I love that people were like ‘wahh, I never use all that power in my iPad Pro for anything!' so Apple designers + engineers went 'sick, that means we can render high-poly 3d tools with this new Apple Pencil Pro to cast dynamic shadows at 120fps’
Like many other technologists, I gave my time and expertise for free to #StackOverflow because the content was licensed CC-BY-SA - meaning that it was a public good. It brought me joy to help people figure out why their #ASR code wasn't working, or assist with a #CUDA bug.
Now that a deal has been struck with #OpenAI to scrape all the questions and answers in Stack Overflow, to train #GenerativeAI models, like #LLMs, without attribution to authors (as required under the CC-BY-SA license under which Stack Overflow content is licensed), to be sold back to us (the SA clause requires derivative works to be shared under the same license), I have issued a Data Deletion request to Stack Overflow to disassociate my username from my Stack Overflow username, and am closing my account, just like I did with Reddit, Inc.
The data I helped create is going to be bundled in an #LLM and sold back to me.
In a single move, Stack Overflow has alienated its community - which is also its main source of competitive advantage, in exchange for token lucre.
Stack Exchange, Stack Overflow's former instantiation, used to fulfill a psychological contract - help others out when you can, for the expectation that others may in turn assist you in the future. Now it's not an exchange, it's #enshittification.
Programmers now join artists and copywriters, whose works have been snaffled up to create #GenAI solutions.
The silver lining I see is that once OpenAI creates LLMs that generate code - like Microsoft has done with Copilot on GitHub - where will they go to get help with the bugs that the generative AI models introduce, particularly, given the recent GitClear report, of the "downward pressure on code quality" caused by these tools?
While this is just one more example of #enshittification, it's also a salient lesson for #DevRel folks - if your community is your source of advantage, don't upset them.
Electronic Frontier Alliance members get support from a community of like-minded grassroots organizers from across the US. If your group wants to help defend our digital rights, consider joining today. https://eff.org/join-EFA
From 7 March, the designated gatekeepers – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft – must comply with all obligations in the Digital Markets Act.
These changes give you control of your:
📱 data: decide freely how your data is used
📱 phone: choose your default apps, browsers and search engines
📱 apps: install the apps you want and remove pre-installed apps
We sat down with @JSPartyFM for 2 hours to talk about the history of OWA, the Digital Markets Act, Apple's attempt to kill web apps & the fight for the future of the web! 🎉
#Budget#UKPolitics This article by Gary Stevenson is so good, please read every word of it.
“Whatever Jeremy Hunt says, traders know the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. And they’re paid millions to bet on it.”
This is what the world is - it is run by a minute elite for a minute elite and the rest of us, the masses, the natural world, we just don’t count. It is a #TragedyOftheNonCommons (will reshare my own piece on this below 1/n)
In an age of LLMs, is it time to reconsider human-edited web directories?
Back in the early-to-mid '90s, one of the main ways of finding anything on the web was to browse through a web directory.
These directories generally had a list of categories on their front page. News/Sport/Entertainment/Arts/Technology/Fashion/etc.
Each of those categories had subcategories, and sub-subcategories that you clicked through until you got to a list of websites. These lists were maintained by actual humans.
Typically, these directories also had a limited web search that would crawl through the pages of websites listed in the directory.
Lycos, Excite, and of course Yahoo all offered web directories of this sort.
(EDIT: I initially also mentioned AltaVista. It did offer a web directory by the late '90s, but this was something it tacked on much later.)
By the late '90s, the standard narrative goes, the web got too big to index websites manually.
Google promised the world its algorithms would weed out the spam automatically.
And for a time, it worked.
But then SEO and SEM became a multi-billion-dollar industry. The spambots proliferated. Google itself began promoting its own content and advertisers above search results.
And now with LLMs, the industrial-scale spamming of the web is likely to grow exponentially.
My question is, if a lot of the web is turning to crap, do we even want to search the entire web anymore?
Do we really want to search every single website on the web?
Or just those that aren't filled with LLM-generated SEO spam?
Or just those that don't feature 200 tracking scripts, and passive-aggressive privacy warnings, and paywalls, and popovers, and newsletters, and increasingly obnoxious banner ads, and dark patterns to prevent you cancelling your "free trial" subscription?
At some point, does it become more desirable to go back to search engines that only crawl pages on human-curated lists of trustworthy, quality websites?
And is it time to begin considering what a modern version of those early web directories might look like?
"But Meta’s version of consent offers users a Hobson’s choice — of paying at least €9.99/month for an ad-free subscription (per each account they have on Facebook and Instagram); or agreeing to its tracking.
No other choices are available, despite the GDPR stipulating that for consent to be a valid legal basis for processing people’s information it must be freely given."
Dzisiaj moje polecajki (i niepolecajki) muzyczne będą krótkie, bo dokończyłem playlistę "do przesłuchania" i pod koniec nie było aż tak dobrze.
EDIT: Właśnie skończyłem pisać - nie są takie krótkie.
Kill the Client - nieistniejący już grindcore z USA, który robi to, co ma robić. Jest mocno, jest szybko, a nazwa pewnie odzwierciedla powody, dla których panowie nie chcieli pracować na etacie. Można sprawdzić - nie spodziewajcie się cudów, ale przyjemnie atakuje uszy.
Ferment - być może pamiętacie, jak pisałem o Porońcu. O ile się nie mylę, Ferment to inny zespół tego samego składu i jest to bardzo dobry i satysfakcjonujący black metal, które warto dać szansę. To trochę ten typ, w którym muzyka swoje, a wokal swoje, tzn. wiadomo, że one się wiążą, ale warstwa głosowa przypomina bardziej krzyk rozpaczy przy okazji warstwy instrumentalnej. To nie jest wada (poza tym pewnie opowiadam głupoty), a wręcz buduje klimat. Warto sprawdzić - jest szybko, potępieńczo, ale dużo tutaj równowagi i klimatu beznadziejności.
Dodsrit - mam wrażenie, że pisałem już kiedyś o tym blackmetalowym (wg Metallum to black metal/crust) zespole ze Szwecji. Utwory są długie i przede wszystkim chodzi tutaj o nasiąknięcie klimatem. Tempo zdecydowanie nie jest najszybsze i są nawet solówki oraz melodyjne riffy. To nie znaczy, że nie ma tutaj tempa, ale na pewno nie są to co chwilę blasty. Wokal nieco wycofany, kompletnie niezrozumiały, ale satysfakcjonujący i czuć, że wokalista chce wypluć płuca.
Dark Oath - melodyjny symfoniczny death metal z Portugalii z kobiecym wokalem. Dobrze się tego słucha od strony instrumentalnej - faktycznie czuć tę podniosłość (tym najbardziej zwraca uwagę ten zespół), poszczególne dźwięki gitary i jest całkiem szybko. Trochę nie pasuje mi tutaj właśnie rzeczony głos, ale to raczej kwestia osobistej preferencji dużo niższego i niezrozumiałego wokalu.