The state of play of the internet

15.06.2023/11.16

From Zero Janitor on Tumblr (and found as an image on Mastodon): Sums up the state of play on the internet nicely. I can’t believe how badly the Reddit situation has been handled, but will leave that to others. A lot has already been written about it, and here’s a good piece in […]

Paging Kiwi magazine licensors

07.06.2023/13.04

I was surprised to learn that Lucire might be the only magazine brand being licensed from Aotearoa New Zealand at the moment. Unless the search engines are all equally poor at finding local colleagues doing the same thing. There are other publishers I know here—I had a great yarn with a Christchurch colleague in […]

Andrew Niccol’s Simone: I think we are now there

25.05.2023/05.26

Anyone remember Andrew Niccol’s film Simone? It remains one of my favourites—I liked it so much I saw it at the cinema in New Zealand, a country which never gave it a proper release. (I still remember the media going on about how much we supported Kiwi filmmakers around that time. Evidently not all […]

Where do we draw the line on LLM- or “AI”-generated content?

/01.40

Contrary to my earlier post, I allowed the trackbacks from AI-Summary.com after its owner reached out to me. The fact he reached out does show he read the post, and there was some human agency involved. That very courteous email even offered to remove this blog from further mining. When you know a human’s there, […]

The way I define data, they’re still not portable on Mastodon

15.05.2023/00.42

Proof once again that your Mastodon data are not portable. New Mastodon.social users apparently sent out a lot of spam. I never saw any—the only one I received was from Mastodon.uk overnight—and this morning I found myself cut off mid-conversation with a friend on Mastodon.nz as the admins there made the decision to suspend its […]

Should I link back an “AI” or LLM-authored splog? I vote no

13.05.2023/04.12

This was an incredibly interesting trackback in the queue for this blog: an LLM-authored summary about a blog post of mine, linking back to it. It’s better than a spun article to read, but at the end of the day, it’s not something I want to give oxygen to by allowing the trackback […]

ChatGPT and other ‘AI’ aren’t that mysterious, after all

10.05.2023/00.49

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has one of the clearest stories explaining ‘AI’, the misnomer used to describe the likes of Bing AI and ChatGPT (which, I understand, is French: Chat, j’ai pété translates to ‘Cat, I farted’). Vaughan-Nichols explains that LLMs (large language models) simply rely on statistics, which is why they get things factually wrong. […]

From a marketing perspective, the coronation was out of sync

07.05.2023/09.48

Market orientation suggests that you should base your marketing on what the client wants. In basic terms, put yourself in the customer’s shoes. There are plenty of studies that back this up, beginning roughly when the 1970s became the 1980s. So if the British people are going through a cost-of-living crisis, then it would pay […]

Did Google use your website to train its language-learning model?

24.04.2023/06.05

It’s going to be very interesting to see the legalities of Google using the contents of 15·1 million websites for its C4 dataset, used to train large language models. Ton Zĳlstra put me on to a Washington Post article that revealed which sites were used. He had discovered that his own website (zylstra.org) had provided […]

Generation Z has the right idea with flip phones and digital cameras

23.04.2023/12.29

This may be a source of comedy on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, but to me it’s obvious why young people are opting for flip phones and digital cameras. They’re smart enough to think: why should I have a device that’s addictive and wastes my time? Why should I spend time on websites […]