I have an acquaintance (not sure if qualifies as a friend) who made news for getting fired for, when they were ill, asking an AI to get a quote out of an article for them, which it just out-and-out made up and got them fired. They aren’t stupid, but maybe a bit too trusting. The world lambasted them, which is a huge shame because they do really good work. One strike, you’re out.

So I am not unsympathetic to people who get, in essence, betrayed by AI. (not literally so, because AI is not a person) But yes I think people should be very careful, more careful they they’re being now certainly.

They also should be ready for if it all falls apart, as training costs increase and becomes harder. Already websites like IMDB are putting CAPTCHAs on their site just to browse it. It used to be an accommodating site to scripts that used it to gather information automatically, but those days seem to be over now. Expect to see that more and more, and in the process, the web becomes that much more annoying to use for plain old human readers too.

I could be really cruel right now, I could point out to people how this is chickens coming home to roost, how it’s always been grossly subsidized and underpriced, how the game was always getting users, companies, the country, the whole damn world hooked on these slop machines and then once they’re reliant on them to jack up the price hugely. I could be really mean about this, I could lord it over people, I could point out how they’ve been dupes this whole time and in the process traitors to all of humanity.

I could. i think I will.

Project Gutenberg predates the internet. I still remember how their goal was to give away one trillion ebooks.

Project Gutenberg is still around, so I won’t say this is an example of the internet getting worse. But I loathe how it’s come to focus on damnable social media like there’s nothing else of worth out there. Social media, among other things, filled the air with noise that starved many worthwhile projects of attention.

Like the Steam Deck?

On of Eyezmaze made the Grow games, which are currently still playable here: https://www.eyezmaze.com/

Ferry Halim made Orisinal, a website full of simple and relaxing Flash games that lives again now through various means, I think a combination of HTML5 conversion and Ruffle: https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

26-year-old image blog Everlasting Blort: https://blort.meepzorp.com/

The venerable and unexplainable Superbad: https://www.superbad.com/

Ancient wiki-style writing site Everything, older than Wikipedia: https://everything2.com/

The “Earth Edition” of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: https://h2g2.com/

Could also try OpenTabletDriver in case it’ll get it to work: https://opentabletdriver.net/

They have to do this because the real Mark Zuckerberg went into an Absolutely Safe Capsule.

It isn’t! But “everything” is a wide net, and destroying it all would be indiscriminate in who it hurts.

I know why this happens. My comments get more, sometimes many more, comments and likes on Mastodon than on Bluesky.

On Mastodon, it’s all how many people you follow and who follow you back. There are other ways to find posts on Mastodon, like the federated tab on your server, but many people don’t seem to use them as much. To find things on Mastodon you must follow lots of people. You have a lot more work to do on Mastodon if you want things to read and for people to read you.

Compared to Twitter, this is also true on Bluesky, but management there has tried to give users ways to find people other than an algorithm (which Bluesky does have in its Discover tab, which I notice post quality drops substantially from my curated following list), in the form of starter packs. On Mastodon the account FediFollows is a good place to find groups of people to follow, and FediTips for general ideas and advice.

To put it into perspective, that’s around 2.3% of the whole US population.

“Shutting everything down” would do untold harm to many low income people.

Find everyone in my life who has money issues and give them each a million.

Eh, if you define it that way then almost anything is innovation.

But innovation, even at the low bar you define it at, for its own sake is useless. It has to do something substantive, or else it’s just more noise.

The famous “Crazification Factor.”

Thank you!

Zuckerberg wasn’t early though, in many ways he was late. Virtual worlds have been tried many times, with varying degrees of success. Second Life is still hanging on. His fault was trying to make it, somehow, a business think, when it should obviously be a gaming thing. Zuckerberg has never been an innovator. He was a geek who got lucky, had a round of mythologizing about him, and got a sweetheart deal in Facebook’s IPO that he could never be ousted no matter what stupid decisions he made, otherwise he’d be long gone over his Metaverse fiasco.

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