Business
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Don’t fall in
AI shit gets so weird. For example, the fake golfer Grace (aka Gracie) Brooks appeared in the midst of my Facebook doomscrolling (above) to say something to me (scrolled across her boobage) about “an older guy” watching her. Never saw her before, or cared to see her. But I am curious about “her” business model.… Continue reading
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Performing a pooplic service
When a whole business category is fubar, and its members together exemplify enshittification better than each does alone, I suggest we speak of their collectivity as a fecosystem. I’ve been using that word since 2016, and bring it up now because these two posts about the subscription industry‘s fecosystem have been getting action lately, and I… Continue reading
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Hey Europe: Make Privacy a Contract
Anu Bradford‘s book, The Brussels Effect: How the European Union Rules the World (Oxford, 2019), hardly exaggerates the EU’s influence. Many EU regulations have global reach, especially in respect to personal privacy. And for that we should be grateful, because the US and China mostly don’t give a shit. On the other hand, every cookie… Continue reading
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Why Charlotte Should Build a Museum of Broadcasting in the Antenna Age
In the foreground are three towers standing on nineteen acres in Charlotte’s south side. They transmit the signal of WBT/1110 AM, a 50,000-watt giant, with a signal that stretches from Canada to Cuba at night: WBT-AM was born 104 years ago and is about to die, because the land under its towers is worth more… Continue reading
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Linkalongday
War prep redux Given the size of my corpus here, most visiting to it, on most days, is to old stuff. One currently getting some action is Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky, which I posted ten years ago. I've shot its scenes (five of them) often since then, while… Continue reading
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Boomerangday
Just the Anthropocene, rolling along The photo above was shared in a group I’m in. It was photographed by ornithologist and naturalist Robert Ridgway in November 1875. The tree is identified as an American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) in the lower Wabash River bottoms of Gibson County, Indiana, across the river from Mount Carmel, Illinois, Ridgeway’s… Continue reading
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Undeadlines
Here is some stuff I’ve noticed, thought about, or wrapped up, while ending a summer of travel and work (the order is random): Continue reading
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What next for Hugging Face?
Nvidia just bought Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. That’s what Reuters says The Information says. The latter is behind an expensive paywall, so I’ll take Reuters’ word for it. In The Price Of Independence Was $5.9 Billion, AI Secret says, 🌍 How this hits reality: Last year, Hugging Face turned down a $500 million investment from Nvidia at… Continue reading
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Pryday
Because “consent” is a fiction Pre-consent tracking is the norm. Prophesy When MyTerms succeeds, CMP—Consent Management Platforms—will mean Contract Management Platforms. These will be contracts you and I proffer and sites and services accept. I look forward to CMPs having a new job. From the Annals of Enshittification Seth Godin on The Amazon Tax: “Amazon… Continue reading
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You can hear the squeak of sphincters closing
How Claude marks AI-generated content is the most self-destructive utterance I’ve ever heard coming out of an AI company. Gary Isaac Wolfe (who contributes a comment below): “Anthropic watermark scheme appears as a comic policeman blowing his whistle while his pants fall down and Mark Pauline loads a cannon with rotting fish.” But maybe that’s… Continue reading
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Shots and Misses
There is a meteor impact crater in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park. It’s called Upheaval Dome, because that’s what geologists thought it was before it became clear that it wasn’t. When I visited the place with my teenage kids in the late ’80s, all the placards along the trail explained that the circular canyon was what… Continue reading
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Whetherday
Check them out Hackernoon today: Cyber Libertarians: Esther Dyson & The Knowledge Age. Esther is an old friend and one of my favorite people. Front burner for her right now is .agent. Exit signals Last night we were suffering through one of the most annoying movies we've ever seen (Ladies First on Netflix, which, among other… Continue reading
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The Web and the New Reality
Until Linux Journal hired me in 1996, no publication—tech or otherwise—would employ me. Not full-time, anyway. I was too obsessed with the Internet, the Web, and what I saw as the dawn of a new reality: a digital world we would co-occupy with the natural one. So I self-published on the Web, at Searls.com, where… Continue reading
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Local radio lives in Burlington and Graham
WBAG’s callsign stands for Burlington And Graham: two adjoining towns between Greensboro and Durham in North Carolina. I have many kinfolk in the hood, and have been living or visiting here all my life. As it happens, WBAG and I were also born the same year. So was the station’s broadcast tower, which stands in… Continue reading
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Earth to Southwest (and every other service company): make your surveys about your service, not just personnel facing customers
Here is the survey hook that came in an email after a Southwest flight: And here is the first question in the survey one gets hooked into taking: I gave up after it seemed that all the questions were about flight attendants. None were about the whole service experience. So one doesn’t have a way… Continue reading
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No body day
Let’s have her sing a country song about life in the uncanny valley Goldie Boone is a “digital country artist” who looks too good to be real. So I’m sure she’s not. Convince me otherwise. Nothing personal. Yet. Mozilla’s The State of Open Source AI is required reading. It makes a great case for open… Continue reading
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Cryday
Haven’t figured out lighting yet, but I like the idea After struggling for days to make my new Epson FF-680W photo scanner, which does a much poorer job of scanning photos than my iPhone 16, I’m ready for one of these. Welcome to New York AeroXplorer: LaGuardia Tower Alerts Pilots to Possible Shoulder-Fired Missile Threat Near… Continue reading
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Thurbsday
It’s still a bubble In May of 2018, I posted GDPR will pop the adtech bubble. It didn’t. The bubble is now bigger than ever. My mistake was assuming that there was a policy answer to a morally awful business that paid well. In retrospect, it’s a humbling reminder of how long one can be wrong… Continue reading
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InOrOutDay
This is the first morning since I arrived in Baltimore on Wednesday that stepping outside in the morning didn’t feel like walking into an oven. It was 76° F (24.4° C), which isn’t bad. I also couldn’t see far up the road, because the air was full of smoke, and it was hard to breathe.… Continue reading
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Heatday
To your health It’s 96° here in Baltimore, where the air quality sucks thanks to fires in Canada and Minnesota. But write on I shall. And your money Ed Zitron’s long read on the coming AI crash is worth your time. Seriously In paleoenshittification and a path to adoption for MyTerms, Don Marti gives us a… Continue reading