David Foster Wallace interview on German TV
This interview only becomes more prescient.
A model of life…in which I have a right to be entertained all the time seems not to be a promising one.
Here’s OpenAI’s big plan to combat election misinformation
Yesterday TikTok presented me with what appeared to be a deepfake of Timothee Chalamet sitting in Leonardo Dicaprio’s lap and yes, I did immediately think “if this stupid video is that good imagine how bad the election misinformation will be.” OpenAI has, by necessity, been thinking about the same thing and today updated its policies to begin to address the issue.
Ah, the internet.
TikTok Innkeeper Influencers Occupy a Cottagecore World
Gilmore Girls looms large in the world of innkeeper-fluencing. “Have you wondered what Lorelai Gilmore actually does for a living?” says Caroline Cardamone, a 20-something innkeeper at a bed-and-breakfast in Wisconsin, in one of the dozens of TikToks she’s posted about picking up breakfast burritos for guests, dusting a lot of doily-adorned wood, and doing laundry. John Lavin, who bought a century-old bed-and-breakfast in Blue Ridge, Georgia, in early COVID and soon started posting about it on TikTok, has been described by followers as “Luke Danes and Lorelai Gilmore rolled into one person.” Lavin says he’s never watched the show, but understands what they’re getting at: “People project this kind of fairy-tale life.”
What concerns me about the audience for this shit is their shared point-of-reference. When our only touchstones are characters from a terrifically uninspiring television show from twenty years ago? When you can make a Gilmore Girls reference and that somehow conveys meaning?
Are we not through the looking glass when media becomes more real than reality?
Homes need to be built for better internet
I have the privilege of knowing how to troubleshoot this stuff on my own largely due to my profession as a tech journalist. To others, this stuff is a foreign language. Knowing how to set up a home internet system is not a skill everyone has, and the complicated steps required to do it properly make moving to a new place more stressful, especially if you work remotely and need the internet to earn a paycheck.
A friend recently asked about my media diet. What are the ten-ish sources of news that I go to consistently (and obsessively)?
I’ll share them here.
- Daring Fireball & The Talk Show
- My various Substacks
- The Verge
- Dithering
- Hacker News
- The Dishcast
- Places Journal
- Tablet Magazine
- The Gray Lady, as is probably obvious
- New York Post
- New York Magazine, completing the trifecta
- Social Science Research Network
- High Country News
How Israeli Civilians Are Using A.I. to Help Identify Victims
Incredible.
I was tempted to use the cliché “AI is an incredible tool,” but then I remembered that while yes, perhaps in its current iteration AI is a tool, it’s also something else.
Intelligence is such a nebulous thing — I rarely hear it called a “tool.” Aspects of intelligence, like critical thinking? Sure, that can be a tool. A piece of the puzzle. A component of the whole.
But AI, or perhaps AGI (artificial general intelligence, loosely defined as when machines are able to think on their own without human intervention), is meant to be a component and a whole. A tool we use…but also a tool that will one day think critically for itself. Without humans.
Remember, while the AI of today is easily explainable with metaphor, the AI of tomorrow is not.
…it’s a profoundly weird (if surprisingly common) rhetorical move to say “I support you for your independence, but you wrote something I disagree with, so I’m not supporting you anymore.” It should go without saying - saying stuff that you don’t agree with is an expression of my independence, and it’s strange to endorse independence in the commission of telling me that you expected me to adhere to your own views. Subscribe or cancel as you will. But are you really out to support independence of thought if you don’t support it when that independence results in an opinion you don’t like?
Israel floods social media to shape opinion around the war
Since Hamas attacked thousands of its citizens last week, the Israeli government has started a sweeping social media campaign in key Western countries to drum up support for its military response against the group. Part of its strategy: pushing dozens of ads containing brutal and emotional imagery of the deadly militant violence in Israel across platforms such as X and YouTube…
What a world we live in.
Using Goatse to Stop App Theft
The mature and responsible thing to do would have been to add a content security policy to the page. I am not mature so instead what I decided to do was render the early 2000s internet shock image Goatse with a nice message superimposed over it in place of the app if Sqword detects that it is in an iFrame.
It has been one of my greatest achievements as a dev: to live-deploy a massive goatse image to at least 8 domains that aren’t mine.
I 🧡 the internet.
Stop Being Shocked—Once and for All
Many of us at Tablet believed strongly, and still believe, in the possibility of creating a better world. But something bothered us from the very beginning about these ideas, and the people pushing them. Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives—intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns—a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality, and yet its defenders got more sure of themselves, more performatively boastful, more passionate and gleeful about smearing anyone who dared to question them.
The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”—where COVID–19 came from, how many genders there are, which skin tones and personal experiences qualify a person for protection status and which do not, whether it was OK for a Syrian dictator to bomb and gas 500,000 of his people, whether the U.S. should ally itself with a Holocaust-denying medieval theocracy, whether the president of the United States was secretly a Russian agent, whether large American cities should let drug addicts and violent schizophrenics get high on the streets and steal stuff—and more. Indeed, over time, we were struck by how little the ideas themselves seemed to matter; what so many people seemed most attached to was power.
Who is peeking over your shoulder while you work, watch videos, learn, explore, and shop on the internet? Enter the address of any website, and Blacklight will scan it and reveal the specific user-tracking technologies on the site—and who’s getting your data. You may be surprised at what you learn.
Why and how to write things on the Internet
In my opinion, the strongest reason for any random person to start a blog is that you will have more awesome friendships—both in the sense that you will meet new awesome people as a result of your blog, but also in the sense that writing will cause you to have more interesting ideas, which will make your existing friendships more awesome because you’ll have better stuff to talk about.
Most other important things in life, like job opportunities and romantic relationships, are downstream of the quality of your friends, so this is pretty great.
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been writing on the internet for much of my adult life, here and there, anonymously and, at least recently, not. The power of the internet is in finding connection, and I’ve made friends or acquaintances via my online presence that make my life far more rewarding. In “real life,” I know at most one person that’s interested in iOS app development, another one person that might appreciate (yet doesn’t love) Star Wars action figures, and maybe two or three that are interested in technology in general. “Real life” is bounded far more by geography and circumstance, but online, people with similar interests flock to each other like moths to a flame.
Thing is, none of this has happened on social media. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok… These companies that tout their “we’re all about connecting people” bonafides are advertising companies and nothing more. Don’t be fooled. The only site that has a semblance of camaraderie (in my experience) is Reddit, and even that has started to undergo some unpleasant changes.
The real fun lies in the small web. What started back on uJournal and LiveJournal back in the late 90s and early 2000s led me here to Micro.Blog twenty years later. It’s the joy of hunting for great writing, for righteous opinions, for scathing dissents, for unique voices, all unfiltered by the cruft of advertising. It’s the human internet.
I am, as ever, torn. I both love my corner of the internet and hate The Internet. But I have to remember: I’m an anomaly. I pay for my search engine so I’m able to tweak my personal search algorithm. How many people do you know pay for a search engine? How many people spend a good deal each year on bespoke software for their iPhones and Macs so that they might use them to their fullest potential? My internet is not most people’s internet, and that’s easy to forget.
But I am, at heart, in love with my internet. I am so immeasurably grateful for the opportunity to have connected with so many people over the years. After all, what else is there?
A disclaimer: I have had substantially more at-bats with debt collectors than most people, as a result of an old hobby of writing letters on behalf of debtors to their lenders and non-affiliated debt collectors. I did this over the Internet, on my own volition, because it seemed pro-social and I was extremely underused by my actual job at the time. This experience leaves me with strong opinions on the debt collection industry; a frequent archetypical person in need of a letter was a Kansan grandmother in diminished financial circumstances who had been harassed for months. I’m going to try to keep these views to a dull roar here, in the spirit of spending more mental energy on discussing why the system presents as so broken.
People with a passion are not to be underestimated.
Summary: I believe that small websites are compelling aesthetically, but are also important to help us resist selling our souls to large tech companies. In this essay I present a vision for the “small web” as well as the small software and architectures that power it. Also, a bonus rant about microservices.
and
Kagi Small Web via mjtsai
Lidl recalls Paw Patrol snacks after website on packaging displayed porn
Lidl did not say how or why the website was allegedly compromised, but TechCrunch’s findings suggest that the web domain on the packaging had lapsed.
Hysterical.
The College Board Tells TikTok and Facebook Your SAT Scores
“We do not share SAT scores or GPAs with Facebook or TikTok, and any other third parties using pixel or cookies,” said a College Board spokesperson. “In fact, we do not send any personally identifiable information (PII) through our pixels on the site. In addition, we do not use SAT scores or GPAs for any targeting.”
After receiving this comment, Gizmodo shared a screenshot of the College Board sending GPAs and SAT scores to TikTok using a pixel. The spokesperson then acknowledged that the College Board’s website actually does share this data.
According to tax forms, 14 of the College Board’s 17 executives made more than $300,000 in 2021. Together, CEO David Coleman and President Jeremy Singer made $1,782,254.
A bit of good ol’ gumshoe reporting by Gizmodo, proving there’s something left inside the husks of Gawker Media.
What bullshit on the part of the College Board. Disgusting.
Remember: online, everything you do is tracked.
Everything.
If you aren’t paying for an online service, you are the product being sold.
(TikTok is ByteDance, a Chinese company that reports directly to the Chinese Communist Party. We’re selling out our own children…for what? So the execs of the College Board can have a new vacation home?)
Participation Inequality: The 90–9–1 Rule
In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
Much of my work is drying up. AI is moving into my field faster than most others, and I have been both late to realize it and paralyzed with indecision. Given that many-if-not-most of my clients work in the intersection of tech and journalism, they’ve watched the rise of ChatGPT and that ilk over the last six months with great interest, which is perhaps why they’ve been so quick to adopt, despite some lasting reticence. For years, I’ve positioned myself at this intersection, creating a small-but-comfortable living for myself.
But now, that position is no longer tenable, or won’t be in the very near future, and I’m realizing that despite convincing myself I hadn’t, maybe I made my career into an identity?
Who am I if not an editor?
I’ve always felt secure in my work, which has allowed me to feel anything but attached to it. For years, I’ve worked digitally from my computer (or more recently, my iPad), which has afforded me tremendous freedom. Much of my contract work has been on-demand, and coupled with a lack of debt, I’ve been able to remain flexible in ways many people have not. So I moved to a small town in 2019 — a small town many, many miles from the nearest city — and now as I see my work starting to dry up, I wonder if that move was short-sighted.
Four years on, I’ve created a little life for myself, but as my work disappears, I’m starting to feel a little empty. Why am I here? If I can no longer do my job remotely — a job that’s afforded me modest financial stability, which includes the ability to leave this town when I want to see friends or family — why am I here? Is this house I bought four years ago — a house I love — becoming an albatross?
When people ask me why I’m here, I usually respond with something like “the mountains,” which, if I’m honest, is a half-truth. I didn’t move here for the mountains, I moved here in part because there was an unexplored mountain range not far from town. What a reason to move somewhere. I’ve since fallen in love with those mountains, and they’ve become a large part of my identity. I know much of this side of the range (“the southern flank,” as I call it) quite well, the twists and turns of this-or-that road, hidden springs, little caves and detours off the trails and old landslides and the best viewpoints.
But ‘the mountains’ no longer feels like a tenable identity. It seems that it was only in relation — or in contrast — to work, and now that one is disappearing, the other seems to be, too.
I’m left in a vacuum. Why am I here?
I’ve struggled to foster community in this place. While I have a few friends, I’m still wanting. As I approach forty in a rural area, there simply aren’t many people here like me. Most people in their late 30s are pairing up, having children, settling down. Most people, mindfully or not, follow a certain path I’ve come to call “heteronormativity.” Careers, children, marriage (and divorce)… it’s the typical story of American life. Growing up, that future wasn’t available to me, but now that I’m in my 30s and homosexuality has been adopted (or co-opted) into mainstream society — a marked change from my childhood — I’m feeling out-of-place. Looking around, I don’t feel at home in straight culture and I don’t feel at home in gay culture.
While I watch many of my gay peers adopt hallmarks of heteronormative culture, I have this nagging feeling that, no, I’m still not sure I want those things. Do I want to be married when I see so many dysfunctional, unhealthy marriages? Do I want a romantic relationship when most relationships I observe seem to be based in something a little fearful, a little controlling?
And then there is place. I don’t want to live in a city, and therefore I’m immersed in straight culture to a degree I find routinely suffocating. Misogyny, latent homophobia, mental illness, oppressive and painful masculinity, drug addiction… There’s a lot to love about rural culture, but there’s a lot that makes me recoil, too, and I have precious few friends that both want to live in a rural space and remain critical of it, careful to keep its miasmas at bay.
Beneath all this, there’s a clock ticking somewhere deep in my limbic system. While I pride myself on living on the fringes of culture, social pressures find their way in. Marriage, maybe a(n adopted) child… Maybe I do want these things. I definitely want to be closer to family as I (and they) age, and this will mean uprooting the life I’ve created for myself here.
More than any other impulse, this one has started to fill the vacuum. Family and community. I want more of both, and they aren’t going to be found in this place. That’s a painful and disappointing — and in hindsight, obvious — realization. What this means I don’t quite know yet.
Archive Your Reddit Data While You Still Can
I’ve been a fairly active Redditor for more than 11 years. Until now, it’s been the website with the best mix of community, popularity, developer ecosystem, and web-search-ability. The non-monetary value Reddit as a knowledge store is literally priceless; it’s a modern-day Library of Alexandria.
By now, you probably know my thoughts on social media. (Fuck social media.) But Reddit was always the exception. When I hear “social media,” I think “toxic stew of projection and posturing designed to make you feel bad about yourself in the service of serving you advertisements,” and by that definition, Reddit isn’t social media.
I’ve made friends on Reddit. Real-life friends. Pen pals. Some people I’ve met in person, others I haven’t. Fellow writers and amateur programmers, fellow HomeKit-ers and hikers and GaiaGPS power users and Stoics and people who live in old homes and lovers of the American West. For many years, on a night when I couldn’t sleep, I’d hop on r/depression and talk to people on the edge of suicide, hoping my past experiences might help them in some way. I’d come to Reddit for good vibes or a little schadenfreude. For help with dinner or a laugh. I met other people with my very, very specific interests. Antinatalists. Techno-grumps. Privacy nerds. Plant daddies. Nature lovers. Righteous tenants and geologists and people just as fascinated by the world in which we live.
Reddit was the promise of the internet in one place. A group of people, each passionate about something, talking and supporting and, yes, sometimes fighting with each other. It’s been a good place. The best of human nature.
Everything changes and nothing is free. Not in this culture, anyway. I know this. But it’s still painful when the pursuit of profit comes for a community you love so dearly. We’ll see how these API changes play out, but I’m not hopeful.
Enshittification comes for us all.
(Update: my blogging idol with a very good point over on Daring Fireball.)
Watch brute force attacks in real time.
Online age verification is coming, and privacy is on the chopping block
Pornhub shocks Utah by restricting access over age-verification law.
According to Pornhub, Utah’s law mandating age verification differs from Louisiana’s law in at least one meaningful way. In Louisiana, the state government created a digital wallet that Pornhub could access to securely verify state IDs. Because Utah has no such technology, Axios reported, Pornhub said it had no choice but to make “the difficult decision to completely disable access to our website” in Utah.
🤭