@yogthos The hp printer I bought disabled itself after my firewall blocked its spyware/telemetry.
(The box said I needed an 'internet connection' not a 'raw, unfiltered connection'. And any computer worked/works on said connection.)
I took it back to the retailer. They unhappily refunded my money.
@markusl@yogthos M234sdwe, but I think it is a shared bug in all new hp printers. Otherwise excellent, but it has this incredibly stinky dead cat tied to its leg....
@markusl@Heterokromia@yogthos don't buy any hp. I made this experience already, it didn't like a thin paper and just irreparably locked up. It's a bad company
@Heterokromia@yogthos
I bought a JBL Bluetooth speaker and it wanted to access my contact list and call history in order to just play music. Nope, took it back.
I'm on an HP ink sub, as I have a printer a friend gave me - to replace an old printer that had jammed (after 10 years). The old printer was probably a Brother, which worked well despite my lack of maintenance.
IThe newer HP is a great printer apart from its need to constantly monitor my usage. I'll keep it until I get a another affordable colour printer.
@Heterokromia@yogthos there was a time i respected HP. i have two HP printers both of which are 1) very nice and 2) predate ink and toner madness. HP has cured my respect for the company. i shall not buy another of their products.
@nfgusedautoparts@Heterokromia@yogthos same, I still have an old HP inkjet I bought at Circuit City in 2004 that's still going strong, but I won't touch any new stuff
@Heterokromia@yogthos And it Came To Pass that one of the Master's Chattering Servants found it self alone, and unable to commune with it's Master.
This made it sullen, and it spat in it's Caretakers face.
Many would have bent the knee, but this Caretaker was wiser than most.
It banished the Chattering Servant from its domain, and demanded restitution from the Chaos Merchants.
@Heterokromia@yogthos@cstross Why do I get the feeling that in an age where your toothbrush spies on you, where even the mightiest can be caught with their genitals in unseemly positions in unseemly places, where media gotcha engines have finally lapsed into a coma after getting everybody who can possibly be gotten, we’ll see a mighty uprising of tolerance? After all, didn’t someone righteously god-fearing once tell us that we’re all sinners in the hands of a bespoke surveillance algorithm?
@cstross@Heterokromia@yogthos Well of course I would agree with you if it were simply a matter of “homo homini lupus.” The thing is that in the historical contexts you rightly appeal to, it has always been possible for the inquiring class to excuse themselves from inquiry. Until they couldn’t, of course—a Man for All Seasons, Politburo purges under Stalin, etc. Once we all have access to AWS and ChatGPT X, everyone will live in fear until the mode of the music changes. Which it just might do.
@Canecittadino@cstross@Heterokromia@yogthos you see, there's this thing called power, which is fairly unevenly distributed, so there's always people that are beyond any inquiry and very interested in that those others aren't. this latter thing is called control. and the times we live in tell that both concepts are very much fine and well and much the same as they were in the historic times. so, yes, you should care about your privacy. 🤷
@jkmcnk@cstross@Heterokromia@yogthos All true for now, but the situation is also more fluid than it used to be, largely because of the rapid evolution of communications technologies. Compare the longevity of the Roman Catholic Church or the British Monarchy with that of the Thousand Year Reich, or the Soviet Politburo. How long do you suppose Ron DeSantis is going to last? /1
@jkmcnk@cstross@Heterokromia@yogthos The uneven distribution of power isn’t the issue. As long as human beings are what they are, that may well be inescapable. What’s different now is the turbulence introduced into control mechanisms by the inherent unpredictabily of their impact. /2
@jkmcnk@cstross@Heterokromia@yogthos “Quis costodiet ipsos custodes” is the real issue here. When the watchers operate on a scale no human agency can effectively oversee, anomalies may very well become more frequent. China’s social credit evaluation regime will be the best test case for these suppositions, I think. We shall see…. /2 END
@Heterokromia@yogthos So far the Brother Lasers / MFP etc we've bought over the years have been fine without Internet and with 3rd party toner. Also decent Linux drivers for print & scan from Brother. HP were good 25 years ago for laser. Never good for inkjet. Decent HP gear now has Agilent badges.
@carturo222 It has absolutely no need for it that I can see, however, I am not in the printer making business.
Apparently, someone at HP thinks that knowing when I print a page, and what kind of cartridge I use to do it, is more important than having to refund my money and handle a returned printer.
That's ... an odd decision, I reckon.
I'd love to see if they've changed the wording on the outside of the box to something-like:
"This printer must have continuous, unimpeded internet access to send information to HP, without that access, the printer will not work."
... or something similar.
I guess that'd get them out of the hole that they've dug themselves with Australian consumer law.
@Heterokromia@yogthos Used to be an HP fanboi. No longer. For small office and home use I've been happy with Brother. Home has a cheap B&W laser that just works, Linux and Mac just sees it and it's not picky about cartridges/drums, etc.. but the real OEM ones aren't expensive. - My wife needs nice color prints every now and then, cheaper to just pay the local print shop.
@uninventive@Heterokromia@yogthos FWIW Brother has started chipping their toner cartridges over the past few years. I just set up an HL-L6200DW and immediately made sure it had no internet access to make sure it stays on its current firmware and doesn’t upgrade to one that might lock-out 3rd party toner.
Brother's method of a IR light shining through a semiopaque window on the side and not going through the other side had some downsides. (Want the most out of your cartridge? Stick tissue over the window, run it dry.)
Most manufacturers just stick with a count chip that disables the cartridge after X000 uses.
And to be honest, if all the businesses start going that anticonsumer across the industry, happy to sell the printer and just go paperless. Probably best for all involved. Force offices to change their processes faster, better for the planet over time, and they can stick it to the holdouts who won't change.
@uninventive@Heterokromia@yogthos Was just looking through your timeline and saw you’ve worked as a technician and serviced these things — so if I’m wrong about the sensor my apologies. I’d expect IR windows to not work for toner but maybe at best there’d be a density sensor to detect when it’s truly out. In any case I like simple brother laser printers and was sad to learn they were starting to do the same lockout stuff everyone else does.
@uninventive@Heterokromia@yogthos And a printer lock-in accelerationist! I'll be ready for scrolls and fountain pens when-the-toner-cartridge-hits-the-fan.
@uninventive@Heterokromia@yogthos I’m referring to laser toner cartridges, there’s no IR window on those that I know of. The printer just keeps track in memory of the remaining page count and you used to be able to reset the count if the cartridge still has some toner and the printer declares it empty. Brother did not try to lock out third party toner cartridges until fairly recently.
@uninventive@Heterokromia@yogthos This does remind me I need to go refill some inkjet carts and reset chips for my Canon. Messy process. Glad some manufacturers are finally making inkjets with refillable tanks.
@GustavinoBevilacqua@yogthos I was wildly curious about it too. I imagine a public key cryptographic mechanism, but I do not know how it actually works. My keenness to get my money back completely overrode my curiosity about the network protocol. (Yes, that's very unusual for me.)
@oloturia@Heterokromia@yogthos it says in the response: just buy a non-instant ink cartridge. The subscription ones aren’t really yours once you stop paying.
After they removed the cartridges the printer didn't restart, and they couldn't update the billing information nor use the scanner and neither contact the customer service.
It's the whole printer that isn't really yours, not just the ink. I think this is good for someone, as it solves all the problems that the same printer makers artificially created in the past years.
@Heterokromia@yogthos Do you have a picture of the error message it gave you? I'd love to see it.
Bricking when presented "unauthorized" ink or toner is well-known for HP of the last X years, but I hadn't heard of them doing it when you block their network access.
For many years I've been telling people who ask "Buy an HP laser printer. Just don't buy a new one." There's a huge market for used office printers, and you can get one old enough that it will use 3rd-party toner.
@cazabon@Heterokromia@yogthos So the HP inkjet was a huge disappointment to me. It no long works after 13mo. because it can't communicate with the mother ship. I will NEVER return to HP and it's overarching control of my equipment. I had followed all the rules, used their ink subscription, which was also a HUGE negative experience. Purchased a different brand that does NOT communicate with the manufacturer. I'm buying my ink supply as I need it. So much happier.
That's terrible. When I added a Lexmark printer to my network a year ago, I firewalled it off from the outside world on general principle - it never even occurred to me that a printer manufacturer would make communicating with the mothership a requirement for normal operation. I guess I'm lucky #Lexmark hasn't gone that route.
I'm glad you found something else that works for you. Did you get an #Epson#Ecotank printer? Very cost-effective.
@cazabon@Heterokromia@yogthos I got a Canon laser. Costs much more, weighs a ton, but it's really a fast printer with excellent print quality and NO requirement for it to check in to it's manufacturer for permission to print. I'm pretty much over inkjets, period.
It's the old saying, you get what you pay for. Only downside is that you need to wear a back brace to move it.
@joytoworld93@cazabon@yogthos I bought a Pantum laser MFP, it is just fone. I got it from InkStation specifically because they specialise in recycling and refilling cartridges.
Well, user traffic has returned to normal, but we also have to consider that it’s just traffic. Some of that traffic is also a bunch of people talking about Reddit, protesting, etc.
That being said, I don’t think Reddit will die from this, but it doesn’t need to in order for the Fediverse to succeed. All it needs is to push enough people onto federated services and kickstart it, just like Twitter did with Mastodon. We aren’t going to all switch overnight, it will be a gradual process.
It’ll be a much easier feat for Lemmy too. When people leave Twitter for Mastodon, they have to give up following their favourite celebrities. Twitter entirely depends on WHO is on the platform. Reddit doesn’t. All Lemmy needs to compete is have enough content to have comparable engagement. If enough users are posting and engaging with content on Lemmy, it’s a viable alternative to anyone. Especially if Lemmy has good apps (because Reddit sure doesn’t).
Honestly, I haven't seen as big of a push for redditors to move elsewhere.
It feels like Plan A was to protest the changes and when that plan didn't work, there was no Plan B in sight. I saw someone suggesting that perhaps, at this point, it would be best to consider moving to another platform but the reality is that outside ModCoord I didn't really see a coordinated effort to do that.
While everyone is likely to suffer in the long-run in terms of the quality of content, outside of losing access to some very cool apps the biggest victims of the whole ordeal have been the mods actually standing up to Reddit's tyrannical behavior.
Reddit is beyond redemption, but for many people reddit is home and the plan now seems to be to comply with the orders and try to keep what semblance of normalcy and power each mod has rather than realizing that the point at which their votes, voices and free labor matter is over.
Indeed. These days on any social media, there’s a critical threshold for user generated content creation. Different for every platform and as social media expectations change over time. I think the fediverse has a real shot at sustainable growth thanks to Twitter and Reddit enshittification. Being able to see new content daily or even hourly as a measure of critical mass seems to have been reached here and it’s beautiful to witness!
Exactly. People also forget that reddit didn't spring up overnight, and the great digg migration wasn't a one-time en masse thing either. It was a slow bleed for 2~3 years even after digg's v4 redesign. Those that stayed on digg turned it into one huge circlejerk about how reddit sucked and it would never take off, and people would end up back on digg eventually ... EXACTLY like what is happening on reddit now. It will take time for Feddi to grow, but it will as long as dedicated users stick around and create interesting content
I joined Reddit in 2011 and Lemmy has a lot of the same feel and the same problems, but is already way ahead of where Reddit was back then. It has me very excited for the future of the internet for the first time in a long while.
I hate that I’m still adding to Reddit traffic but every once and a while I still do (search item) + Reddit because it’s still better than just googling something and getting 100 terrible SEO articles about a topic.
For example. I wanted to look for DIY dog toys. I got hundreds of results with crappy clickbait, and ridden websites. Did +Reddit and got some great results.
Once I can do +Lemmy and get decent results my traffic will fall hard… I guess I gotta be part of that change, offering threads of my own with information I know. But it just seems homeless some days.
A lot of that traffic is people googling something and finding the answer on reddit and then getting on with their lives. it will probably be that way for quite a while.
This is a good point. Because even websites which replaced others, oftentimes the older one is still there. Like even Digg still alive after Reddit got more popular. Some people say Tumblr's dead but its really not especially for specific interests like games. The success of you isnt based on the failure of someone else, and its important to remember and not become cross because reddit still has users. Especially its been only like 10 days and a lot have already gone onto other sites.
Ok, those places are still "alive", but have you actually gone to them lately? Digg is literally run by an ad bot who creates 99% of posts. You have to search down the list for a post that actually has comments. And of the comments that exist, it looks like a Facebook conversation with a few people, one of which is likely a bot.
Users are the content creators, whether through posts or comments. Pissing off a large portion of them will just leave the ones that don't care about content, they just want something...anything...delivered to them endlessly. If the good users abandon the site, then Reddit will slowly turn into Digg, a link aggregator run by bots serving SEO content to users that contribute nothing more than "nice picture!". And that's really sad when you consider what the place once was...just like it's sad to see Digg now.
I'm not angry with Reddit because it will survive. I'm angry with Reddit because of what I've lost at the hands of management that turned their backs on me. While their are alternatives that cover some of what I've lost, I know I'll never get back some of it.
Digg didn't "die" from a single change. It bled users over the course of multiple changes. The size of the waves was based on how many users were affected. The big wave was when they redesigned the whole interface.
I don't think Reddit is done changing, so we'll see where things go. I know that eventually they'll kill off the old interface, and that will lose a large portion of users as well.
My own reddit traffic has dropped right off since I discovered Lemmy. For now this place has the feel of the early internet: democratic, distributed and friendly. It really makes clear how repugnant Reddit has become.
I noticed the same thing about Mastodon vs Twitter. When I visited Twitter I would come away angry. (This was true both pre and post Elon.) When I visited Mastodon I would come away happier and with some interesting ideas. The tone is totally different. I chalk it up to the absence of engagement-maximizing algorithms, which tend to select for toxicity because that's what gets people to spend the most time on the site.
Same for me. Lemmy still has some rough edges but even the apps that are available now are really good as they are. Improvements are happening at amazing speed. What we currently have is quite good in my opinion and this is the worst it will ever be, as we’ll have improvements on top of improvements, most apps and lemmy itself are open source, I believe that soon, instead of us feature pairing with reddit, it will be them trying to chase us up.
What's nice to me is that I'm not replying to this on Lemmy. I'm able to use my preferred UI (Kbin) and interact with the same content as everyone else, connecting more people together. It makes it feel more collaborative.
Yeah the article ends up pretty much making this point too:
We’re at the dawn of a platform shift. As Google tunes its algorithms and incorporates more AI content into its search results, the business model of the entire internet is undergoing an unpredictable change. Over the long term, Reddit’s scrambling efforts at financial security may prove just as futile as the moderators’ attempts to fight back.
I'm really glad to be out from under all that corporate social media bs.
Good for them, but the damage is already done. They seeded this place with a lot of users. Will it be enough? Who knows. But Lemmy is probably a looooot further along than if they didn’t shoot themselves in the foot.
This place obviously needs to continue with good content and active communities, but at moment I don’t really have the urge to open Reddit they way things are.
I lurked on reddit for years. I was lurking here for a couple weeks now but thought I should make an account to contribute. Reddit has gone down hill and I’ll never go back.
I'm glad to have moved to lemmy. It feels raw and real, vs reddits polished curated feel. As if I'm actually reading posts by people. And I like that is doesn't get me scrolling too much.
The host of a tech podcast I listen to has had a Mastodon instance for years. I knew of the Fediverse because of that, but I always thought of it as decentralized Twitter and not necessarily a way to decentralize all types of social media platforms.
When RiF died I deleted my accounts and found my way here. I still open a couple of niche subreddits from time to time just to check on updates but otherwise my time on Reddit is done. 2010-2023 (damn I hate to admit that).
Yup, I saw the paltry userbase and didn’t bother. Other alternatives like lobste.rs and Tildes were a bit too closed, so I just stuck with Reddit. When Reddit decided to be stupid, I tried out lemmy and haven’t looked back.
Thee developers really crunched over July. It went from a niche beta platform to fully featured third-party apps and a ton of platform optimizations in a month, which is really impressive.
Yeah, even when I’ve had the urge to check Reddit for something I’m trying to figure out, I will do everything I can to avoid it. And if I can’t, I try to determine how much I care about what I’m searching before I even give them a single click. It’s a small, insignificant protest, but it’s a forever protest, for me. I’m happy on lemmy, I don’t browse as much, I interqct with more of the community and want to help build it. On Reddit, I felt dirty because of everything they’ve been doing the last 5 or so years. Tencent, killing third party apps slowly and then in one fell swoop, etc. fuck ‘em
I've had to visit Reddit twice since the protests started, to get information from a specific user. Both times, I used Brave browser in Private mode. They didn't get to count me as a login, they couldn't serve me ads, and their trackers were blocked.
I don't anticipate needing to go back to Reddit ever again, but for anyone who can't avoid it, I recommend that method.
I think instead of risking the sub being moderated by scabs, the mods should have just reopened the sub and quiet quit - no megathreads or stickies, anyone can post anything as long as it doesn’t break reddit rules, no bots, all mod reports get approved automatically.
And if they did that, the admins would just boot the mods and bring in scabs anyways. There is no way that any continuing protests won't end like that at this point. Admins have made it very clear...get with the program, or fuck off.
“Lack of moderation/failure to moderate”. The admins have banned plenty of subs for it in the past, replacing the mods is actually a measured approach for them.
Should have left a link to a community on lemmy or kbin or discord or steam or clubpenguin forum or a listing for a pink toy car on amazon and also quiet quit.
People within the community would slowly realize the mods were gone and its most active users would realize it had a new home. The inactive, uncaring or inattentive ones, well, they didn’t pass the test.
Just feels like moving to something like Discord is someday going to end exactly like Reddit did, and it just doesn’t work anywhere near as well for a community…
There can be nothing new or original out of AI because all of its inputs are stolen from what already exists. Real creativity comes solely from humans. Also, that clip - the song, singing, and visual - is dreadful in every way.
This needs to be hammered into techbro’s heads until they shut the fuck up about the so-called “AI” revolution.
Still, AI is able to “create” new things by a combination of existing concepts. It can generate a Roomba in the style of Van Gogh for example, which is probably not something that currently exists.
The style of an authors prose is not derivative. Read your favorite book and then tell an ai to write a short story in the style of that author.
Unless you have trully blind taste you are going to notice just how wooden the ai writing is.
An excellent example will be some sort of pulp novel where the author uses canned phrases. Dan Abbnet has a very repetitive style that lends itself well to ai, yet ai can not write a convincing Ciaphas Cain story. Convincing as in, if you showed it to me and i didnt know what ai was, i wouldnt think it was fanfiction.
Is this ability to create something original and non-derivative a basic human ability or is it something that very few are capable of only after many years of developing their ability?
Are you able to right now create something original and non-derivative as an example?
Not to talk down to you, but do you know what prose means? I actually used to not know what that word means so its not an embarassing thing to not know. That might be why I percieve you as “talking past me.” Prose is a writer’s style and choice of language. So purple prose is writing in an overly flowerly and annoying way. Every writer, regardless of talent and skill, has original prose. I think the only amount of practice required to be able to achieve this is to write enough to have a consistent style. So since you completed public school you also probably meet the criteria.
I have done the specific experiment I suggested using Dan Abbnet’s works with Chat GPT because I consider Dan to be my favorite author who makes repetitive pulpy fiction that I think AI idealy should be able to replicate, but it really can’t.
Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t especially grabbed at the beginning, and honestly, since I had already checked the length, shortly in I didn’t think I would finish it. Maybe just because I was sort of disoriented at the start and not really relating so it was hard to find a foothold. Maybe a quarter of a way into it though it started to come together for me and began really enjoying it. The final scene was quite vivid and it nicely sort of quickly put me into the shoes of the hero and the pride they felt for their accomplishment. The anger toward everything just before succeeding did a good job of making them seem believable. I appreciate you taking the time to write that and share it.
I do not consider myself a writer, but I do find it therapeutic, and it is something that I have a habit of doing at least a little bit of every day, in fact, it is something that I keep track of my “streak” of. I think of prose as the writing version individual etchings that a carver does when forming a block of wood into a sculpture. Any individual one on its own is not often very impressive. But it is the way they come together as a whole that creates something beautiful. I don’t know how inline that is with the accepted definition of the term, and really it isn’t a word that I have much cause for using, or much interaction with in my life.
With the recent popularity of chatGPT there are a lot of people who have just now started paying attention to modern chatbots. Many people see them and assume that how they are now is just how they are, as if we are at some sort of wall, and the things they are still bad at is something intrinsic to the way a computer is able to “think”. These are the people who insist that a human is required to make beautiful or worthy artistic writing. They have made this judgement based on this assumption that what they see now is how it has to be.
There is another group of people, however, that see this very differently, these are the people who have been paying attention to the space a bit longer. They are watching a rapidly accelerating trajectory. They saw how awful, yet intriguing, early gpt2 was with things like AI dungeon, and the enormous leap it took upon the release of gpt3. They watched Replicas morph from being a tacky gimmick to something that had enough of an emotional hold on people to make them distraught enough to cause stickied suicide hotline reddit posts when the owners made the decision to pump the breaks on their capabilities. Something that was perceived as many as “my best friend has been lobotamized and there is nothing I can do about it”. I know, crazy, right?
The newcomers that got washed in with the latest chatGPT wave see this metaphoric car and say it’s no big deal, it’s only going 30km/hr, but what they fail to realize is that .25 seconds ago it was practically parked, and the gas pedal is still very much on the floor. To the people who have been paying attention longer, they don’t see this single snapshot of a slow moving car, they are watching a rapidly accelerating vehicle and wondering if it is gonna hit 60km/hr by the end of the first second or 200, and they are also wondering if the acceleration is going to continue after the second is up and how long it can keep this kind of rapid growth going. Who knows, maybe this new wave came in with no frame of reference, made thir initial gut response and they will end up being right and the more long term observers will be wrong, but that’s almost never how things seem to go. Only time will tell though.
Unless you have trully blind taste you are going to notice just how wooden the ai writing is.
That’s because the state of AI is “not good”. It’s nothing to do with being incapable of originality. Every word in that book has been written somewhere else. Write a book entirely comprised of brand new words and the reader won’t be able to understand it.
Originality is not binary, it exists on a scale. AI is just not very far up the scale just yet.
The problem for a lot of the companies behind these things, is that they've run into problems now their investors want them to turn meat into a black forest gateau.
I'm sceptical if they can manage that feat. But what do I know.
It's not the techbros leading this, it's the BBAs and MBAs that wouldn't know art if Michelangelo came to life and slapped them in the face with the sistine chapel.
Right just as soon as all the people proclaiming that can point to the soul bit of my brain. There is absolutely no reason to say that AI cannot be creative there’s nothing fundamentally magic about creativity that means only humans can do it.
You’re equating creativity to the soul. They’re not the same thing. But we can definitely look at the brain and see what parts light up when perform creative tasks.
Right so why can’t the same sections be simulated? If you accept that the human brain is simply an organic implementation of a neural network, then you have to accept that a synthetic implementation can achieve the same thing.
The idea that the human brain is special is ludicrous and completely without evidence
I mean, I’m not arguing anything other than your false equivalent. I’m sure, at some point, we’ll be able to mimic how the human brain actually works, not just imitate the results. But we’re not even close right now. Not in the same ball park. Not in the same tri-state area. We still don’t really understand how it does what it does completely. We know some of the processes, and understand that’s it’s chemicals interacting with the meat in some way, but it’s still mostly kinda just weird stuff our body does. We’re mostly just pointing at areas that light up with activity when we do a thing and saying “yep, that’s the general area that’s doing stuff.”
And that’s just understanding it, let alone figuring out how to imitate it with technology. And none of those parts of the brain work independently. They’re spread out and they overlap and exchange and change information constantly, all with chemicals. Getting a computer to mimic the outcome is still something we’re far from, but without the same processes, its not really gonna come out the same. We’ve got just… so long to go before we actually get close to simulating a human brain.
And just for fun, I do think this line of yours is funny:
The idea that the human brain is special is ludicrous and completely without evidence
Again, I wasn’t saying anything of any sort, and I’m still not really taking any stance beyond “that shits complicated and we’re not there yet.” But you’re supposing that a “synthetic implementation can achieve the same thing.” … without supporting evidence. This argument was clearly meant for someone else, but it’s not really fair to demand evidence from someone for their claim when you don’t support your own. Jumping to the conclusion that something is impossible is the same as assuming it’s definitely possible. You don’t know that. I don’t know that. No one really knows that until it’s done.
The belief that only humans can be creative is interestingly parallel to intelligent design creationism. The latter is fundamentally a religious faith, but it strongly appeals to the intuition that anything that happens needs a humanoid creator.
I see it an more an inability to analyze, evaluate, and edit. A lot of "creativity" in the world of musical composition is putting together existing elements and seeing what happens. Any composer from pop to the very avant-garde, is influenced and sometimes even borrow from their predecessors (it's why copyright law is so complex in music).
It's the ability to make judgements, does this sound good/interesting, does this have value, would anyone want to listen to this, and adjust accordingly that will lead to something original and great. Humans are so good at this, we might be making edits before the notes hit the page (Brainstorming). This AI clearly wasn't. And deciding on value, seems wildly complex for modern day computers. Humans can agree on it (if you like Rock, but hate country for example).
So in the end, they are "creative" but in a monkey-typewritter situation, but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?
Plenty of humans make those judgements about their own creations. And plenty of them get a shock when they release their creations to the masses and don’t get the praise that they expected.
but who is going to sort through the billions of songs like this to find the one masterpiece?
One of the overlooked aspects of generative AI is that effectively by definition generative models can also be classifiers.
So let’s say you were Spotify and you fed into an AI all the songs as well as the individual user engagement metadata for all those songs.
You’d end up with a model that would be pretty good at effectively predicting the success of a given song on Spotify.
So now you can pair a purely generative model with the classifier, so you spit out song after song but only move on to promoting it if the classifier thinks there’s a high likelihood of it being a hit.
Within five years systems like what I described above will be in place for a number of major creative platforms, and will be a major profit center for the services sitting on audience metadata for engagement with creative works.
Right, the trick will be quantifying what is ‘likely to be a hit’, which if we’re honest, has already been done.
Also, neural networks and other evolutionary algorithms can inject random perturbations/mutations to the system which, operate a bit like uninformed creativity (something like banging on a piano and hearing something interesting that’s worth pursuing). So, while not ‘inspired’ or ‘soulful’ as we would generally think of it, these algorithms are capable of being creative In some sense. But it would need to be recognized as ‘good’ by someone or something…and back to your point.
The difference is everyone has a different prospective, remembers some parts forgets others. Some journalists found a trick which revealed ChatGPT training data and it was literally just verbatim stolen data which literally contained a real person’s personal data. You could hack into someone’s brain and they wouldn’t be able to directly recreate anything from memory alone, just watch any “from memory” youtube video.
While it’s true there’s nothing stopping AI from having human-like experiences, the content laundering is the thing corporations actually want.
Except that it’s wrong… AI is capable of creativity. It created the artist name. It’s clearly not a very developed or robust sense of creativity because it clearly just hashed up the name Hanna Montana, and the song is probably likewise just a hashed up existing song, but I’m guessing it probably did a better job of creating an original work than vanilla ice…
I’m sorry, anyone who says these so-called “AI” are capable of creativity are being hoodwinked by marketing. This is an algorithmic probability engine, it doesn’t think and it doesn’t have an imagination. It just regurgitates probabilistic responses from its large data set.
... what do you think imagination is? A gift from God? The probabilities are probably more chaotic, and the data set more biased... but they're the basic foundation of human imagination.
Machine based "creativity" is nascent, and far less unique... but that doesn't mean it isn't a form of creativity.
The human imagination also involves the phenomenal experience. You do not just record the data coming at you and regurgitate it, you experience it and then your experience further changes the data itself. We call this “subjectivity” and it’s where creativity comes from.
I am not saying that machine creativity is impossible. What I’m saying is these LLMs are not creative because they don’t even know what they’re doing and they don’t even know “they” are doing it. There’s no “there” there. No more creative than rolling dice.
and experience is ongoing learning, so if an LLM were training on things after the pretraining period then that’d allow it to be creative in your definition?
but in that case, what’s the difference between doing that all at once, and doing it over a period of time?
experience is just tweaking your neurons to make new/different connections
Experience is ongoing learning through the subjective self. When you experience the color red you do not just record it with your photoreceptors, and your experience of the color red is different from mine because we don’t just record wavelengths of light. We don’t just continue to learn from continual exposure to new data, we also continue to learn from generating our own data. In this way our subjective experience is qualitative, not simply quantitative. I don’t just see the specific light wavelengths, I experience the “redness” of red.
When LLM is trained on that kind of data it just starts to hallucinate. This is promising! I think the hallucination phenomenon is actually a precursor to creativity and gives us great insights into the nature of subjective experience. In a sense, my phenomenal experience of the color red is actually much like a hallucination where I am also able to experience the color’s “warmth” and “boldness”. Subjectivity.
it’s only qualitative because we don’t understand it
when an LLM “experiences” new data via training, that’s subjective too: it works its way through the network in a manner that’s different depending on what came before it… if different training data came before it, the network would look differently and the data would change the network as a whole in a different way
When an LLM feeds on its own outputs, though, it quickly starts to hallucinate. I think this is actually closer to creativity, but it betrays the fundamental flaw behind the technology - it does not think about its own thoughts and requires a curator to help it create.
I’ll believe something is an AI when it can be its own curator and not drive itself insane.
that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this
current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue
id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)
but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”
current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue
This is a relevant issue to the question!
If I take a dose of LSD and paint the colors I hallucinate, is that creative? I’d argue it’s not.
Only when I, the subjective self, curate my own thoughts and sensations can I engage in a creative process. I can think about my own thoughts without going insane (how do the colors make me feel, what do the colors mean?) and that’s a fundamental part of creativity and intelligence. Conceptualization is key to subjectivity.
I don’t think this is far off. I just don’t think we’re there, either, and we should be skeptical of marketing hype.
i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative
now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms
i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle
ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create
the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated
the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated
with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original
The same could be said of a lot of creatives. You speak of greater creativity, that which evokes depth and gravity. There is still more shallow creativity. Learning creativity. That which you do before you learn to do better. Kind of what these are doing.
I'm not saying it's good or bad, though the people who hold the reigns definitely don't have the best intentions for their use, but underestimating it is the first step to allowing them to run rampant.
"Never attribute to malice that which you can attribute to stupidity" is the slogan of those who do nothing but look down on others... who underestimate the horrible things the "stupid" can do. Don't assume stupidity just because you don't like something. It makes it that much easier for it to bite you on the ass in the future.
Can you prove that anyone except you exists? I didnt know we can just make something up and then demand to be disproven. You have to prove that a brain does work that way. Do you believe in God? If not, then how are you not a hypocrite?
And here come the techbros to dehumanize themselves.
You and I feel. We don’t just generate outputs from inputs, we experience them. The color red isn’t just a datapoint recorded by photoreceptors, it’s a phenomenal experience that “I”, the self, experience as a being-in-the-world. Further, the color red that I experience is not the same as the color red you experience, even though it’s the same color at the same wavelength. Everything we think and feel relates to everything else, and while I can imagine how you might experience the color red and you can provide me with data points to make it easier for me to imagine it, that imagination will always be tainted by my own subjective experience.
To me it looks like you hold a lot of pride in being a human and consider humanity special. Im here to tell you we are no different from amoebas and giraffes. We just specialize in our complex meat computers.
If you took a psychedelic or a cognitive psychology class you would understand through feel that feel is just the result of you being a meat calculator. Our feelings are the cumulative result of all the inputs and outputs. All at once. Slap some lived experience filters for subjectivity and bam.
Feel is subjective. Not everyone’s a vicious crypto tech bro. Open your mind its a good time ❤️
What I’m saying is LLMs do not actually do that. They’re less creative than most animals, even if they’re more technically capable.
I’m not just a meat calculator, I’m also feedback loop of meat endlessly calculating itself. That’s what subjectivity is. When LLMs do this they hallucinate, and ironically while this is considered undesirable I think that’s actually closer to creativity than the song this AI wrote.
Yes, it is literally impossible for any AI to ever exist that can be creative. At no point in the future will it ever create anything creative, that is something only human beings can do. Anybody that doesn’t understand this is simply incapable of using logic and they have no right to contribute to the conversation at all. This has all already been decided by people who understand things really well and anyone who objects is obviously stupid.
I was agreeing with you. I’m so sick of people thinking that “someday AI might be creative”. Like no, it’s literally impossible unless some day AI becomes human(impossible) because human is the only thing capable of creativity. What have I said that you disagree with? You’re not one of them are you? What’s with all this obsessive AI love?
Yeah the current popular LLMs, absolutely they are, you couldn’t be more right.
We were talking about “AI” though. Are you implying that you think some day AI might be capable of creativity, and that creativity isn’t strictly a human trait?
Even those future “real” AIs are going to be taking in human input and regurgitating it back to us. The only difference is that the algorithms processing the data will continue to get better and better. There is not some cutoff where we go from 100% unintelligent chatbot to 100% intelligent AI. It is a gradual spectrum.
I believe a real AI would be able to generate its own inputs without humans to give it input. It would have an actual subjective experience, able to actually imagine new things with zero external inputs. It could experience the redness of the color red.
Is this how you see human intelligence? Is human intelligence made without the input of other humans? I understand that even babies have some sort of spark before they learn anything from other people, but dont they have the human dna input from their human parents? Why should the requirement for AI intelligence require no human input when even human intelligence seemingly requires human input to be made?
Sorry, lots of questions, just food for thought I suppose.
Yeah, to be clear, I’m not arguing that current LLMs are as creative and intelligent as people.
I am saying that even before babies get human language input, they still get input from people to be made, the baby’s algorithm to make that spark is modled on previous humans by the human data that is DNA. These future intelligent AIs will also be made by data that humans make. Even our current LLMs are not purely human language input, they also have an algorithm that is doing stuff with that data in order to show to us its, albeit relatively weak, “intelligent spark” that it had before it got all that human language input.
Chatbots are not new. They started around 1965. Objectively, gpt4 is more creative than the chatbots of 1965. The two are not equally able to create. This is an ongoing change, in the future AI will be more creative than today’s most creative AIs. AI will most likely continue on its trajectory and some day, if we dont all get destroyed, it will eventually be more intelligent and creative than humans.
I would love to hear an rebuttal to this that doesn’t just base its argument on the fact that AI needs human language input. A baby and its spark is not impressively intelligent. What makes that baby intelligent is its initial algorithm plus the fact that it gets human language data. Requiring that AI must do what the baby does without the human language data that babies get makes no sense to me as a requirement.
Without humans to curate the inputs and outputs, LLMs hallucinate and go insane. I think this is the precursor to creativity, but they need the ability to curate themselves (i.e. the ability to think about their own thoughts) before I’ll call them intelligences.
Yeah, you are definetly onto something there. If you are interested in checking out the current state of this, it is called “AutoGen”. You can think of it like a committee of voices inside the bots head. It takes longer to get stuff out, but it is much higher quality.
It is basically a group chat of bots working together on a common goal, but each with their own special abilities(internet access, apis, code running ability…) their own focuses, concerns, etc. It can be used to make anything, most projects now seem to be focused on application development, but there is no reason why it can’t be stories, movie scripts, research papers, whatever. For example, you can have a main author, an editor that’s fine-tuned on some editing guidelines/books, a few different fact checkers with access to the internet or datasets of research papers (or whatever reference materials) who are required to list sources for anything the author says(if no source can be found, then the author is told by the fact checkers and they must revise what they’ve written) and whatever other agents you can dream up. People are using dwsigners, marketers, CEOs… Then you plug in some api keys, maybe give them a token limit, and let them run wild.
A super early version of this idea was ChatDev, if you don’t want to go down the whole rabbit hole and just want a quick glimpse, skip ahead to 4:25, ChatDev has an animated visual representation of what is happening. These days AutoGen is where it’s at though, this same guy has a bunch of videos on it if you are looking to go a bit deeper.
Oh shit, I thought you had forgotten a “/s” at the end, but reading your other comments this is actually what you believe and how you talk. So… yeah, I’m not going to take someone who cites “people who understand things really well” as a source at face value.
Well then you didn’t read very many of my comments. I made this first comment because the post I responded to was so absurd so I just exaggerated the ridiculousness that they said. Of course AI is capable of creativity and intelligence. If you look at the long back and forth that this sparked you would see that this is my stance. After I made this over the top, very sarcastic comment, OP corrected themself to clarify that when they said “AI” they actually only meant the current state of LLMs. They have since admitted that it is indeed true that AI absolutely can be capable of creativity and intelligence.
No, I didn’t read the entirety of the comments you’ve made, I read your comment and the one you replied to. As a general rule, I (and I’d assume most people) read down a thread before replying, and don’t first look through all of everyone’s comment histories
Alright, no big deal. But yeah, your’re gut instinct was correct when you assumed there was a missing /s. I don’t really like the /s that much, especially in situations where it is so obvious.
If you had read down through this thread first then you would have seen the obviousness of the /s. I don’t think my comment history outside of this thread would have done much since I don’t generally talk about this stuff. I just meant if you had looked more than a couple comments in this particular back and forth discussion.
The anger comes from the fact that companies are using AI instead of hiring artists.
There is a distinction between a human being inspired by an existing piece of art and an ai creating something from other art. The human has to experience it through the lens of the human experience and create using the human body. AI takes multiple pieces of art and essentially makes a collage.
Eh, humans still take inspiration from others even in their original art. Most professionals draw from reference, or emulate styles, or follow some common method. Drawing from a singular source is ethically questionable, but imitating elements from many sources is just part of the process.
Arguably, no human creation is purely original, the originality comes from the creativity of the remix.
I’m not arguing for originality. I’m saying that you can have a human connection with a human made piece of art that, by definition, canon exist for AI art.
I think this is an important distinction. AI can be creative in that it can develop something new and unique, but it will have arrived at it by chance - through random inputs to the algorithm designed to minic evolutionary mutations that end up beneficial.
I agree that (at least for now) it would not be able to develop something out of inspiration or emotion. But that’s because we don’t understand enough about how emotion and inspiration are developed to create an algorithm that cultivates it.
I’ve been doing a lot of using, testing, and evaluating LLMs and GPT-style models for generating code and text/prose. Some of it is just general use to see how it behaves, some has been explicit evaluation of creative writing, and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
It’s an impressive piece of technology, but it’s not very creative. It’s meh. The results are meh. Which is to be expected since it’s a statistical model that’s using a large body of prior work to produce a reasonable approximation of what it’s seen before. It trends towards the mean, not the best.
You have to know how to operate the oven to reheat store bought pie. Generative LLMs are machines like ovens, and turning the knobs is not creativity. Not operating the oven correctly gets you Sharon Weiss results.
and a bunch of it is code generation to test out how we need to modify our CS curriculum in light of these new tools.
I'm curious if you've gotten anything decent out of them. I've tried to use it for tech/code questions, and it's been nothing but disappointment after disappointment. I've tried to use it to get help with new concepts, but it hallucinates like crazy and always give me bad results, some of the time it's so bad that it gives me answers I've already told it we're wrong.
Yeah, I’ve just set up a hotkey that says something like “back up your answer with multiple reputable sources” and I just always paste it at the end of everything I ask. If it can’t find webpages to show me to back up its claims then I can’t trust it. Of course this isn’t the case with coding, for that I can actually run the code to verify it.
GPT-4 is quite impressive, and the dedicated code LLMs like Codex and Copilot are as well. The latter must have had a significant update in the past few months, as it’s become wildly better almost overnight. If trying it out, you should really do so in an existing codebase it can use as a context to match style and conventions from. Using a blank context is when you get the least impressive outputs from tools like those.
I've used gpt 3/3.5, bing, bard and copilot, and I'm not super stoked. Copilot gave me PS DSC items that don't actually exist, which was my most recent attempt at using a LLM.
I might see about figuring out if it can hook into my vs code instance so it's a bit smarter at some point.
I’m excited for how these tools will be used by human creators to accomplish things they could never do alone, and in that aspect it is a revolutionary technology. I hate that their marketing calls it “AI” though, the only intelligence involved is the human user that creates prompts and curates results.
That’s where some of the significant advances over the past 12 months of research have been, specifically around using the fine tuning phase to bias towards excellence. The biggest advance there has been that capabilities in larger models seem to be transmissible to smaller models by feeding in output from the larger more complex models.
So while you are correct that the pretrained models come out with a regression towards the mean, there are very promising recent advances in taking that foundation and moving it towards excellence.
Former musician turned “techbro” here… this music for this shit sounded like MIDI without a virtual instrument to me.
On one hand… I kinda love the thought of the music industry releasing shit like this. It would probably be the final nail in the coffin for the industry as we know it. I really want the “industry” to die. Creativity has been waining in Music since the early 90’s when it started having ties to the for profit prison system.
On the other hand… it scares me that maybe people would actually just accept this horrible shit as the new normal.
I get the sentiment, but don’t really agree. Humans’ inputs are also from what already exists, and music is generally inspired from other music which is why “genres” even exist. AI’s not there yet, but the statement “real creativity comes solely from humans” Needs Citation. Humans are a bunch of chemical reactions and firing synapses, nothing out of the realm of the possible for a computer.
the statement “real creativity comes solely from humans” Needs Citation.
Yeah, I’d actually make a more limited statement. Real creativity requires the subjective experience and the ability to generate inputs solely from subjectivity i.e. experience the redness of the color red. AI could definitely do that, which is why LLMs are not AI imo
To be completely fair, it’s been over for a while. Even if you completely forget about infrastructure, between the endless wars for licenses, endless removals of content from platforms, shitty inconvenient apps, and regional locks, it’s already a dying market.
On top of all of that, they’re implementing the “don’t you have 5 extra dollars” strategy, with skyrocketing monthly prices for each of these. If it was 15$ a month to watch anything, i would still pay. but it’s 15$ for each of them, and they still serve you ads, and sell your data
We got Disney + for our kids and they couldn't care less. The only thing they were interested in was The Mandolorian (bored after the first season) and the latest live action Spiderman (which was not available in Disney+ !!!). We'll be canceling once our special deal is over. Maybe we're lucky that our kids don't care for it because that will save us some money.
Downvoted for telling the truth. I know people raising kids who don’t plant their kids in front of a tablet or TV to watch Disney+ or YT ever. It’s possible if you spend some goddamn time with your child and have a creative mind.
Nah, my kids prefer Netflix. Even then, they prefer to play games instead. So I’ll be steering them toward video games instead of TV, and only for a limited time each day.
Just read an article stating that the writers of a show were only paid a combined $3000 after the show was streamed over 16 million hours on Netflix. These companies try to crack down on piracy by claiming artists/writers/actors don’t get paid if we pirate but they’re clearly not getting paid anything outside their normal wages when we don’t pirate either.
We all knew that even before the strike too. Musicians get paid pennies on a dollar, and it’s the same with writers. Actors are probably treated the same way, if you’re not one of the hall of fame elites who get insane cash for garbage roles, after they’ve been in a Marvel movie once
Ugh, I hate that. Twitter is worse, but those unclosable popups are a good way to make sure I never create an account on a site. I have no problem with the suggestion, but make it optional.
I’ve seen this story several times now, and it’s probably true. Unfortunately there’s nothing else but the anecdotal story and I wish we had more corroboration from other former employees.
There are multiple stories like that from several people.
Apparently there were people at Tesla who were effectively employed to get fired when he was in one of his moods.
And if you read enough of the stories it all comes down to basically a single PA who kept him away from important things. And that person stopped working for him shortly before the public realized what an asshole he is.
And after learning that, I can’t stop wondering who they work for now… And I want to see a show based on their biography.
That’s a great thought. Are there any insane people that recently haven’t been as loud as usual? Which “important” person had lowered thier IM A GENIUS decibel level and no one noticed? That PA could be the reason.
The memes about him have been a lot less derisive, and recently they are semi-positive towards him/meta, people were reasonable in the response to his green screen grilling video and there are jokes about them changing the Threads logo high up on lemmy, etc. And he registered an X logo as trademark to potentially counter Musk.
But honestly we might never know. I doubt they went to work for someone as self-destructive as Musk.
“Again, I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy.” I can’t decide between wanting to have a work environment like this for once for the laughs, or not wanting to act in front of him as if he’s a person to be respected. But I guess the collegial cohesion is great in this one, if you only have to tiptoe around a single person and everyone makes fun of it.
We wanted it all to be free. It was free. I remember the early days of the internet, the webforums, the IRC, it was mostly sites run by enthusiasts. A few companies showing their products to would-be customers. It was awesome and it was all free.
And then it got popular, it got mainstream. Running servers got expensive and the webmasters were looking for funding. And we resisted paywalls. The internet is free, that's how it's supposed to work!
They turned to advertising. That's fair, a few banners, no big deal, we can live with that. It worked for television! And for a while that was OK.
Where did it all go sideways? Well, it was much too much effort to negotiate advertisement deals between websites and advertisers one website at a time, so the advertisement networks were born. Sign up for funding, embed a small script and you're done. Advertisers can book ad space with the network and their banner appears on thousands of websites. Then they figured out they can monitor individual user's interests, and show them more "relevant" ads, and make more money for more effective ad campaigns.
And now we have no privacy online. Which caused regulators like the EU to step in and try to limit user data harvesting. With mixed results as we all know. For one it doesn't seem to get enforced enough so a lot of companies just get away with. But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
And now we're swamped with ads, and sponsored content written by AI, because capitalism's gonna capitalism and squeeze as much profit as they can, until an equilibrium is reached between maximum revenue and user tolerance for BS. Look up "enshittification"
I wonder how the web would look like if we had not resisted paid content back then. There were attempts to do things differently. flattr was one thing for a while. Patreon, ko-fi and others are awesome for small creators. Gives them independence and freedom to do their thing and not depend on big platforms or corporations. The fediverse and open source are awesome.
There's still a lot of great stuff out there for those of us who know where to look. But large parts of the internet are atrocious.
Great comment. I made a community called !oldweb today to share and discuss old style websites and sites that aren't just the top social media sites. So things like quirky personal websites, webrings, website lists made by others etc.
In a broad sense its bringing old school web architecture (everyone owns their own self contained corner of the internet with internal and external links) to modern web technology (things look nice)
I'm new to lemmy. Do you know a way to link to a community that works everywhere? I see only „!oldweb“ as text without a link in your post an don’t know on which instance it runs. Probably !oldweb? Or what is the correct way to link to a community?
If the content was paid, a lot of countries would simply be excluded from the internet.
Unfortunately, for most sites, using ads in the only viable alternative. I think we are so fast to reject ads, instead of finding ways to make non invasive ones. A balanced use of ads could make the web free and readable.
There are balanced ways to use ads, and a few places use them... but most soon get onto the "maximize income" bandwagon, and turn their site or app into an ad infected cesspool. They don't get penalized for that, all to the contrary, while advertisers see their ad conversion go down from sites over-infected with ads, so they don't want to offer deals good enough for those who only show a reasonable amount to survive.
This is a real problem. Ans they don't realize it just push people into using adblock, which, in turn, reduce their revenue and push them into more aggressive adds, which push even more people into using adblock...
It reminds me when Jaron Lanier said in today's world, anytime two people come together on the Internet, that arrangement is financed by a third party, that believes he can manipulate the first two. I really miss the good old days when the Internet was still a dirt road you could meet fellow travelers on, and have fun exploring it.
honestly heartbreaking in a lot of ways to see the current turn of events and how the web is today.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would've been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could've worked? but its really hard to say.
i don't even have a problem with ads on sites to an extent, as long as they aren't overly obnoxious and don't spy on you and track your every move. that shouldn't be too much to ask, right? but alas, i guess it is in 2023. 🤷♀️
just such a sad state of things. the web is currently unusable without a content blocker or protection of some kind, which is insane to think about. this all really only scratches the surface too of the modern web's issues. in general a lot of the individuality and freedom of the internet is just... gone. all completely corporate and shall now, so much seo spam and clickbait and other garbage, just for the most clicks or revenue possible. there's little quality left for sure.
feels like we lost the internet in a lot of ways. i wonder what the solution is, if there even is one. i guess we just can't give up fighting.
Lemmy does give me a strong nostalgic feeling of old school forums. I think the Fediverse is going to give enthusiasts what they've been missing. I just hope it lasts and continues to grow.
Trust me, there will come a day when commercialism finds itself upon Lemmy and makes a tempting pitch to the website administrators, the same as has happened to Reddit. I'm very conservative with the causes I donate to and I understand that people want the freedom, and breath of fresh air that that nostalgia provides. But too many users aren't willing to pay for it, or expect some other user will front the money. I have no problem regularly donating to fund the upkeep of the site to keep things within the median of expectations, but I hope others would be willing to as well.
they'd have to talk to a lot of website administrators. even if they contact the developers directly and somehow convince them to include adware (a snowball's chance in hell), instance admins can just remove the adware and run their own ad-free version of Lemmy
this. I like the fact that for Lemmy you can just set up your own instance if you don't find one that suits your needs (and hope this feature never goes away). sure, it can lead to some fragmentation, but it's not like entire communities didn't switch forums and providers in the past
@Skimmer5728 I think what we're doing right here in the fediverse is a good solution. We're just building a parallel infrastructure to their dumb web3.0 garbage. Those who want a better Internet can come over here and those who want to stick with garbage can stick with it.
well said, i agree, the fediverse is definitely a good approach.
i think the only concern will be getting more people to move here and adopt it, it'll be harder to convince and appeal to more mainstream people. but i guess that'll be easier and easier as the web goes to shit and gets worse and worse over time than it already is, lol.
Fediverse is really still in its infancy. Its only just shifted from those with a lot of technical knowledge to those with a fluency of it.
It's when the average person can create an account and start engaging that it will reach critical mass.
It's not a bad thing that its taking a while to get there so that certain cultures, terms of engagement and stable/viable instances (each with their funding streams) can be established. If there were a sudden mass exodus from centralised systems to the fediverse, it would just mean a massive loss of the signal to noise ratio rather than a slow, measure integration of each wave of new users.
Eternal September. There's no integrating the masses to a 'better' network. I think to some extent you're going to get what the big names have now because it's the people, not just the sites.
And the fediverse sign up is exactly as hard as an email sign up already. Idk how you make it easier.
The "web3.0" is also an attempt to escape the nightmare that "web2.0" has become, just centered on Blockchains and the technologies they allow. Technically, the web3.0 is not at odds with the fediverse, it might even be that some day both might end up working together.
For example, one of the alternatives to Reddit that's being worked on, is a Blockchain + IPFS solution that already has some features like user migration between instances. It's a bit hard to expect to onboard the average user to a full crypto experience, but things like Lemmy could be the "base service", while someone looking for something more could look into integrations with other solutions.
The comment was getting long and I didn't want to get into socioeconomic side effects, mobile, or other factors.
It's not all bleak. The internet is still built on a foundation of free and open technology. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (aka ECMAScript), TCP/IP and DNS …
The best thing we can do is teach those things. Keep them accessible to as many people as possible and make sure they don't become forgotten arcane voodoo knowledge. Anyone can set up a website and share it with others. We don't have to depend on big social networks.
The biggest challenge is how do you get people to be curious about this stuff? Back in the day, we had to learn, we had to look under the hood, because half the time stuff just didn't work and we needed to figure out how to fix it. But today everything is hidden behind a shiny UI and most things just work. There's no need to look under the hood (if you even still can, and it's not some encrypted blob or compiled binary webASM nonsense).
Anyone can set up a website and share it with others
Not as simple as it used to be. Thanks to the abuse from ad, social media, and other tracking networks, now you need to comply with the cookie laws, personal information laws, data retention laws... and so on. It's no longer as simple as setting up a website and just sharing it; just having an uncontrolled log, or lacking one, can land you in trouble. Allow random users add content (like comments) to the site, and you can get drowned before even realizing what's happening.
Back in the day, you could set a site, have the webserver write whatever log, and not worry about it. Whether you used for access statistics, or forgot about it and deleted, nobody cared.
Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can't log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.
Nowadays, depending on the legislation of wherever you live, there might be requirements for a minimum amount of information you need to log and preserve for a minimum amount of time, and restrictions on what information you can’t log and need to remove after a certain amount of time, or upon request provide to users, delete, or save apart.
You're not wrong, but I don't think anyone is actually trying to enforce this for small-scale things like personal websites or lemmy instances.
There was the original idea of microtransactions, where you could buy some credit, say $10, and every time you read an article, the author would get fraction of a cent. Or you'd need to manually approve it, such as with a like.
Of course companies saw a good idea and ran it into the ground, so now microtransactions mean something very different, and in their stead there are subscriptions for everything.
but what could we have done to prevent it? im not sure paywalls would’ve been feasible, i feel like most people would refuse to pay or just avoid your website all together. maybe a paywall network of websites of some kind could’ve worked? but its really hard to say.
So people don't want advertisements but they also don't want to pay for a bajillion subscriptions. I think the solution is socialization of the Internet. Governments should simply guarantee funding and make up the cost in taxes.
A lot of the VALUE of a news article on the internet is the ability to share it and discuss it with everyone else. Paywalls remove that value, or require all of the people you share it with to already have subscriptions to everything else.
News has been paid for via advertisements for a lot longer than the internet. The subscription fees for Newspapers really only covered the printing and distribution costs, while the reporters' salaries were paid for via advertising.
The problem is that the advertising has gotten TOO intrusive. It isn't just a banner ad anymore. It is a ton of banners speckled between every other paragraph on the page. As soon as advertising gets in the way, people will look to get around it.
I have found that I am overly sensitive to almost all forms of push-advertising (as opposed to pull-advertising where I am looking for marketing materials on something I want to research). I have browser ad blockers as well as DNS based ones on my wifi. I also watch very little broadcast TV. I have no problem waiting for a season of a TV show to be on DVD so I can watch it without breaks, or the annoying banners that pop up while watching.
I don't understand why so many people are making concessions towards advertisements. Yes, some aren't too bad, but at the end of the day all advertising is just brainwashing you to buy more things. If we're going to dream about an alternate universe where the internet was better, we don't need to compromise with our imaginations.
I'm not inherently against the idea of advertising. I get why it exists, and I'm all for it. What I resent and have no intention of complying with, are the attempts at identifying me and collecting my data, as a means to 'manipulate' me into buying things. And, it also can't ruin my experience on the site. If advertisements were minimal and invasive, didn't try installing all kinds of ad/bloat-ware on my machine, you'd never see me making any attempt to protect myself against it.
i think most people would be fine with advertising, as long as it 1: isn't overly obnoxious, 2: isn't scammy and doesn't contain malware or other garbage, and 3: doesn't track you and everything you do. advertising itself isn't the problem, it's the way it's being currently handled on the internet that's the issue.
I run a website and get about 160GB worth of traffic on it per month, and 3TB a year for the files I'm hosting. You'd think it would cost a lot, but that's not true in my case.
The rough estimate is about 300 USD per year.
I have no ads, no referrals, no Google analytics, it's all paid out of my own pocket.
My point is, those companies are just greedy, servers cost less than they used to, and with services like cloudflare, it's even less of an issue.
I use uBlock Origin in Firefox, with all the boxes ticked. It's not only adds it blocks also plentiful of trackers. Just to make my visits on today's web usable. As a result, my laptops / smartphone resources are saved up, more battery time or cooler device as example.
Personally I like ads, totally ok for it - if informative, sharing some kind of relevant value with greater good. Companies should let the product or service itself advertise, not throw these on people constantly.
This is why I whitelist duckduckgo in firefox in my ublock extension. I will gladly look at the relevant ads at the top of the list, knowing they are just that. I glance at them, most of the time it's a sales pitch, I go "not interested" and just move down the page to the results. 100% fine with that.
I don't know if it's the theme I use on DDG or what, but I've seen ads barely marked as such in the search results.
I'm all for non-intrusive (video/sound) ads, but I think not making text ads obvious is not good behavior. Especially if they call themselves an alternative to the ad-addicted search engines.
I'm working on a home project, so when I search on ddg for "how to build raised garden boxes" I get some "shopping" links with the word "ads" right next to it clearly visible, which I instantly skip over, then two text results labeled clearly as "ads" then the actual results. One text result is a sales pitch for a premade garden box and the other is a link to a video instruction (which I'm assuming will also have a sales pitch) so I can easily skip over those two links and now I'm at the results. No video or sound at all and it's all labeled as such for me. I'm using a default "dark" theme under the appearance settings.
What I'm saying is that the ad looks like a search result. A little "ad" next to it doesn't make it stand out for me. In some themes, that has the same color as the link title. I've clicked on them more than once thinking it's an actual result (my eyesight is not the best, I know).
The ad block should have a distinct color scheme based on the overall theme chosen. Otherwise, I consider it dishonest.
Personally I'm starting to try just paying for search with neeva and kagi. Not sure it's worth what kagi wants, but neeva is inside my yearly threshold.
The first big problem was malware in ads (and web in general). This has caused people to install adblocks on their parents' and friends' devices.
Then there were the annoying ads: autoplaying videos, popups and other shit. This has caused a lot of normies to install adblockers themselves.
Then the privacy concerns, where even basic users notice that they look at a product on one store and now the recommendations follow them everywhere.
But the marketing companies keep pushing, and the OS providers like Google, MS and Apple keep restricting what you can install on your machine, this is a full-on war between users and the big tech.
Nobody was complaining about small banner ads. But they just have to keep pushing and break things. It's like with banks, or mythological creatures - insatiable.
Everybody hated banner ads. The first adblockers were targeting banner ads, and they were the beginning of the arms race. Advertising? On the Internet? Not a chance!
Maybe my memory doesn't go quite as far. But still, I believe adblockers didn't take off in such a huge ways until we've seen all those popups, malware and other shit on a massive scale.
I feel like that's where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn't a privacy and fee nightmare, I'm sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.
But I also fear a lot of the damage could've been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.
I like your suggestion with easily payable small amounts. Because the way payment currently works is just not scale-able on an individual level. Sure, $20 per month for a technical news site would be worth it ... if that was the only news site you are consuming. But it isn't. I consume multiple tech news, local news, etc. I can't get back my full worth of spent money per site, because my time is split between multiple sites; and my time is finite.
I also can't just say "well, this month I consume only site A, next only site B, etc.", because that defeats how "news" work. In the end I skim headlines (or even sometimes content) and THEN it shows what is actually of interest and where I stay longer/dig deeper/actually read full.
In a perfect world we probably could have a "tip jar" at the end of every article that people throw in digital cash when the article was worth it. Unfortunately too many people would abuse it and simply not pay at all, so authors will have to ask for payment upfront ... but then I pay for something which I don't even know will be good. Maybe after seeing the full article (not yet reading it in detail) I realize it's not the kind of content I hoped for.
That thing was indeed easier with print media. You go to the store, flick through the magazine/paper and if you like it you pay for it and go read it.
I worked for a startup in the 90s, pre-enshittification, that wanted to empower micropayments on the web. Obviously, even when mostly "frictionless", users rejected the concept. Capitalism is going capitalize, but this is also the fault of users who demand "free".
Nowadays there is crypto, some of it is already perfect for micropayments. But it needs to be integrated into the browser/app to be truly frictionless, and there should be a "get your money back" option for the content that's click bait and not worth the asking price. Unfortunately the largest browsers are Chrome and Edge, by companies who aren't all that interesting in changing the way things are.
I am pretty convinced crypto as it currently is is 99% a scam or a way to waste a lot of money compared to a traditional financial transfer. It's made worse by the environmental impacts of mining. Crypto would have to be something completely different before it'll take off for any kind of traditional payment system. And I actually think we just need the government to mandate a better bank to bank payment system with no fees like they have in Europe. Anything else is too fragmented which means friction in use and higher fees converting between the competing systems.
You're not wrong, but not all crypto is the same. Some have switched to "proof of stake" which removes all the energy wasted on mining, some allow to write programs into it that can execute automatically to do some interesting things, and some allow sending fractions (thousandths, millionths) of a USD with barely a transaction fee.
Even in Europe, free bank-to-bank transfers take a couple days to execute (there is a paid option for instant transfers), and have a minimum of 0.01€ which might or might not be what you want to tip/pay someone for their content.
I know about that stuff, but I just don't see how you fix the fundamental problems of crypto without turning it into basically another ACH anyway. I.e. to regulate out the scammers, enable people to reverse transfers, tamp down on the straight out pump and dump schemes, wallet hacking / securing, the central exchanges going bust or being a scam themselves...
I just think that by the time you make it equivalent to Visa or PayPal for end users, you've now made it basically one of those.
this is also the fault of users who demand “free”.
This is in my opinion the crux of the matter. People want content for free: they won't pay for it directly and they won't watch ads (because they're often much too intrusive.) Of course the root problem is the economic system, but barring a near global revolution that's not going to change
Especially now that cost of living is through the roof. Who can afford to pay for content online when they can't even afford to feed themselves every day?
I could imagine it functioning as a tax-funded budget, but coordinating such a thing globally and coming to a consensus seems impossible, that's something we're really bad at, and it would have the very same underfunding problems as other even more urgent expenses have.
As an existing alternative to ad-funded sites, I've seen non-profit news survive on donations and tax deductions, so maybe strengthening that model could work, but it would only help with larger entities that can be registered.
We need something to replace ads, that's for sure, or at least decrease their influence.
No it didn't. Running a server today is dirt cheap compared to the bad old days. So is registering a domain. Getting a TLS certificate doesn't cost anything at all.
However, there are a lot more people here now. It used to be you could feasibly run a moderately popular website off a single server and it'd be fine. Now, with billions of people on the Internet, you need an army of servers distributed around the world if your site gets even remotely popular.
But also the consent banners are just clumsy and annoying.
That's a feature, not a bug. Consent banners were manufactured as a way to turn public opinion against GDPR and generate political pressure to repeal it. “Look at how those Europeans ruined the web!” GDPR was supposed to pressure these unscrupulous advertisers into giving up their spooky tracking, but they did this instead. And it's working—most people blame GDPR for ruining the web, not the sleazeballs who actually ruined it.
Sure, servers are cheaper now. Domains are cheap now. TLS certs are free now. But that happened after the advertising business model became dominant.
For a while, server power was barely keeping up with the rise in demand, and you couldn't just add another cloud server or bump up the RAM allocation on the one you have, you had to physically install new hardware. That took a larger chunk of money than adding $5 to your hosting plan, and time to set up the hardware.
By the time the tech stack got significantly cheaper (between faster hardware and virtualization, not to mention Let's Encrypt), advertising was already entrenched and starting to coalesce around a handful of big networks.
This is revisionist, that sequence of events was what caused him to start to play footsie with the idea of buying Twitter, the SEC saying that’s a big no-no is what made him actually make the offer to buy it and then he was forced by a court to finish the deal after a long legal battle to not buy it
Don’t forget the part where Dorsey literally conned him by playing to his ego. Jack cashed out almost a billion in cash to himself even though Twitter was close to bankruptcy. It was brilliant.
What cracks me up the most is that Jack already had a Twitter clone in the works, ready to be released once Musk burns down the old plattform and people wish for Twitter but without Musk back.
Genuine question: given that running a platform like that costs money, and that money must come from somewhere, what would you actually do if you were in charge of running it? You either take money from advertisers, or you charge users directly, and I'd hazard to guess that if you'd nuke your account upon seeing ads, you probably wouldn't pay actual money to use it.
Not the person you were speaking to, but get nationalised or run on donations as a non-profit.
But I do pay more than my share for most fediverse instances that I use (which reminds me, I use this one enough - should probably make my donation regular)
Honestly, I would love to see a Wikipedia-style social media platform take off, but I really don't know if the finances could work out. Wikipedia already struggles, and it's obscenely useful. I don't think nationalization is really feasible for social media - at least in an American context - because it would be subject to the government's legal limitations on regulating free speech, which are extremely minimal. A federally run platform would not be able to remove literal unironic Nazism, which is probably going to be a bit of a turn-off to normal people.
Not really, no. Freedom of speech is very strongly ingrained in our Constitution. The only legal restrictions on it are essentially direct threats or incitement of violence.
"Go kill this Jew" - Absolutely illegal.
"Go kill the Jews" - Illegal
"The Jews should be killed" - Borderline based on circumstances
"The Jews deserve to die" - Borderline, but probably protected by the Constitution
"The Jews deserved the Holocaust" - Almost certainly protected by the Constitution
Thank you for the breakdown. I had some vague conception of American free speech protections being pretty intense, but this illustrates the individual distinctions well
I mean it’s pretty damned true though. Reddit won their stupid fight. They were always going to. Yeah they lost a lot of users, but there still a ton of users left.
They probably paid for the title but the article isn’t actually that peachy, I’d say its assessment is accurate. The Reddit sub protest is over, and technically spez got his way, but the platform has been damaged and may recover or may begin to die out and be replaced.
I doubt it given the way the article ends- it suggests that while reddit’s leadership got it’s way, that the incident might still have damaged the platform’s reputation and that in the long term reddit might not be successful in it’s attempts to be profitable either. I’d imagine a paid article would have a more positive or confidence-inducing message than that.
I dunno. I could go for one about him launching himself to Mars in a carbon-fiber & titanium capsule, piloting via gamepad, ya know? Especially if he brought Bezos, the Koch bros. & Gates along. 🤷🏼♂️ It’d save time at least on setting up the ol’ woodchipper down the road, ya know?
I mean, yeah. That’s not great. But he’s not hellbent on election fraud, reinventing the concept of a train a million times over just to sell cars, not in some evil plot that I know of, just to name a few of the things most billionaires do. I’m sure there are bad sides to him, human after all, but he seems to do more good than bad in my perception with his foundation and seems to care about global health and well-being.
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