KnowProse.com off WordPress.com, Now on Hostinger.

November 17, 2024November 17, 2024 ~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

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.

Connecting WordPress.com Websites to Mastodon: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly.

April 9, 2024 ~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Yesterday, I found that I could connect KnowProSE.com and RealityFragments.com to the Fediverse through Mastodon and decided to give it a try.

WordPress.com has a good article on connecting WordPress.com sites to the Fediverse, so there’s no need to rewrite that. What I noticed, however, is what everyone should be aware of.

I may actually disconnect the sites from the Fediverse in the near future because of what I write below, but if you are interested the links to the sites on Mastodon are:

That said, I’ll tell you why I’m not too pleased with these connections.

The Good

Clearly, having another outlet where posts are shared is always a good thing, and I actually had a good conversation related to something I posted because of it – these are good things. It creates hashtags from the tags created on your website.

Yet were they good enough? Is that enough?

The Bad

As it happens, these are automated accounts that the user cannot apparently log into on Mastodon. Because of that, interacting with users on Mastodon is not really something you can do. It automagically posts what you post on a WordPress.com site to the Fediverse, but it doesn’t handle the most important part of any part of social networks: Interaction.

I had hoped that the conversations would somehow connect to the comments on posts. That doesn’t happen. ~~Also, because it posts what the title and an excerpt, it doesn’t have hashtags, which is how the Fediverse users find content~~.[corrected]

Because Mastodon doesn’t have functionality to retransmit with commentary, there’s just no getting around that.

The Ugly

Search engines aren’t big on the Fediverse yet, and that’s largely because it is by nature decentralized. Thus, it doesn’t really help search engine ranking, ~~it doesn’t help people find your content through hashtags (the Bad),~~ and it has a level of interactivity that is depressing enough to consider not doing it at all.

Takeaway

I am presently not impressed with this offering for the reasons above, but, I also know that sometimes time is a powerful factor. Things change, things are seen in a new light, etc.

For now, I’ll leave them up as they are and see what happens. I think I’ll give it about a month. Thus, if you read this article in May and the links to the Fediverse no longer work, you’ll know that I deemed them a waste of space.

The Supreme Court, Your Social Network, and AI

March 19, 2024 ~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

One of the ongoing issues that people maybe haven’t paid as much attention to is related to the United States Supreme Court and social networks.

That this has a larger impact than just within the United States takes a little bit of understanding. Still, we’ll start in the United States and what started the ball rolling.

“A majority of the Supreme Court seemed wary on Monday of a bid by two Republican-led states to limit the Biden administration’s interactions with social media companies, with several justices questioning the states’ legal theories and factual assertions.

Most of the justices appeared convinced that government officials should be able to try to persuade private companies, whether news organizations or tech platforms, not to publish information so long as the requests are not backed by coercive threats….”
“Supreme Court Wary of States’ Bid to Limit Federal Contact With Social Media Companies“, Adam Liptak, New York Times, March 18, 2024

This deals with the last United States Presidential Election, and we’re in an election year. It also had a lot to do with the response to Covid-19 and a lot of false information that was spread, and even there we see arguments about about whether the government should be the only one spreading false information.

Now I’ll connect this to the rest of the planet. Social networks, aside from the 800lb Chinese Gorilla (TikTok) are mainly in the United States. Facebook. The Social Network formerly known as Twitter. So the servers all fall under US jurisdiction.

Let’s pull that 800 lb Chinese Gorilla back in the ring too, where that political issue of TikTok is at odds with who is collecting data from who, since the Great Firewall of China keeps China in China but lets the data from the world go to their government.

Why is that data important? Because it’s being used to train Artificial Intelligences. It’s about who trains their artificial intelligence’s faster, really.

Knock the dust off this old tune.

Even WordPress.com, where this site is presently hosted, got into the game by volunteering it’s customers before telling them how not to volunteer.

The Supreme Court is supposed to have the last say on all matter of things, and because of that there’s a level of ethics assumed of the members – which John Oliver dragged under a spotlight. Let’s just say: there are questions.

It’s also worth noting that in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that money was free speech. This means, since technology companies lobby and support politicians, the social networks you use have more free speech than the users combined based on their income alone – not to mention their ability to choose what you see, what you can say, and who you can say it to by algorithms that they can’t seem to master themselves. In a way that’s heartening, in a way it’s sickening.

So, the Supreme Court ruling on issues of whether the United States government’s interference in social networks is also about who collects the data, and what sort of information will be used to train artificial intelligences of the present and future.

The dots are all there, but it seems like people don’t really understand that this isn’t as much a fight for individual freedom of speech as it is about deciding what future generations will be told.

Even more disturbing now is just how much content is AI generated on the Internet, which has already been noted to be a significant amount, and is estimated to be 90% by some experts by 2026.

So who should control what you can post? Should governments decide? Should technology companies?

These days, few trust either. It seems like we need oversight on both, which will never happen on a planet where everybody wants to rule the world. Please fasten your seat-belts.

WordPress.com, Tumblr to Sell Information For AI Training: What You can do.

March 10, 2024 ~ Taran ~ 9 Comments

I accidentally posted this on RealityFragments.com, but I think it’s important enough to leave it there. The audiences vary, but both have other bloggers on them.

While I was figuring out how to be human in 2024, I missed that Tumblr and WordPress posts will reportedly be used for OpenAI and Midjourney training.

This could be a big deal for people who take the trouble to write their own content rather than filling the web with Generative AI text to just spam out posts.

If you’re involved with WordPress.org, it doesn’t apply to you.

WordPress.com has an option to use Tumblr as well, so when you post to WordPress.com it automagically posts to Tumblr. Therefore you might have to visit both of the posts below and adjust your settings if you don’t want your content to be used in training models.

This doesn’t mean that they haven’t already sent information to Midjourney and OpenAI yet. We don’t really know, but from the moment you change your settings…

WordPress.com: How to opt out of the AI training is available here.

It boils down to this part in your blog settings on WordPress.com:
With Tumblr.com, you should check out this post. Tumblr is more tricky, and the link text is pretty small around the images – what you need to remember is after you select your blog on the left sidebar, you need to use the ‘Blog Settings’ link on the right sidebar.

Hot Take.

When I was looking into all of this, it ends up that Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com and Tumblr.com is doing the sale.

If you look at your settings, if you haven’t changed them yet, you’ll see that the default was set to allowing the use of content for training models. The average person who uses these sites to post their content are likely unaware, and in my opinion if they wanted to do this the right way the default setting would be to have these settings opt out.

It’s unclear whether they already sent posts. I’m sure that there’s an army of lawyers who will point out that they did post it in places and that the onus was on users to stay informed. It’s rare for me to use the word ‘shitty’ on KnowProSE.com, but I think it’s probably the best way to describe how this happened.

It was shitty of them to set it up like this. See? It works.

Now some people may not care. They may not be paying users, or they just don’t care, and that’s fine. Personal data? Well, let’s hope that got scrubbed.

Some of us do. I don’t know how many, so I can’t say a lot or a few. Yet if Automattic, the parent company of both Tumblr and WordPress.com, will post that they care about user choices, it hardly seems appropriate that the default choice was not to opt out.

As a paying user of WordPress.com, I think it’s shitty to think I would allow the use of what I write, using my own brain, to be used for a training model that the company gets paid for. I don’t see any of that money. To add injury to that insult of my intelligence, Midjourney and ChatGPT also have subscription to offer the trained AI which I also pay for (ChatGPT).

To make matters worse, we sort of have to take the training models on the word of those that use them. They don’t tell us what’s in them or where the content came from.

This is my opinion. It may not suit your needs, and if you don’t have a pleasant day. But if you agree with this, go ahead, make sure your blog is not allowing third party data sharing.

Personally, I’m unsurprised at how poorly this has been handled. Just follow some of the links early on in the post and revel in dismay.

NYT Says No To Bots.

August 16, 2023 ~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

The content for training large language models and other AIs has been something I have written about before, with being able to opt out of being crawled by AI bots. The New York Times has updated it’s Terms and Conditions to disallow that – which I’ll get back to in a moment.

It’s an imperfect solution for so many reasons, and as I wrote before when writing about opting out of AI bots, it seems backwards.

In my opinion, they should allow people to opt in rather than this nonsense of having to go through motions to protect one’s content from being used as a part of a training model.

Back to the New York Times.

…The New York Times updated its terms of services Aug. 3 to forbid the scraping of its content to train a machine learning or AI system.

The content includes but is not limited to text, photographs, images, illustrations, designs, audio clips, video clips, “look and feel” and metadata, including the party credited as the provider of such content.

The updated TOS also prohibits website crawlers, which let pages get indexed for search results, from using content to train LLMs or AI systems…
“The New York Times Updates Terms of Service to Prevent AI Scraping Its Content“, Trishla Ostwal, Adweek.com, August 10th 2023.

This article was then referenced by The Verge, which added a little more value.

…The move could be in response to a recent update to Google’s privacy policy that discloses the search giant may collect public data from the web to train its various AI services, such as Bard or Cloud AI. Many large language models powering popular AI services like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are trained on vast datasets that could contain copyrighted or otherwise protected materials scraped from the web without the original creator’s permission…
“The New York Times prohibits using its content to train AI models“, Jess Weatherbed, TheVerge.com, Augus 14th, 2023.

That’s pretty interesting considering that Google and the New York Times updated their agreement on News and Innovation on February 6th, 2023.

This all falls into a greater context where many media organizations called for rules protecting copyright in data used to train generative AI models in a letter you can see here.

Where does that leave us little folk? Strategically, bloggers have been a thorn in the side of the media for a few decades, driving down costs for sometimes pretty good content. Blogging is the grey area of the media, and no one really seems to want to tackle that.

I should ask WordPress.com what their stance is. People on Medium and Substack should also ask for a stance on that.

Speaking for myself – if you want to use my content for your training model so that you can charge money for a service, hit me in the wallet – or hit the road.

Revisiting Interactivity on WordPress.com

June 16, 2023 ~ Taran ~ 5 Comments

While I was interacting in the RealityFragments Facebook page (join in!) about the use case issue of allowing users to log in to interact with content on RealityFragments and here, it occurred to me that WordPress probably does allow for people with Google accounts to log in.

WordPress does have a plugin for allowing Google accounts to log in. It exists. So I went over to my administrative page, mentally slapping myself on the forehead about it, when I found out that even though my account is premium (paid), I would need to upgrade to a WordPress.com business account for what is now $25/month. What?

This should be the default, even for free sites on WordPress.com, because people interacting with content is how people with weblogs grow, and when they grow, they might consider the tiered pay accounts.

Instead, effectively, they’re screwing themselves over – and their users – to try to force people to pay more when their monetization plans are at best… blech, particularly if you live outside of the geographic areas Stripe supports.

Just one plugin would cause more interactivity on sites. It should be a default. How annoying is that?

Now I have to go compare options before I renew my sites on WordPress.com, which has been otherwise trouble free but annoyingly myopic regarding monetization and usability for the users of their users. The readers.

Or maybe they will read this, have an Eureka moment, and change the way that they do things.

For now, please use the RealityFragments Facebook page to interact with content here, to stop in and say hi, and to meet others who are doing the same.

Revisiting Design: The RealityFragments Like/Comment Use Case

June 14, 2023 ~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

Yesterday, I went on a bit of a spree on RealityFragments.com, with the results fairly summarized on the RealityFragments About Page. The reason for the spree was pretty simple.

There are some issues with design.

Some of it is implicit in WordPress.com. To ‘like’ or ‘comment’ on content, you require a WordPress.com account. It’s painful for non-WordPress.com users to do that when they’re used to logging into everything automagically – and it’s also necessary to avoid spam comments that link to websites that sell everything from ‘getting rich quick’ schemes to promises of increasing the prominence of one’s nether regions. It’s a hard balance.

And it’s kinda crappy design because we, collectively, haven’t figured out a better way to handle spammers. I could get into the failures of nations to work together on this, but if we go down that path we will be in the weeds for a very, very long time.

Suffice to say my concern is that of the readers. The users. And it brought to mind that yellow book by Donald A. Norman, the very color of the book being an example of good design. After all, that’s how I remember it.

“Design is really an act of communication, which means having a deep understanding of the person with whom the designer is communicating.”
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (2013)

This is where we who have spent time in the code caves get things wrong. Software Engineers are generally rational beings who expect everyone to be rational, and if we just got rid of irrational users “we would have a lot less problems!”.

I’ve spent about half a century on the planet at this point, and I will make a statement: By default, humans are irrational, and even those of us who consider ourselves rational are irrational in ways we… rationalize. Sooner or later, everyone comes to terms with this or dies very, very frustrated.

The problem I had is that I wasn’t getting feedback. The users can’t give it without giving WordPress.com the emotional equivalent of their first born child, apparently. Things have gotten faster and we want things more now-er. We all do. We want that instant gratification.

In the context of leaving a comment, if there are too many bells and whistles associated with doing it, the person forgets what they were going to comment about in the first place.

“The idea that a person is at fault when something goes wrong is deeply entrenched in society. That’s why we blame others and even ourselves… More and more often the blame is attributed to “human error.” The person involved can be fined, punished, or fired. Maybe training procedures are revised… But in my experience, human error usually is a result of poor design: it should be called system error. Humans err continually; it is an intrinsic part of our nature…. Worse, blaming the person without fixing the root, underlying cause does not fix the problem: the same error is likely to be repeated by someone else.”
Donald A. Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (2013)

The thing is – there is no good solution for this. None, whatsoever, mainly because the alternative that was already there had not occurred to the users. It’s posted on Facebook, on the RealityFragments page, where I mix content from here and RealityFragments. The posts can be easily interacted with on Facebook for those who use Facebook. Sure, it doesn’t show on the website, but that doesn’t matter as much to me as the interaction itself?

Factor in that it’s easy for my posts to get buried by Facebook algorithms, it becomes an issue as well.

Thus, I created the RealityFragments Group on Facebook. People join, they can wander into the group and discuss stuff asynchronously, instead of the doom scroll of content people are subjected to. My intention is for my content not to compete for attention in that way, because it simply can’t.

I don’t have images of models trying on ideas. I don’t have loads of kitten pictures, and I’m certainly not getting dressed up and do duck lips to try to convince people to read and interact with what I create. I am also, for the record, not willing to wear a bikini. You’re welcome.

This was less than ideal solution to the problem. Maybe.

Time will tell if I got it right, but many more technically minded people will say, “You could just manage your own content management system on a rented server.” This is absolutely true.

What’s also true is that I would then be on the hook for everything, and when a content management system needs love, it wants it now. Thus when I’m ready to start writing, I suddenly have to deal with administration issues and before you know it, I’ve forgotten what I wanted to write – just like the users that have to create an account on WordPress.com to comment or like. A mirror.

So this is a compromised solution. Maybe. Time will tell.

And if you want to interact with this post and can’t log in to WordPress, feel free to join the RealityFragments.com Facebook group. Despite it’s name, it’s also for KnowProSE.com

If You Boost Content.

September 13, 2022 ~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Brick-Moji Thinking face by Ochre Jelly on Flickr - public domain Aug 4 2022 Out of the blue last week, someone I knew said they knew a way that I could get the site to make $500 a month if I simply continued thrashing out content like a mad monkey.

Well, that’s not exactly what he said, but that’s how I read it. Of course, he wanted to schedule a meeting to talk about how this could be done and… well, I’m a person who reads and evaluates, not talks and evaluates. Something of worth in my mind sells itself and meetings are… well, let’s be honest. Meetings aren’t very exciting and I avoid them unless absolutely necessary.
This leads to things I have been considering over the past month or so as I wrote a lot but published nothing on the web. I have this idea I’m fleshing out and I don’t want to jump the gun on it – and oddly enough it started off as a post I was writing for RealityFragments.com.

I’m more focused on the reading and writing now than the publishing and monetization. There’s also this pressure on the Internet to write frequently when I’d rather take my time and be happy with what I put out for a variety of reasons. When something comes with money, it generally asks for a bias and I’d rather the bias be mine or the readers, or a combination of the two. Money can easily change that when someone wants to pay you. This isn’t my first rodeo.

What also happens with such things is that for lack of something to write, you end up rewriting, and if I have written about something I generally don’t revisit it until something has changed. I don’t write reviews of technology because you only really know how good a technology is until years later. Hype, as it is, is overhyped.

However, what I was pointing out was how silly it is that, being in Trinidad and Tobago, I would have to start a company in the United States to get paid by Stripe for WordPress, etc. And that’s a problem I think that can and perhaps should be avoided. I am slowly working on some solution(s) on that.