Made with Dalle.
Four years is being extremely optimistic, in my opinion.
Category: Other Page 13 of 177
I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
The whole piece is worth a read.
Personally, I go one step (or several) farther: I will simply not join any new social platforms. Ever. Period. I even made some AI images to celebrate the occasion:
For me, it’s not a question of services that start out good and then gradually through market pressures enshittify – because that’s literally every platform. It’s more about my experience of the paradigm of social media – at base – is already fundamentally profoundly shitty.
I don’t want *any part* of my experience of life to be ruled by likes, follows, subscription membership counts, traffic analytics (I have none on this site), etc. etc. It’s a train that goes on and on forever and you cannot get off, and all the other passengers are hostile as hell, and there is no food and nowhere to sleep or go to the bathroom. Why people still participate in that shit and why they expect it to be any different with a new coat of paint and new management is so beyond me that its unfathomable at this point.
You should be able to mention anyone on the web publicly, from anywhere, and have them be able to get it (if they want).
Google Alerts kinda almost does this, but usually only for “news” sources (many of which are questionable), and its a closed system.
I don’t know much about them, but talking with ChatGPT is leading me to believe that elements of such a concept exist already in Webmention and ActivityPub, but they would require participants in it to adopt compatible technological approaches.
My idea is much more broad than that, and as someone posting a blog or a tweet or a toot or a flutter or whatevertf people call them now, you would just say whatever you’re gonna say, to whomever you feel the need to address, publish it – and somehow, magically, it would be available to that person, or any person, since it is publicly available, just like a search result.
PublicPing
ChatGPT and I are calling this system PublicPing right now for lack of a better name. The idea goes something like this (my text):
- PublicPing bridges siloed systems by providing a universal way to observe mentions, making it easier for users on different platforms to engage with the same public conversations.
- So that would go like:
- A blogger mentions a person’s name in a post.
- Many diverse automated observers index and process natural language mentions of peoples’ names (or other identifiers) from public blogs and other open public sources.
- Observers collate these mentions from sources they observe according to their own criteria into public
PingFeedsthat anyone can view or subscribe to updates from. - People can subscribe to PingFeeds for mentions of their own name/s or identity/s, and since PingFeeds are always public, anyone else can subscribe to them just the same.
- The system is agnostic about the identity of people who post mentions and consumers of a PingFeed. It simply observes, collates, and retransmits mentions into a common format.
- Such a system would allow us to have conversations as people across different technological systems, without having to be locked into any one of them.
- We could publish how and where we like, and read public PingFeeds where and how we like too. No one would own this simple open framework or have a monopoly on how we communicate with one another online.
- To participate in the system, you would just publish your thoughts – anywherere, publicly, and mention someone in them.
- We would not need to agree to become anyone’s “users,” nor be subjected to the whims, restrictions, policies or bad UX of malicious owners or bumbling admins.
- PublicPing should remain simple and accessible by avoiding unnecessary technological complexity like cryptocurrency or blockchain.
- Observers would instead be incentivized to act by serving the common good of public civic discourse.
- The framework is open, non-proprietary, and free for anyone to implement, ensuring no single entity controls the system.
- Multiple independent observers ensure resilience, transparency, and diversity in how mentions are indexed and shared.
- Observers faithfully re-transmit their findings based on public sources into corresponding public PingFeeds (unless doing so violates the law, etc. TK).
- Consumers of PingFeeds would be able to filter them according to their own custom criteria. (Example: “Only mentions from verified websites,” “Exclude mentions with profanity.”)
- Consumers decide on their own actions which they will take independently in their own way regarding items in PingFeeds (which could include ignoring them altogether).
- If consumers choose to respond to a mention, potentially proving their identity as the person originally mentioned is up to them and outside the scope of the PublicPing system, which merely observes, collates, and re-transmits public mentions into public PingFeeds without intervening or mediating.
- The system respects individual privacy, since it only deals in clearly publicly-available information. Does not harvest private or semi-private personal data (no private groups, no DMs, etc.).
- Something something spam, malicious uses, ethical concerns – the usual grab bag of stuff nobody wants to have to deal with but perpetually exists with any system, like it or not. So may as well consider it a feature not a bug at this point.
Anyway, a lot to chew on here, and yes much of it half-baked. But this seems like it would fit in with the Intertext Protocol as well…
Have been trying to use Signal in a way that is “slackier” where a specific set of group DMs are named like #slack-channel style. And one group has a short custom message retention period, and the other does not. It’s the kind of thing where with Slack having an entire workspace for just DMing one other person doesn’t always make sense (overkill). But in Signal it fits – kinda.
What would make it fit more is if I could select a couple of DMs from the list on the left (I am a Mac desktop Signal app user, and nowhere else), and have those groups/DMs/proto-”channels” live together as a visually differentiated set, indented, with the ability to name the cluster, and collapse or expand it. Small change that would make a big difference.
This is one of the best music websites I’ve ever come across, especially if you enjoy web-based radio, which I do (I have a portable handheld and fixed web radio that are separate from my computer).
Radioside is a browser-based web radio tuner, the best use of which I think is to power up and click the RND (random) button until you find something you like. Rinse, repeat. And save stations you like. I’ve been stuck on 100077, “Exclusively Supertramp” for the past few days. Loving it. So many good finds here, and an excellent way to find stations to listen to on other web or wifi-connected radio devices.
Via Perplexity.ai query on the topic, it did a good job summarizing.
The dark forest theory of the internet posits that users are retreating to private, closed online spaces to avoid the hostile environment of the public internet. This theory draws its name from Liu Cixin’s science fiction novel, where civilizations hide to avoid detection by potentially hostile aliens.
Key aspects of the dark forest theory include:
- Users seek shelter in private channels like Slack, WhatsApp groups, Discord chats, and invite-only message boards.
- These “dark forests” provide psychological and reputational safety, allowing users to be more authentic.
- The public internet is seen as a competitive, predatory space filled with advertisers, bots, trolls, and attention-seeking behavior.
- Communication in public spaces is viewed as risky, potentially exposing one’s existence to hostile entities.
- This retreat to private spaces is a response to the increasing noise, manipulation, and surveillance on mainstream platforms.
I’ve definitely been feeling this and reacting accordingly for years and years, and even more so lately, as I trust less and less mainstream apps in the hostile information space opening up to us in the coming months. I’m mostly abandoning Slack for that reason, and for it being an over-priced way to keep in touch with a small group of friends. I will be setting up the end-to-end encrypted Rocket Chat on a Digital Ocean droplet in the coming days, and have corralled some other remainder Dark Forest activity over to Signal.
Jay Springett has a good audio piece on this topic here as well. Worth a listen:
Looks like this 2019 post from Y Strickler is one of the original pieces on this topic, some choice quotes:
Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet, because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay quiet. […]
In response to the ads, the tracking, the trolling, the hype, and other predatory behaviors, we’re retreating to our dark forests of the internet, and away from the mainstream. […]
These are all spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. […]
Love this, another awesome blog site that has no tracking or analytics, like my own.
If yer wondering how I know Blogroll.org’s traffic levels, where folks are coming from, email open rates, etc.? I have no freakin’ idea and I’m okay with that.
It’s actually quite liberating. You should try it, too.
Besides way back in the beginning, websites had no clue either. Old school, baby!
I enjoyed this piece and appreciate that the Daily Grail is still going strong and putting out interesting quality content after all this time. Kudos to Greg!
‘Smart people’ are often the dumbest people you’ll ever meet, and in researching this article – watching numerous podcast and video interviews in which these ‘tech visionaries’ featured, or reading their writings – I discovered that many of these supposedly incredibly smart people are the dumbest motherfuckers you’d ever meet, with zero ability for introspection or emotional intelligence.
CoEvil is the 123rd installment of the AI Lore Books series. It depicts a near future/present where government devolves into an entirely privatized hyper-capitalist dystopia where society is divided into strict “subscription tiers.” Until, like in many of my books – especially the recent ones – things completely fall apart and reality starts disintegrating at the seams. The book is, er, inspired by “current events” and builds on storylines developed in previous books like The Continuity Codex, some others, and The Algorithm #5, which I think I may put up for sale as its own thing in the coming weeks as well.
This is the first book to use Recraft extensively for image generation, and the results are in general pretty good. I would call it a cut above maybe Ideogram. There are also a lot of janky Firefly images in here – a janky quality that I like, reminiscent in its way of early Stable Diffusion combined with the feelz of Adobe Stock images. There are also a handful of Dalle’s thrown in for good measure.
The text is a combination of my own writing with help from Mistral & Llama via Textsynth, like pretty much all the latest books I put out this year.
This is the first book to glancingly reference what I am calling “Natalitarianism,” which I plan to also make as the centerpiece of the next book or so, depending how things go. Enjoy!
I have a lot of horses in this particular race, but this quote from AP coverage just strikes me as wrong:
And what will happen when some of Jones’ casual fans who didn’t follow the news of the bankruptcy auction log on to Infowars in a few months only to find the Onion’s new creation? Probably not much, said Beran, who suggested it’s unlikely there’s much overlap between people attracted by conspiracy theories and those who want to mock them.
In my experience, there is actually a *great deal* of overlap between those two groups… But I think that’s not a drawback, that’s another thing in the plus column!