Threads
I’m not optimistic about Threads, the new Twitter alternative from Meta. I’m told the community is pleasant now, but I have no doubt the shitstorm will roll in soon. Fool me once…
I’m not optimistic about Threads, the new Twitter alternative from Meta. I’m told the community is pleasant now, but I have no doubt the shitstorm will roll in soon. Fool me once…
I once wrote a blog post entitled Less is more. It did fairly well on Hacker News, and two people commented in situ. I was pretty excited. (The comments weren't able to be migrated here.)
Years later, I read the following article from the Washington Post, which dovetails nicely with it. I recommend giving it a read:
We instinctively add on new features and fixes. Why don’t we subtract instead?
#Business #PersonalDevelopment #SoftwareDevelopment #Technology #Usability #UserExperience
I’m glad this blog, as insignificant as it is, may marginally influence some artificial intelligence in the future. After all, it’s my understanding that LLMs like ChatGPT and Bard are trained on public data. Perhaps the next ChatGPT will be just a bit more informed about issues that I care about.
Email is dying. So many people never see the emails I send them, only paying attention to Signal, Slack, SMS, and other messaging services. Who could blame them, with all the promotions, feedback requests, privacy policy updates, and other junk we receive in our inboxes?
I've written before that AI could be used to produce new Beatles albums, and now Sir Paul McCartney says artificial intelligence has enabled a 'final' Beatles song.
Conversation is not performance. Performance is not conversation.
Every so often, I'm reminded that the web is almost unusable without an ad blocker. I'm amazed anyone can tolerate it for more than 10 seconds.
Use an ad blocker.
I recommend AdGuard because it's thoughtfully designed. It has the user interface I've always wanted from an ad blocker, where the user can select broad categories of ads and annoyances to block or pick and choose from more specific filters, which are hidden by default. uBlock Origin is more popular with technologists, but I find its settings UI to be overwhelming.
I genuinely believe in supporting publishers, but not through modern advertising. If a website you like offers an ad-free experience for some price, consider paying for it. Otherwise, I think you're more than justified in using an ad blocker to protect yourself from the sludge being thrown at you. Doing so is arguably an ethical obligation. Online advertising has completely run amok, harming our privacy, our digital security, and our sanity. The attention economy it fuels has tremendously harmful downstream consequences—addiction, misinformation, political extremism—that threaten society at large.
Use an ad blocker.
#Business #SocialMedia #Technology #Usability #UserExperience
I know I'm late to the party, but Cory Doctorow's essay on “enshittification” is brilliant.
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
—Cory Doctorow in Tiktok's enshittification
“Social media users see affirmation when they receive a thumbs-up or a heart. But that's not really why we're sending them.”
—Chris Taylor in The 'Like' doesn't mean what you think it means
A while ago, I wrote that artificial intelligence may soon author new Beatles albums. In hindsight, I feel silly for suggesting that only 50 such records might be produced. If an AI could create 50 new albums in the style of the Beatles, and in their voices, it could create 10,000. It could create them on demand. Want to hear the band singing about hoverboards in a collaboration with Skrillex? Sure.
Today, this is even closer to becoming reality. As Andy Meek writes in BGR, “Thanks to the increasingly creative potential of artificial intelligence… Beatles fans like me can get a small taste of what it might have been like had the Fab Four either stayed together, or gotten back together, to produce new music.”
His article includes some amazing AI-generated mashups as examples, like Paul singing “Imagine,” as well as an unreleased song that AI was able to finish from an incomplete fragment. I'll admit that the reporting is light on details, and there's plenty of “fake AI” stuff going around on social media (no surprises there), but for the moment, I'll take Meek and the creators at their words. If any of these songs was not created with substantial help from AI, they might as well have been, and a future AI will be able to do the same, given how quickly things are accelerating. Our difficulty distinguishing between “real AI” and “fake AI” says something on its own.
I recommend reading his full article, As a lifelong Beatles fan, this AI-generated Beatles music is blowing my mind, or at least listening to the audio. We're still a little ways off from artificial intelligence producing entirely new songs, but it may not be very long.