Listening to an interesting talk by Professor Nick Couldry, who pointing out that we legislate to stop companies filling our rivers and land with pollutants. Isn’t it about time we started doing the same to companies polluting our social ecosystems with toxic social interactions?
He’s written a book exploring these ideas and how human solidarity survives social media, called The Space of the World.
Yeah, going to read that.
Taking advantage of micro.blog’s new EU hosting option to move adders.blog’s hosting to the EU.
For obvious reasons.
Turns out there’s a lot of books I wrote in the pirated data Meta used to train its LLM. And I’m not the only family member impacted, either…
I’d be a lot more sanguine about this if it wasn’t, well, Meta.
Meta’s AI Will Suggest Comments for Users to Post About Your Photos:
Meta is testing an Instagram feature that suggests AI-generated comments for users to post beneath other users’ photos and videos.
So an AI can leave a comment on an AI-created image, while being shown an AI-created ad, and we can do something more meaningful with our lives.
Finished reading: Lucius: The Faultless Blade by Ian St. Martin 📚
Interesting dipping back into Warhammer fiction after 30 years. Surprisingly good for tie-in fiction. Predictably grimdark, but does a good job of making you care what happens to the characters, while still amazing it clear they are early all irredeemable monsters.
Print isn’t dead, and doesn’t need to die. Because, in a digital-first world, it’s an invaluable form of retreat and escape.
Betteridge’s Law applies: Will big AI save the world?
Why I’ve taken the first step in connecting One Man & His Blog to the #Fediverse - and why I think this will matter for media businesses in the coming years…
The Ghost ActivityPub Public Beta is here!
(Well, for ghost(pro) users…)
Drawing towards the end of several months of quite intensive Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The best decision I’ve made in a long time. I finally feel equipped to make the very most of the second half of my life.
For all its faults, the NHS has been there for me when I needed it.
Started reading: Bringing Back the Beaver by Derek Gow 📚
But most days, working on policy at Facebook was way less like enacting a chapter from Machiavelli and way more like watching a bunch of four-teen-year-olds who’ve been given superpowers and an ungodly amount of money, as they jet around the world to figure out what power has bought and brought them.
From Careless People: A story of where I used to work by Sarah Wynn-Williams 📚
This explains a lot about Facebook:
Javi’s my favourite of the coworkers here tonight; Javier Olivan, in charge of “growth” at Facebook, which means he’s the person responsible for getting the billions who still aren’t on the platform to sign up. Javi’s a laid-back Spaniard and one of the few people in top management with a sense of humour.
From Careless People: A story of where I used to work by Sarah Wynn-Williams 📚
Started reading: Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams 📚
Just found a cache of old videos on my Dropbox, while hunting for something for a friend. Here’s some moments from a trip to Helsinki in the early morning, when I was doing some work with Nokia (!)
Everything we’ve learnt about technology is upended by AI: we’re used to digital technology being frustratingly literal — but AIs make shit up. They’re guessing machines, and until we learn that, we’ll keep making mistakes.
Hmm. I can’t figure out how Micro Social’s link post format works. I can see it in the settings, but can’t figure out how to invoke it when posting.
The Fediverse Isn’t the Future. It’s the Present We’ve Been Denied:
The fediverse is a jailbreak. It’s not a product, not a single platform, it’s not something you can buy stock in or use to enrich yourself at the cost of our shared humanity. It’s a network of independent, interconnected social platforms, all running on open protocols like ActivityPub. It’s an ecosystem where you - not some incellionaire obsessed with eugenics - own your digital identity. Where your social graph belongs to you, not an algorithm’s shifting fucking whims.
One of the major societal advances of my time on this planet is how much more seriously we take mental health these days. We’ve reshaped the world faster than our brains can evolve to cope, and that has consequences.