ChatGPT and the Onset of Late-Stage Anti-Humanism

If that's true, we're now unavoidably heading for a full-on AI wipeout, in which there is no incentive for humans to provide any non-commercial information or valuable imagery, and everything henceforth is just a rehash of pre-existing material.

As the Disgruntled Souls of Twitter were stressing enthusiastically over which scroll-zombified, digital-credit-scoring, transactional labour-mill they'd allow to waste their lives next, a neighbouring Silicon Villain was releasing a new toy. And oh, did the public want to play with it!

The product? ChatGPT. A chatbot whose friendly verbal spewings have already become internet-famous.

Actually, this flagship release from OpenAI is considerably more than a toy. Conceptually, the supercharged chatbot is really just the prodigy lovechild of Wolfram Alpha and Mitsuku. But it's phenomenally sophisticated, and the number of people its legacy could render workless is truly frightening.

Musk's Twitter Crisis Deepens, But There's Still Hope

If Twitter began a smooth but rapid evolution towards customisable paywalling, with drastic improvements to the search interface, it could absolutely batter Google as an ecosystem.

When Elon Musk declared, on 28th October, that "Comedy is now legal on Twitter", he evidently meant the "now" very literally indeed. Less than a week later his moderation nervecentre would embark on a run of suspensions, banning verified Twitter users for what can only be described as "assaults on a billionaire's ego".

Over the past few days, a parody trend has seen blue-tickers with large-to-huge fanbases changing their screen names to Elon Musk, replacing their profile pictures with Musk portraits, and then (mostly) posting satirical Tweets that mocked the new boss, his private life and his calamitous platform purchase. Here's an example from the now suspended comic artist Jeph Jacques...

The Benny Test: The Value of Twitter Laid Bare

As Elon persists with his mission to persuade Twitter that $96 per annum is a good deal, research suggests he's lucky to be getting $0...

How much is Twitter worth? I don't mean to its owners. I mean to us, the general public who feed it. Why do I ask? Well, because in the wake of Elon Musk's $8 saga, we're seeing committed subscribers calling for their hero to roll out a charge across the entire platform. That is, to directly monetise the unverified users, as well as the verified.

Can Twitter Survive Elon Musk?

Few people appear to have recognised that Musk's intention to "prioritise paying users in replies, mentions and search" would equate to a soft shadowban for everyone else.

Who would have imagined, this time last year, that the latest global crisis in autumn 2022 would be a bitter bleating match over who gets to have a ball-bearing-sized blue badge next to their name on an Internet forum? The row, to which I'm colloquially referring as blue-tickgate, has been sparked within the first week of Elon Musk's tenure as Twitter boss, after the multi-billionaire mogul Tweeted this...

The Truth About Open Source Software

Tor, Mastodon and the like are closed source for anyone who isn't running the servers on which the software is located. Don't let anyone hit you with the "open source!" chant and convince you that these resources, as typically consumed, have verified integrity.

Most of the people who passionately loathe technology corporations are strong advocates of open source software. Namely, software whose human-readable source code is published and therefore available for inspection, or for further development, by anyone with the ability and inclination. The official Open Source definition is a bit more specific than that, but broadly, open source software (OSS) has a transparent and communally-accessible production stream which, importantly, cannot licence against commercial use.

CLOSED-SOURCE SOFTWARE DISTRIBUTION

Software is routinely programmed in a language that humans can understand. Provided they've taken the trouble to learn the language, that is. But typically, before distribution, the software will be translated into "machine code". This translation process, known as "compiling", renders the software independent of a language interpreter program, meaning it can run as a self-contained package. The benefits are...

Shill City: The Dark World of Privacy Tech Marketing

Privacytests.org - a performance table site which ranks Brave as its best-performing browser - is maintained by the Senior Research and Privacy Engineer at Brave Software. But sure, let's all take this quagmire of shilling and sockvertising seriously.

There should never be any trust where brands are concerned - especially in the tech genre. But after it was revealed that the self-styled privacy brand Startpage had bribed its way back into the recommendation resource privacytools.io’s listings after being legitimately booted out, the focus of suspicion split in two. Not only were the “privacy brands” untrustworthy - at least some sources of recommendation were a sham too.

As the seriousness of the privacy debate escalates to uncharted levels, perhaps this is a good time to ask how many of the voices in the privacy arena are being incentivised by brands. Perhaps, indeed, it may be better to ask how many of them are not being incentivised...

Word Processing Software: Revolution Pending?

“The divide between the progress of the Internet and the progress of the word processor could not be more stark. The word processor launches to something that looks barely any different today than it looked decades ago.”

Do you remember the days of WordStar, when a mouse was just a rather timid rodent that inadvertently antagonised cats and fantasised about processed cheese? If you're too young to know what I’m rambling on about, WordStar was the premier word processor of the 1980s, and it primarily existed on computers with non-graphical operating systems.

For the majority of PC users there was no mouse. Every instruction to a PC program had to come via the keyboard. And because the era's foremost operating system - DOS - had no graphical capability, the word processor couldn't represent elements of formatting as literal variations on screen. For a given display resolution, text would always reproduce at the same size, and with the same CP437 styling. It couldn't be italicised on screen, or displayed in bold. And many PCs of the 1980s only had monochromatic monitors, so even colour-coding was off the agenda as a universal means to represent format changes.

Whilst one might imagine that word processing software would be roundly unpopular under such unconducive conditions, offices couldn't get their hands on WordStar fast enough, and sales went through the roof. The software's renowned mail merge capability linked it up with the database behemoth dBASE, and suddenly, SMEs could produce their own mailshots, run off personalised invitations, autoprint customer/client/patient reminder letters... The future had arrived.

The Ethics and Consequences of Dodging Paywalls

"Some paywalls are so weak that those of us who adhere to high privacy standards online don't even realise they're there."

Photo by Dima Pechurin on Unsplash

It's a really interesting question. Is dodging an online paywall worse than blocking ads? What are the potential consequences when we bypass paywalls and access "premium" content without compensating the provider? If publishers tell us we must pay to read their content, do the technical means by which we evade their 'digital checkout' even matter? Is bypassing paywalls akin to stealing books - something we can do, but know is wrong? That really depends on how "paywalled" the content is.

There are different strengths of paywalling. Some paywalls are rigid lockouts that genuinely do solely let in those who pay. Others essentially employ a sucker-gate, which only monetises the visitors who don't realise they have a choice. The site may, for example, let you in for free if you're hitting a link on Twitter or Facebook, but not if you're responding to an email nudge from an existing subscriber. Let you in for free if you're using this browser setup, but not that one.

Min Browser - Can YOU Resist The Irresistible?

"It's deeply cool - exactly the browser you'd want when aiming to impress a trendy guest, or an in-the-room business client who's viewing a presentation on your website."

Min browser on the left, vs Firefox on the right. Whilst Firefox is more cluttered, clunky and noticeably less appealing aesthetically, it has detected the content as Reader View compatible, whereas Min has not. Content: The Jimi Hendrix Concerts.

Do you ever look at cybertech brands and think: wouldn't it be nice if they all stopped ripping off each other's designs and did their own thing? Well, if you're bored with watching fat, bloated browsers struggle to break away from the pack, Min could put a bit of excitement back into your life.

Content Podding: How to Build Portable, DIY, Offline 'Blogs', and Why You Should

[UPDATE: I've since built an app to create content pods and other distributable writing formats totally offline. You can find out more and get the download links in Take The Web Offline With Lit.OTG.

I've left the original post below.

The Original Post...

"An HTML web page can be incredibly simple, and it can be created entirely offline with something like Seamonkey Composer. I'll move onto that shortly. In fact, I'll summarise the whole creation process."

A portable, offline version of the NRGCult post "I am Suing the Feminist Metal-Bending Channel".

Content creators… Imagine producing a website or blog without the involvement of any remote service. Imagine completing the whole process on your local drive, without any signups, without any terms, and without any conditions. Imagine being able to send your DIY website, or collection of web pages, directly to people of your choice. By email. Or on CDs, or on DVDs.

Content consumers… Imagine being able to read content in total privacy. Imagine that content being delivered to you in a format that doesn't allow your interests to be profiled. Imagine that content being futureproof and immune to censorship. Imagine being the gatekeeper of that content, so you don't have to rely on a bunch of massive tech companies graciously allowing you to find and/or access it.If these ideals appeal to you, then let me welcome you to the world of portable content.

Portable content is not attached to any specific web service. You choose how you want to deliver or receive it. It's extremely difficult for Big Tech to censor, suppress or ban, and it's totally impossible to interfere with when it's distributed on disc media at functions or in other offline situations.