Olives @olives@qoto.org

Don't be a useful idiot for Facebook.

I'm tempted to write a new piece on "#AI", but as always, I have to get around to doing the other things first.

Remember that algorithms which ingest things and generate content are not new. What might be new is the architecture and how much data a few companies want to put into it (there are researchers looking for ways to train models with smaller datasets).

Also, not that long ago, there was an "academic" who worked at an institution which was run by a Facebook executive, and who just so happened to come out with things which attacked Facebook's competitors in contrived ways.

On the other hand, Facebook was not held to the same standard. If they were to be held to a standard, it would be one that they could trivially "resolve" with a gesture.

There's always a new idea for what I could do.

https://theintercept.com/2024/10/25/africom-microsoft-openai-military/ This reminds me of that Project Maven thing which the folks at Google really didn't want to get involved in.

https://apnews.com/article/jaywalking-legalized-new-york-6df1eacddfa5b7951a51dadc05a4ce6b I've never been a fan of banning jaywalking, so this looks good to me.

"404" was upset that someone didn't speak to them prior to one of their hit pieces (and instead refuted each and every point in a more neutral outlet), because what company would talk to someone who looks like they have an axe to grind, and might spin whatever they say against them.

I think someone thought that the article was being too hard on a particular company. Anyway, the reaction was quite surprising.

There was also an incident a couple of years ago with the Vice blog.

One of the writers, I think it was someone called Emanuel, got into a social media spat with someone for... them mildly criticizing one of the articles, and he attacked them saying that they should be flattered that he would pay attention to them at all.

Excuse me if I've posted a fair bit of media critique lately.

I wanted to get that out of the way as I don't really want to revisit it later, in the case that a blogger posts something stupid and I have to comment on it.

Wired tends to be better than things like "404", although it has it's flaws (such as an over-emphasis on "AI").

That said, these tend to be people with more expertise in a particular area, rather than a general current affairs blog as those others are.

To be fair, I've seen good articles on Substack, just as I've seen good articles on blogs.

The question box doesn't appear to work though.

I was following up on an old article from there to see if it was still live before making a post and I noticed that it's been bought up by... What appears to be some sort of AI firm.

The articles are gone.

Speaking of which, did you notice that Gawker's domain has expired and it's been bought up by a completely irrelevant company?

If I start writing a blog, maybe I'll go a bit into this form of journalism, although honestly, I think it might be going downhill.

Vice went bankrupt.

Gawker's domain has expired.

"blasting into the ether"
Perhaps, a better way of putting it is that it's a lot like treating articles like shells in a barrel. They are fired off and not revisited. And then, they move onto firing more shots.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost It's almost like an extreme version of this.

Unfortunately, this style of "journalism" has created the impression that this is how journalism is done, and you get copycat blogs like "404" (Vice inspired) which similarly blast content into the ether.

I've seen people rely on a couple of articles from the Vice Blog, but it's important to remember that they did not retract articles (or corrected them shortly after posting them), and they primarily shared current affairs without a lot of curation.

This is one reason why I don't use them as a source (although, I think Vice has gone bankrupt more recently).