A reminder from Craigslist's Craig Newmark that the owners of the big tech platforms don't need to hoard billions of dollars #craigslist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKfg69v-X3g

Legalese is a signal. Lawyers use it to signal expertise (and to exclude others), and some clients are reassured by it being difficult to understand. Reminds me of phatic expression; a communication which primarily serves to establish or maintain social relationships. cr. https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study-explains-laws-incomprehensible-writing-style-0819 #law

More: "Since ChatGPT’s launch, Chegg has lost more than half a million subscribers who pay up to $19.95 a month for prewritten answers to textbook questions and on-demand help from experts. Its stock is down 99% from early 2021, erasing some $14.5 billion of market value. Bond traders have doubts the company will continue bringing in enough cash to pay its debts."

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-chatgpt-brought-down-an-online-education-giant-200b4ff2

#openai #chatgpt #chegg #ai #seo

Here, @pluralistic neatly distills the real problem with Bluesky ...

... which is that, because they don't offer a way to quickly leave *and take all your followers with you*, as Mastodon does ...

... it risks becoming a trap. You spend months, years, building up connections to tons of cool people ...

... and then Bluesky enshittifies, not because of any individual terrible decision, but because of a ton of small forced-hand ones

The essay: https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/02/ulysses-pact/#tie-yourself-to-a-federated-mast

Anyway, TL;DR, impressed and fascinated as I am by LLMs and GPTs as technology, the things we're using them for are just dumb and, in many cases, dangerous.

The more of these artificial liars get rolled out, the more we have to choose between believing everything the machine says -- which is lunacy -- or believing nothing that it says -- which is exhausting.

6/

Example:
https://www.reddit.com/r/london/comments/1gdi7ct/the_queue_for_angus_steakhouse_today/

Humans will always find a way around the algorithms.

Redditors Are Trying to Poison Google’s AI to Keep Tourists Out of the Good Restaurants

https://gizmodo.com/redditors-are-trying-to-poison-googles-ai-to-keep-tourists-out-of-the-good-restaurants-2000516156 #ai

Seeing messages saying WP Engine customers have lost all access to Wordpress updates etc.

The plugins, uploads etc can be downloaded directly, then uploaded into your Wordpress website. It's less convenient, but achievable. #wordpress

@mike_moran @fatrat Charity Majors wrote a fantastic piece about that a few months ago https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jun/12/generative-ai-is-not-going-to-build-your-engineering-team/

Ga4 reporting is more delayed than usual for 22 Aug. Many sites just seeing 0.

#ga4 #analytics

Easy to overlook the artistry of this popular video clip by athlete & video creator Hero DW.
- Meme: English or Spanish (freeze)
- Audio: Lyrics juxtaposed against fun stunt and sunshine. Tiktok version of Static by Steve Lacy
- Editing trickery - artifacts around feet

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/bGnmZ8NxUVE

The Independent's £4/m value proposition depletes its reputation and customer goodwill. Instead of "support our high quality journalism", it's: "pay us or we'll sell your data to people who must be dodgy otherwise there'd be no need to pay to avoid them". #subscriptions #news

Difficult to quantify to interesting https://mastodon.me.uk/@danluu@mastodon.social/110499276003285996

Apparently the Digg "algorithm", back when it worked, was one human being?

I've seen a few lists of "do things that don't scale" success stories, because VCs and founders love to write up survivorship bias success porn, but I'd be much more interested in a collection that included both successes and failures so that you could at least attempt to figure out what differentiated the successes and the failures.

📝 Did you know that you can follow UK voter registration data in real time?

🙋‍♀️ 151,373 people registered to vote in the UK yesterday, which was the last day to register to take part in the 2 May elections.

👀 View the government dashboard here: https://www.registertovote.service.gov.uk/performance

@politicalscience #ukpolitics #democracy #voterRegistration

Wendy's using "AI" / LLMs for customer service in the US. We'll be seeing a lot more of this. Video via @brittanyann_222 on Tiktok. #AI #LLM

A reminder that after the recent solar eclipse, there was a spike in Google searches for "eyes hurt".

#SEO

Good episode of the critically acclaimed wonderful The Barbara Gaines Show! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z99Yr5IsOr4 #letterman

Perhaps the (often unspoken) mass appeal customer problem that the AI LLMs are solving is not efficiency / productivity - but thinking itself? Lots of us don't like to think, we'd prefer a machine to do it for us?

Reminds me of that research that suggested "People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts"

https://www.science.org/content/article/people-would-rather-be-electrically-shocked-left-alone-their-thoughts

#AI #LLMs

Gregg Wallace, the anthem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqXCehqYVsY