know. I can believe the devs aren’t personally training AI on it, but it’s definitely a thing you can feed to a LLM. Regardless of who physically does it.
Personally? I don’t have a problem with AI scraping the dumb shit I post online. But I can understand why an artist or seasoned writer wouldn’t want generative AI learning off of their trademark style and then bottling it up for a monthly subscription fee.
I don’t think this is a Bluesky issue, it just got caught in the middle because it’s in the spotlight right now. I’m not a programmer or an AI whisperer so I could totally be wrong, but couldn’t anyone create a dataset of a public social network’s content using their APIs and then train whatever they like on it?
It’s shitty, but the cat’s already out of the bag. If you’re posting anything online it can, and probably is, being trained on AI.
Update: Looks like they took down the data already:
I've removed the Bluesky data from the repo. While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake.
— Daniel van Strien (@danielvanstrien.bsky.social) November 26, 2024 at 9:19 PM
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‘Enshittification’ Is Officially the Biggest Word of the Year
2024 will go down in history as the year humanity managed to enshittify the entire planet.
Elon Musk wants to block the transfer of InfoWars' X accounts to The Onion
Musk’s lawyers now claim that users don’t actually own their profiles on the supposed “free speech platform.”
Of course not. That’s why corporate social media is terrible. Granted, it’s usually the other way around; taking an account that belongs to someone else because Elon wants the handle.
UK and Irish retailers pull products associated with Conor McGregor
Lucky for him the US loves rapists. His bottom shelf hooch will continue to do just fine over here. Hell, he might even get nominated for a Cabinet position.
Update: Ope, maybe not! Conor McGregor dumped by Proper No. Twelve Whiskey, multiple UK retail giants in wake of sexual assault verdict - Yahoo Sports
I still stand by my Cabinet position comment though 💁
USSR: The United States of Sudden Regression
I was in the middle of writing this post about how, pretty much until the middle of the 20th century, people took the law into their own hands if they saw fit. And they probably got away with it too.
Like this photo I saw on Reddit:
That’s a feel good ACAB justice kinda story, right? I’m not sure of the source or legitimacy of it; I mean after all it was just a random Reddit post, but OP had a little blurb to go along with it:
Farmers “arrest” the sheriff for trying to evict a woman from her farm on behalf of the insurance company. Michigan, 1952.
So basically the sheriff came to evict this sweet little old widow and some farmers from around the way stood up and (violently) stopped the him from going through with it. Back then that was just the end of it, right? There were no records logged in a police database, the cop wasn’t wearing a body cam; it was the 50’s.
…
…and I was just going to ramble on about how easy it was to get away with crazy shit back then compared to nowadays.
But then I actually thought about it. It was only white guys who got away with everything. If you were some old Sam Elliot type with a cowboy hat and handlebar mustache, you could get away with murder. Literally. If you were black? Or a woman? Or a black woman?
Different fucking story.
Segregation wasn’t that long ago. Women didn’t have fuck all for rights until pretty recently. White men ruled everything until pretty recently.
What am I saying; they still rule everything.
And that’s what MAGA wants to really hone in on and refine. That’s the “great” America they’re working around the clock to bring back. The US is a great melting pot alright. One made of racism, sexism, misogyny, and LGBTQ+ phobia hate, “but for a brief moment in time”, we’ll say in our future history books, “we were actually making some progress.”
What else is there to say?
All you have to do is open any news app you like and the screen populates with headlines too stupid to even be satire. If anyone would’ve pitched some of Trump’s concepts of plans ideas for the movie Idiocracy, they would’ve said it’s too unrealistic and in bad taste.
Who would joke about the kind of shit Donald Trump is about to do?
I subscribed to the print editions of a couple websites I like recently. Magazines are such a cool nostalgic experience. The original adhd doomscrolling device, in the flesh.
Elon Musk Muses About Buying MSNBC: “How Much Does It Cost?”
The billionaire and buddy to the president-elect jokes about buying the liberal network. At least we think he’s joking.
His acquisition of Twitter started out as a joke too. I’d be surprised if he doesn’t at least make an offer. Fascist regimes need their state run media and he’s just preaching to the converted on Twitter now.