maegul

maegul , 6 days ago to Fediverse in Federated Blogging Platforms

but it shouldn’t

I'm curious about why you think this relatively strongly (if you don't mind my asking)?

maegul OP , 6 days ago to Fediverse in Reminiscing about the "Reddit migration"

Without knowing the financial history of the place, it seems a good case study in something that could have gone for the sustainable stalwart of the internet path but instead fell to the dark silicon valley profit/growth side of things. With wikipedia being the only great success (AFAIK) at forging solid and sustainable foundations for the internet, I suppose the lesson is that it has to be non-profit, or open-source (or both) from the beginning.

In a way, it is kinda on many of us for not realising this and pushing against it sooner.

One of the great things coming out of the fediverse (and bluesky too at the moment) is all of the open software being developed that will hopefully plant seeds that will last a long time.

maegul OP , 6 days ago to Fediverse in Reminiscing about the "Reddit migration"

Hear hear!!

maegul , 6 days ago to Fediverse in Federated Blogging Platforms

I keep wondering if lemmy itself could do a decent job of this, and that being native to a communities style platform is a good thing for a blogging platform on the fediverse.

maegul , 8 days ago to Technology in Windows feature that screenshots everything labeled a security “disaster”

Kinda funny, not too long ago it was a fun mental exercise if you were paying attention to the tech industry to try to think of the ways in which Google or MS could fall.

Now, AFAICT, neither are falling any time soon, but there certainly seems to be a shift in how they're perceived and how their brand sits in the market (where even so I'm still probably in a bubble on this).

But I'm not sure how predictable it would have been that both would look silly stumbling for AI dominance.

And, yea, I'm chalking recall up to the AI race as it seems like a grab for training data to me, and IIRC there were some clues around that this could be true.

maegul , 19 days ago to Technology in New Windows AI feature records everything you’ve done on your PC

yep! I didn't pick up on any explicit link ... but the coupling AI and recall is not coincidence. It's serfdom.

maegul , 20 days ago to Technology in DuckDuckGo is down. Is there any info about it?? [EDIT: IS BACK]

So I've been ranting lately (as have others) about how big tech is moving on from the open user-driven internet and aiming to build its own new thing as an AI interface to all the hoovered data (rather than conventional search engines) ...

which makes this (and the underlying Bing going down) feel rather eerie.

How far away (in time or probability) is a complete collapse of the big search-engines ... as in they just aren't there any more?

maegul , 20 days ago to Technology in OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game

LOL (I haven't actually met someone like that, in part because I'm not a USian and generally not subject to that sort of type ATM ... but I am morbidly curious TBH.

maegul , 20 days ago to Technology in OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game

Great take.

Older/less tech literate people will stay on the big, AI-dominated platforms getting their brains melted by increasingly compelling, individually-tailored AI propaganda

Ooof ... great way of putting it ... "brain melting AI propaganda" ... I can almost see a sci-fi short film premised on this image ... with the main scene being when a normal-ish person tries to have a conversation with a brain-melted person and we slowly see from their behaviour and language just how melted they've become.

Maybe we’ll see an increase in discord/matrix style chatroom type social media, since it’s easier to curate those and be relatively confident everyone in a particular server is human.

Yep. This is a pretty vital project in the social media space right now that, IMO, isn't getting enough attention, in part I suspect because a lot of the current movements in alternative social media are driven by millennials and X-gen nostalgic for the internet of 2014 without wanting to make something new. And so the idea of an AI-protected space doesn't really register in their minds. The problems they're solving are platform dominance, moderation and lock-in.

Worthwhile, but in all serious about 10 years too late and after the damage has been done (surely our society would be different if social media didn't go down the path it did from 2010 onward). Now what's likely at stake is the enshitification or en-slop-ification (slop = unwanted AI generated garbage) of internet content and the obscuring of quality human-made content, especially those from niche interests. Algorithms started this, which alt-social are combating, which is great.

But good community building platforms with strong privacy or "enclosing" and AI/Bot protecting mechanisms are needed now. Unfortunately, all of these clones of big-social platforms (lemmy included) are not optimised for community building and fostering. In fact, I'm not sure I see community hosting as a quality in any social media platforms at the moment apart from discord, which says a lot I think. Lemmy's private and local only communities (on the roadmap apparently) is a start, but still only a modification of the reddit model.

maegul , 20 days ago to Technology in OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game

I dunno, my feeling is that even if the hype dies down we’re not going back. Like a real transition has happened just like when Facebook took off.

Humans will still be in the loop through their prompts and various other bits and pieces and platforms (Reddit is still huge) … while we may just adjust to the new standard in the same way that many reported an inability to do deep reading after becoming regular internet users.

maegul , 21 days ago to Technology in OpenAI Just Gave Away the Entire Game

The moment word was that Reddit (and now Stackoverflow) were tightening APIs to then sell our conversations to AI was when the game was given away. And I'm sure there were moments or clues before that.

This was when the "you're the product if its free" arrangement metastasised into "you're a data farming serf for a feudal digital overlord whether you pay or not".

Google search transitioning from Good search engine for the internet -> Bad search engine serving SEO crap and ads -> Just use our AI and forget about the internet is more of the same. That their search engine is dominated by SEO and Ads is part of it ... the internet, IE other people's content isn't valuable any more, not with any sovereignty or dignity, least of all the kind envisioned in the ideals of the internet.

The goal now is to be the new internet, where you can bet your ass that there will not be any Tim Berners-Lee open sourcing this. Instead, the internet that we all made is now a feudal landscape on which we all technically "live" and in which we all technically produce content, but which is now all owned, governed and consumed by big tech for their own profits.

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I recall back around the start of YouTube, which IIRC was the first hype moment for the internet after the dotcom crash, there was talk about what structures would emerge on the internet ... whether new structures would be created or whether older economic structures would impose themselves and colonise the space. I wasn't thinking too hard at the time, but it seemed intuitive to that older structures would at least try very hard to impose themselves.

But I never thought anything like this would happen. That the cloud, search/google, mega platforms and AI would swallow the whole thing up.

maegul , 22 days ago to Technology in Linux Inventor Says He Doesn’t Believe in Crypto

I don't follow thinigs closely at all, but I'm under the impression he's already starting to kinda take his hands off of the wheel? If so, maybe that picture is emerging now, at least behind the scenes.

maegul , 22 days ago to Technology in Linux Inventor Says He Doesn’t Believe in Crypto

Yea. It's almost like caring about your craft and being motivated chiefly to just make good things and fix things ... aren't terrible character traits?!?

maegul , 22 days ago (edited 22 days ago) to Technology in Linux Inventor Says He Doesn’t Believe in Crypto

It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.

EDIT:

Torvalds's anti-anti-left post (I was curious to read it again):

I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.

Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.

I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?

I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.

And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.

maegul , 22 days ago to Fuck Cars in Cycling isn't legitimate transportation...apparently

Yea, car congestion isn’t about industrial transport, it’s about personal transport. All of the people commuting to/from work etc in single person occupied tanks.