Some time ago, I took a quick look at Perplexity AI and wrote about it. It seems it’s a very popular post right now.
I use it on occasion, particularly when I’m researching something I’m completely unfamiliar with. A quick search this morning (not using Perplexity) showed me that people were writing things on how to use it, etc. That would indicate people are wondering how to use it.
Well, ask it a question.
I didn’t find it too hard. But there are some things to look out for.
Continue reading
Let’s start with a little bit of history.
In 1980, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, programmers were refused to access the source code for a new printer in the lab. One of the programmers had modified the source code of the previous printer so that it would message a user when a print job was done.
In those days, that was a nice tweak to have when printers were slower and a lot more people shared a printer – and in this case, the printer wasn’t even on the same floor for some people. Yet with the new printer, this was not being permitted to be done.
Continue reading
Bryan Rayburn had posted on Mastodon about an idea that I think deserves more people looking at it. We had a bit of discussion there about his article, “Communication Across Worldviews With Sociotechnical Systems“, which deserves a read.
The basic idea is to use a neutral party – an AI – to play go-between between perspectives. I really like the idea itself, though if you follow the conversation I do see some areas that should probably be addressed such as inherent biases in training models of the AI. That can be balanced out even as we balance things out ourselves in mediation (I’m a trained mediator), and I’m not 100% sure how, but I’m 100% sure that mediation itself counts on the human agent involved – the mediator – to recognize their own biases and account for them.
Continue reading
Headlines have been all over the place regarding people migrating from Twitter/X to BlueSky, but there has also been some migration to Mastodon. I’ve been on Mastodon since April 1st, 2024 and (despite the amusing date) won’t go to Bluesky.
Why? Going from one centrally controlled social network to another controlled social network just doesn’t make sense to me. If I’m going to participate, I want to control my own destiny.
Mastodon and Bluesky are two distinct platforms in the decentralized social media space, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. However, Mastodon has several advantages that make it superior in certain aspects:
Continue reading
There was a time before social media and social networks as we know them, where people would talk to each other in person, isolated by geography. Then we figured out how to send our writing, and there was a period when pen-pals and postcards were important. News organizations adopted technology faster as reports came in from an ever increasing geography until, finally, we ran out of geography.
Social media has become an integral part of our lives, connecting us to friends, families, communities, and global events in ways that were unimaginable just a few decades ago. Yet, as platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (now X) dominate our digital landscape, serious questions arise about privacy, control, and freedom. Who owns our data? How are algorithms shaping our perceptions? Are we truly free in these spaces? Are we instead slaves to the algorithms?
It’s time to rethink social media. Enter decentralization and the Fediverse—a revolutionary approach to online networking that prioritizes freedom, community, and individual ownership.
Continue reading
Generative AI is allowing people to do all sorts of things, including imitating voices we have come to respect and trust over the years. In the most recent case of Sir David Attenborough, he greatly objects to it and finds it ‘profoundly disturbing’.
His voice is being used in all manner of ways.
It wasn’t long ago that Scarlet Johannson suffered such an insult that was quickly ‘disappeared’.
The difference here is that a man who has spent decades showing people the natural world has his voice being used in disingenuous ways, and it should give us all pause. I use generative artificial intelligence, as do many others, but there would be no way that I would even consider misrepresenting what I write or work on in the voice of someone else.
Who would do that? Why? It dilutes it. Sure, it can be funny to have a narration by someone like Sir David Attenborough, or Morgan Friedman, or… all manner of people… but to trot out their voices to misrepresent truth is a very grey area in an era of half-truths and outright lies being distributed on the Babel of the Internet.
Somewhere – I believe it was in Lessig’s ‘Free Culture’ – I had read that the UK allowed artists to control how their works were used. A quick search turned this up:
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, is the current UK copyright law. It gives the creators of literary, dramatic, musical and artistic works the right to control the ways in which their material may be used. The rights cover: Broadcast and public performance, copying, adapting, issuing, renting and lending copies to the public. In many cases, the creator will also have the right to be identified as the author and to object to distortions of his work.
The UK Copyright Service
It would seem that something similar would have to be done with the voices and even appearance of people around the world – yet in an age moving toward artificial intelligence, where content has been scraped without permission, the only people who can actually stop doing this are the ones who are scraping the content.
The world of trusted humans is being diluted by untrustworthy humans.
It’s been a while since I wrote something on the site – that was largely to do with not wanting my content scraped, and being WordPress.com did not fill me with trust or confidence in what the company was doing.
Nevermind the whole WordPress vs. WPEngine debacle, that I have not read much into because my life has sufficient drama and I do not wish to overflow with it. I did do some initial reading and quickly realized the whole thing seemed engineered.
Instead, I switched to Hostinger (referral link). It was fairly easy since I opted to continue using WordPress for the site after shopping around a bit, though I am working on a semi-personal project with Drupal 11 – which Hostinger’s love for on the command line is as deprecated as the command line PHP version is. This related to running Composer – the command line is PHP 8.2.19, and Composer2 on there presently requires 8.3+ as Drupal 11 does… bleeding edge requires blood or it’s not bleeding edge, right?
The domain transfer was about the full 7 days, and I could speculate on why that is but that has no value.
The site is more plain, at least for now, and eventually there will be likely be some advertising on it – but not in the way advertising has manifested itself on sites I visit. No, the site will not spam you to give you updates. No, the site will not have pop-ups that just annoy you. No, the site will not… well, you get the point.
I did consider Bluehost. Over a decade ago, I had a really bad experience with Bluehost whose pain this site still feels – their automatic backups, at least then, did not really work on a daily level. The site went down when I was at a CARDICIS conference – I forget which one – and by the time I could have unfettered access to the site when I returned home, a lot of the site was gone. Bluehost may have improved since then – I certainly hope they have – and even though it was likely an outlier event for me, and they may have improved, I opted not to go with them.
This does not mean my experience should color yours, mind you. It would appear that they’re still in business, so they’re doing something right. At the time, I had a tendency to be bleeding edge with the sites that I write on and that may too have bitten me in the posterior. We are, though, creatures that remember pain even beyond rationality.
So yes, KnowProse.com is back from hiatus.
What to do about scraping for LLM learning is the only real thing left.
I’ve tried evolving things over the years, and what I have found is that it’s not where I write that matters. It’s how I feel that matters.
Sometimes it means sitting at the big white dining table in the living room, as I am now, even ignoring the mess off to the right since I’m mid-reorganization.
Sometimes It do it outside on my balcony, with the raw cedar – freshly polished today.
The only place I don’t write is in the bedroom, really. Well, the bathrooms too.
I used to have romantic ideas of writing on the beach. That’s a bad idea. Sand, corrosive stuff all over – I will write in notebooks, but then the sun is never quite right, the wind never quite right, the sand all over… and on every beach I’ve been to in every country, invariably there’s some idiot with a big speaker system in their car who really wants to play me the song of his people.
The things I need for writing are an idea that has congealed. Once I have that, writing is a simple task.
Today I did not have one, so I finally used one of the writing prompts.
In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were good. Mostly.
Then came social media, which allowed everyone a blog, per se, and a common area to view everyone else’s ‘blogs’. In fact, most social media websites are just that – microblogging with better readership by the platform, through the platform, and for the platform.
Blogs had followers, or readers – as we have here on WordPress.com, which seems to have a confused identity in trying to be a site like Facebook or Twitter while not being Facebook or Twitter. Can I say Twitter still? Will this make Elon Musk angry? More importantly, do I care? Yes, dunno, no.
In travels, I have met people from all over the world. We shared parts of our lives, and these were generally good in some way. We’ve all moved on, as we should have, from the times when we were connected. This is the point I wanted to riff on with what Renard was blogging about.
More and more often I find myself telling others, even writing it, that although people may be going in the same direction, they may have a different destination. In the age of social media, followers will come and go. If you’re writing focally, people may grow beyond the interest. If you write personally, something you may be going through may riff with what’s going on in someone else’s life.
We all move on, or should. It’s healthy.
When people like every post I make, it’s nice for a while but then it gets a little worrisome. Maybe it tells me they’re not actually reading but just going through an engagement checklist someone wrote in “Blogging for Dummies”. It’s highly unlikely someone would like all those posts and not have anything to write as a comment.
Just remember, people do move on. It’s when they’re reading what you wrote that matters. They don’t have to come over for dinner, and they don’t have to have a blood oath. If they got what they enjoyed, wanted or needed (hopefully all 3), you’ve done something of worth.
In probably the saddest news for me this week, National Geographic has layed off the last remaining staff writers.
It was a matter of time, I suppose, with the Internet shaking things up for better and worse, and with National Geographic being a business – but how many of us have really considered National Geographic a business? In many ways, it is akin to the BBC in showing us our world, so much so that I hope that their lawyers don’t get upset over me using one of their most famous covers as part of this post.
I’ll take it down if you want to, NatGeo Legal Department, but I’d rather keep it alive as a memory of a wonderful magazine that enriched so many of our lives before the Internet.
It seems I would worry about such a thing from NatGeo, but since they are majority owned right now by Disney, Defender of Mice, Cheese Rights and Copyrights, I just want to be on an even keel.
The cutback — the latest in a series under owner Walt Disney Co. — involves some 19 editorial staffers in all, who were notified in April that these terminations were coming. Article assignments will henceforth be contracted out to freelancers or pieced together by editors. The cuts also eliminated the magazine’s small audio department.
The layoffs were the second over the past nine months, and the fourth since a series of ownership changes began in 2015. In September, Disney removed six top editors in an extraordinary reorganization of the magazine’s editorial operations.
Departing staffers said Wednesday the magazine has curtailed photo contracts that enabled photographers to spend months in the field producing the publication’s iconic images.
In a further cost-cutting move, copies of the famous bright-yellow-bordered print publication will no longer be sold on newsstands in the United States starting next year, the company said in an internal announcement last month.
National Geographic lays off its last remaining staff writers, Washington Post, Paul Farhi, June 28, 2023
It’s interesting that WaPo didn’t paywall that article, which they’ve been pretty annoyingly good at. Bezos needs to get to space, we know.
But wait, there’s more.
“Staffing changes will not change our ability to do this work, but rather give us more flexibility to tell different stories and meet our audiences where they are across our many platforms,” the spokesperson said. “Any insinuation that the recent changes will negatively impact the magazine, or the quality of our storytelling, is simply incorrect.”
The full-time staff will be replaced by a roster of freelance writers, save for certain digital content that will be written by in-house editors, the former staffer said. National Geographic currently employs only two designated text editors, a group of so-called multi-platform editors who handle both print and digital, and a group of digital-only editors, the former staffer said.
National Geographic magazine has laid off the last of its staff writers, CNN, Liam Reilly, June 29th 2023
It’s worth noting that the Washington Post had only one paragraph on what CNN expanded on – and that may be appropriate because it seems to be the Company Line.
It wasn’t until I got to Quartz that I started to see things a little differently.
Disney CEO Bob Iger announced a $5.5 billion plan to cut costs across the company in February. The entertainment goliath has since fired 7,000 employees in multiple rounds of layoffs. One of Iger’s priorities is to turn around struggling streaming service Disney+.
“Instead of chasing (subscribers) with aggressive marketing and aggressive spend on content, we have to start chasing profitability,” said Iger at a Disney all-hands meeting in November, as Reuters reported.
NatGeo, which Disney bought from 21st Century Fox in 2019, has been just one brand hit hard by Iger’s cost savings plan. In September, six senior editors at the publication were also terminated.
National Geographic will soon disappear from newsstand shelves, Quartz.com, Julia Malleck, June 30th, 2023
I mean, c’mon.
This is where the term ratf*cked came from, maybe. Is that a term? Maybe it should be.
