Gavin Newsom wants 28th Amendment for guns in U.S. Constitution. The amendment doesn’t go far enough. Swing for the fences. Repeal the Second Amendment outright.
OpenAI Hit With First Defamation Suit Over ChatGPT Hallucination. A Georgia radio host is suing OpenAI after ChatGPT generated a fictional embezzlement suit against him.
The Apollo story is even uglier. Apparently, Reddit CEO Huffman is telling people that Apollo developer Christian Selig tried to blackmail Reddit for $10 million. Selig says that’s bullshit and he has recordings to prove it.
According to Selig, he said something on a call with Reddit officials that the officials initially took as blackmail. He said it was nothing of the kind, and explained himself, and the Reddit officials apologized—five times.
Enshittifying the Internet seems to be a theme this week. In addition to Reddit knifing third-party apps, Wordpress is adding generative AI capabilities to its blogging software, which will only lead to an explosion in clickbait search engine spam. It’s a naked revenue grab by Wordpress’s parent company, Automattic, at the expense of making the Internet vastly less usable for the rest of us. I thought Automattic was better than that.
Today is a day of petty disappointments. I’ve had a couple of business developments that are discouraging. Hopefully, they’ll come to nothing, but they’re discouraging in the moment.
Also, my five-year-old Macbook Pro is getting flaky. I’ve noticed the Internet slows to a crawl at lunchtime. Do you know what I like to do at lunch? Read things on the Internet. Do you know what I don’t like doing at lunch? Troubleshooting network problems.
Because the Macbook is so old, I routinely reboot it in the morning to optimize performance. Today, I also had to reboot it at lunch to make those networking problems go away. Yesterday, I returned from stepping away from my desk and found the MacBook had spontaneously rebooted itself, which is never a good sign.
I do not have a new MacBook in the budget this year.
I’m disappointed that Reddit is jacking up its API pricing and forcing developer Christian Selig to shut down his Reddit app Apollo. It’s one of my favorite iPhone and iPad apps. It feels like Reddit is flipping a big fat middle finger to me and many other people who enjoyed using Apollo.
I use Apollo to find about half of the memes, vintage ads, vintage photos, and other found media that I post regularly to Facebook and Tumblr. If you’ve enjoyed seeing those, then Reddit is flipping you the bird too.
I also use Tumblr to find those found media, and I’m not thrilled with the direction Tumblr is taking either.
UPDATE: A friend reminds me that Reddit is essentially killing all third-party apps, not just Apollo.
To me the Macintosh has always felt more like a place than a thing. Not a place I go physically, but a place my mind goes intellectually. When I’m working or playing and in the flow, it has always felt like MacOS is where I am. I’m in the Mac. Interruptions — say, the doorbell or my phone ringing — are momentarily disorienting when I’m in the flow on the Mac, because I’m pulled out of that world and into the physical one.
— John Gruber, Daring Fireball: First Impressions of Vision Pro and VisionOS
Yes! And the same is true for me on the iPad and also on the iPhone (but less so). And it’s not specific to Apple products; it’s true for any computer, tablet or phone.
And when I go to Facebook or other social media platforms or read RSS feeds, it’s like traveling to other places. Indeed, it sometimes surprises me to think how much time I spend physically in one room of the house because it feels like I’ve been out and about all day.
Gruber is discussing this feeling of placeness in the context of the Apple Vision Pro, which he tried, and how it will vastly enhance the sense of place when using computers.
The most impressive feature of Vision Pro is that it enables you to hang multiple virtual 4K displays all around your field of vision, some as big as the broadest widescreen TVs.
Gruber again:
Last night I chatted with a friend who, I found out only then, has been using Vision Pro for months inside Apple. … he spent weeks feeling a bit constrained, keeping his open VisionOS windows all in front of him as though on a virtual display, before a colleague opened his mind to spreading out and making applications windows much larger and arranging them in a wider carousel not merely in front of him but around him. The constraints of even the largest physical display simply do not exist with VisionOS.
I absolutely expect to buy the Vision Pro. But not at its opening price of $3,500. We don’t have that kind of money lying around (especially because Julie wants one too). But I expect the price will come down to an affordable range in three to five years.
No, a rogue AI drone simulation did not kill its operator, despite recent news reports. Why make up a story about something like that? Because it enforces the narrative that AI is super-powerful and threatens human extinction, which is bullshit. But it’s profitable bullshit for AI grifters, who are literally the same people who were peddling crytop/blockchain grift untill last year.
Cory Doctorow:
If the problem with “AI” (neither “artificial,” nor “intelligent”) is that it is about to become self-aware and convert the entire solar system to paperclips, then we need a moonshot to save our species from these garish harms.
If, on the other hand, the problem is that AI systems just _suck _and shouldn’t be trusted to fly drones, or drive cars, or decide who gets bail, or identify online hate-speech, or determine your creditworthiness or insurability, then all those AI companies are out of business.
Take away every consequential activity through which AI harms people, and all you’ve got left is low-margin activities like writing SEO garbage, lengthy reminisces about “the first time I ate an egg” that help an omelette recipe float to the top of a search result. Sure, you can put 95 percent of the commercial illustrators on the breadline, but their total wages don’t rise to one percent of the valuation of the big AI companies.
For those sky-high valuations to remain intact until the investors can cash out, we need to think about AI as a powerful, transformative technology, not as a better autocomplete.
We literally just sat through this movie, and it sucked. Remember when blockchain was going to be worth trillions, and anyone who didn’t get in on the ground floor could “have fun being poor?”
At the time, we were told that the answer to the problems of blockchain were exotic, new forms of regulation that accommodated the “innovation” of crypto. Under no circumstances should we attempt to staunch the rampant fraud and theft by applying boring old securities and commodities and money-laundering regulations. To do that would be to recognize that “fin-tech” is just a synonym for “unlicensed bank.”
The pitchmen who made out like bandits on crypto — leaving mom-and-pop investors holding the bag — are precisely the same people who are beating the drum for AI today.
Ted Cruz is citing the Bible and preaching on Twitter in defense of gay people, and it’s quite something. I suspect that Cruz is trying to play some kind of five-dimensional chess here that will actually turn out to be anti-LGBTQ when the story comes out in full.
Why Is Everyone Watching TV With the Subtitles On?. By Devin Gordon at The Atlantic. Good article, but takes a long way to get to the real explanation, which is that the sound quality of streaming TV is rubbish.
I have a pet theory that a four- or even three-star review would be fine in a rational universe. Ride in an Uber, and the driver gets you there safely, on time and the driver is reasonably personable? Three stars.
Four stars if the driver gets you there on time despite traffic, helps you with a massive amount of luggage, or you have a fascinating conversation.
Save the five-star reviews if you have a cardiac event and the driver restarts your heart.
But because I am not a sociopath, I do like everybody else and routinely give five-star reviews for acceptable service. I rarely give as low as four stars because I know that’s a big deal for the gig worker who provided the service.
I, for one, appreciate Roman numerals.
AI chatbots lose money every time you use them. That’s a problem.. By Will Oremus at The Washington Post
Businesses are laying off writers because ChatGPT can do the job. What will those businesses do when AI companies stop giving away the product?
On this day of the big annual Apple product launch, I’m remembering that day many years ago when Julie and I went to the Terminator experience at the Universal Studios theme park on vacation.
All these theme park experiences have the same storyline: The audience is supposedly dignitaries taking a VIP tour of some science-fiction location. And Something Goes Terribly Wrong, and the special effects start going off around you.
In the case of the Terminator experience, the audience–which included me and Julie that day–were supposedly journalists at a press conference for Cyberdyne Systems, unveiling its new Terminator model robot soldier.
And, of course, the Terminator runs amok and starts blowing things up and disrupts the press conference.
The funny thing is that I am a journalist, and Julie did tech PR for most of her career. And we have both been to a million product launch press conferences.
So there we were on vacation doing a science fiction simulation of the exact same things we did at work every day.
Writing a corporate blog this morning, I was able to dodge using the word “paradigm,” but I couldn’t resist “holistic” and “actionable.”
Coming back from the grocery store, I dropped six bottles of iced tea in the driveway and gave the neighborhood children vocabulary lessons.
When reading genre novels, often my favorite parts are the parts before the bad things start happening.
That’s particularly true for Stephen King. I want the Torrances to have a nice winter at the Overlook Hotel.
It’s true most of all for one of my favorite of his novels, “11/23/63.” I loved the story of a rootless man from 2010 Maine who finds community and love in 1960 Texas. I was far less interested in the hunt to stop Lee Harvey Oswald.
Idea for the beginning of a horror story: A friend mentioned recently that he works in a six-story building. His job takes him up and down from floor to floor all day. He likes to use the stairs instead of the elevator. To clear his mind, he counts the stairs as he goes.
Here’s the story idea: One day, the count changes.
Stephen King, if you’re reading this—no charge.