Phillip Winn @pwinn@qoto.org

Ever have one of those days where so many people are saying such incredibly stupid things that you genuinely start to wonder: am I the one being stupid?

But then someone you’ve respected immensely for many, many years agrees with you, so then you know: it’s not me, it’s all of them.

#blog #personal

When the CEO of IAB describes his worst fear, and it sounds wonderful to you, I guess that makes you an "extremist."

Join me, fellow "extremists," as we insist on basic privacy and "cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it" in the process!

Reading the full script, I note that he calls out Apple as an "enemy from within," so welcome to the party, Apple. Let's take them down!

https://tinyurl.com/5d535vyc

#blog #privacy #advertising

I was not aware before this week that Apple, like Spotify, makes on-demand audio shows available to subscribers without making them available as podcasts, and yet audaciously calls them “Apple Podcast Subscriptions.” This is bad behavior, antithetical to the spirit of podcasting, and Apple should know better.

I learned about it via Hacker News from Matt Basta: https://basta.substack.com/p/the-absolute-audacity-of-apple-podcasts

I don’t use the Apple Podcasts app, because @overcastfm is really great, and most of the Apple’s podcast-related web pages seem to be focused on the usual podcast stuff, same as they have been since 2005 or so. Little did I know that things changed in 2021! That is apparently when they launched this:

https://podcasters.apple.com/878-subscriptions

Horrible!

I get the appeal of the pitch for podcasters. If you have an existing podcast and are tired of paying $5/month or more to host the audio files, you might hear about “Apple Podcasts Subscriptions” and see that they charge only $20/year, and you aren’t required to charge for a subscription. It certainly isn’t clear on the publicly-available pages I’ve seen that this is going to break your podcast, making it no longer freely available everywhere! Instead, even if your show is free, it will be encrypted with DRM and there will be no feed for clients not owned by Apple. They have many lawyers, so it’s probable that this disclosure is buried somewhere in the fine print as you sign up, but it’s still bad behavior.

A podcast is on-demand audio available in any podcast client via a syndication feed. Usually this means MP3 files via RSS, but M4A files via Atom would still fit the description. It’s possible to offer subscriptions to podcasts, and even charge for them. Even on Apple’s own list of “Podcast hosting providers” they list four providers that do so, but the normal way to handle that involves either HTTP Basic Authentication or tokens in the Feed URL, *not* DRM and proprietary clients.

https://podcasters.apple.com/partner-search

Once you take away the feed and lock down consumption to only your apps, you’re not producing a podcast anymore. You’re producing a proprietary on-demand audio show. That Spotify and Apple use the word “Podcast” in their product descriptions is deceptive, but co-opting popular labels is somewhat common, and reasonably-aware people should be able to see through that.

I understand the appeal of this for Spotify and Apple, too. They can both say, “using our app, you can listen to any podcast ever made anywhere, PLUS a bunch of shows exclusive to us!” But of course, Spotify’s exclusives can’t be listened to in Apple Podcasts, and “Apple Podcasts Subscriptions” can’t be listened to in Spotify, because they’re not actually podcasts at that point. It’s a short-sighted approach with lasting damage.

Shame on Apple for playing this losing game.

#blog #nerdery #apple #podcast #spotify

My daughter texted me urgently today, asking for help in art class. As someone who attended school before the advent of cell phones, this entire concept threatens to derail me, but I'll focus for her sake. She wants examples of abstract art, and wants me to help, and I quote, "Using your uhm ai art thing."

I happen to have the Wombo.ai Dream app installed on my phone, and haven't used it very much, so I started there. That app heavily leans into models trained in different styles, one of which is "Abstract," so it seemed like a good bet. For the first prompt, I supplied an input image, which I said should heavily influence the result. Avid fans of anime might guess from the result that the image was fan art from "Assassination Classroom," which was also the text prompt. For the rest I supplied no starting image, using only text prompts to steer things. Unfortunately, I didn't keep notes at the time, and worse, I foolishly didn't "Finalize" any of the results, since I was just looking for samples to influence my daughter's art on paper. So I don't remember what words I used for the other three examples, my favorites of the eight I generated for her.

If I can generate image description alt text for abstract art, it should be easy for anyone to generate image descriptions for anything.

#AIart #wombo #abstract #AssassinationClassroom

This is real talk, with McSweeney’s saying what the folks responsible for laying off tens of thousands of people won’t.

So far, Apple has chosen to cut Tim Cook’s pay rather than engage in mass layoffs. So far, the company I work for has avoided mass layoffs, too. In fact, they acquired yet another small company, but that’s another argument for another day.

#blog #politics #BigTech #capitalism

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/macroeconomic-changes-have-made-it-impossible-for-me-to-want-to-pay-you

Gong hay fat choi!

Since I don't want to actually publicly engage with Matt Yglesias or his fellow subscribers, and I keep talking myself out of my one-to-five rating system, it turns out what I do instead is discuss some of his articles at length with one of my brothers, where one of us takes the pro and the other takes the con on a given issue until we find common ground.

That way you don't have to read the whole conversations that end with one of us saying things like "I would *love* to live in a world where housing permits were like gun permits: shall-issue rather than may-issue."

#blog #politics #SlowBoring #MattYglesias

The more I dig into GoodReads exports, the more I realize how utterly broken they are, almost to the point of uselessness.

Assuming I manually edit the CSV file to eliminate the corrupt data from the GoodReads database, I'm still left with a file which contains "date completed" but not "date started," and nearly every "date completed" is wrong. Usually off by one, sometimes by more.

I'm not sure which is worse, the missing data or the wrong data, but both require me to manually look up each book. Which I wish I had done *before* the very-recent rollout of the new book page, because I seem to recall both dates being visible directly on the book page, while now they require scrolling, clicking, and clicking again. It's possible the new book page is more usable for people who want to keep using GoodReads, but it's abysmal for people trying to leave and realizing the GoodReads export function is no good.

On the positive side, it's easy to add missing books to Bookwyrm, and some have turned out to not be missing, just missed while importing.

#blog #Bookwyrm #GoodReads #amazon #nerdery