First up, as I’ve publicly posted this and have helped out myself, my friend and colleague Hasan Abu Afash is in Palestine, and I don’t need to tell you what he and his people are facing. If you can help out, here’s a link to his Paypal.
Apparently, August 11, 2023 marked my 20 years of blogging. It wasn’t an anniversary that meant as much to me as, say, Richard MacManus, who created a very important tech industry blog on April 20, 2003. Nice to know I was only four months behind Richard, who took to blogging in a much bigger way.
When the Beyond Branding Blog was created, I wasn’t interested, even though I created the template for it. (One friend was so impressed as he had set up the original Blogger blog, then exclaimed ‘F***!’ when he saw what I had done to the template, to make it match the rest of the site.) I actually argued at the Medinge Group meeting a few months before that while a site to provide updates to our book was a good idea, blogging, to me, was associated with amateurism, having been exposed to some terrible blogs up to that point. (There were a few good ones, but they were well outnumbered.) I wasn’t for it.
I was wrong, considering what happened since. Blogging is only as good as the author. And having your own space is far better than any reliance on Big Tech or “free” platforms, where you are the product.
Courtesy of Dogzilla on Mastodon, your cellphone could well be listening to you, or so claims one US marketing firm who says they can take those data and use it for their clients.
And via Chris Palmer, Google actually did something useful for once: it showed that ChatGPT is built on the backs of others’ unpaid labour (just like slavery, and, for that matter, allegedly Google’s own Bard).
Will The New York Times prevail in its lawsuit against ChatGPT, where it alleges its copyrighted materials were used for the LLM’s training data? It’s going to be an interesting case to follow. I’m not against technological advancement, when it helps people, but I am against someone nicking others’ stuff to do it.
You may also like
