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From Amazon to Facebook and Google, here’s how platforms can ‘decay’ | NPR | …another Cory “enshittification” piece, but having seen USENET & various BBSes decay, I feel he overcooks the “capitalism” aspects
In truth: platforms either evolve their user demographics or they die with them. Cory’s arguments feel reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ use of the Shoe Event Horizon to explain the fall of a planet and it’s culture, which (in the radio series) Adams both sets up & knocks down people who are caught up in the…
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Gradually, Civil Society is starting to wake up to the idea that “Government algorithms” are less an issue than underlying Government policy of treating people as objects or stereotypes
Quote: U.K. civil society groups as well as my organization, Human Rights Watch, have found that the system relies on a means-testing algorithm that is prone to miscalculating people’s income and underestimating how much cash support they need. Families that bear the brunt of the algorithm’s faulty design are going hungry, falling behind on rent,…
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Nineteen Eighty Pooh
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clock was stuck at ten to thirteen. Time for a little something thought Winnie-the-Pooh, his chin nuzzled into his fur in an effort to escape the vile wind as he stomped through Victory Woods. A coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked…
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Short (but deep-clickable) thread by @matthew_d_green which foreshadows debate about power the UK Government seeks: to prevent fixes of security bugs they are exploiting
UK context: Device manufacturers would likely also have to notify the government before making available important security updates that fix known vulnerabilities and keep devices secure. Accordingly, the Secretary of State, upon receiving such an advance notice, could now request operators to, for instance, abstain from patching security gaps to allow the government to maintain access for surveillance…
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This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI | …I’m always torn whether to call these things “pettyware” or “get off my lawn-ware”
This stuff is the tech equivalent of the Facebook post to tell everyone that you’re leaving Facebook. It happens to each cycle of technology & commercial innovation: ad-blockers, image watermarks (stego or not), OCR-resistant fonts, tagging innocuous web-pages as “porn” to either distract/dissuade attention, blocking scrapers at the network level. My take: this blog is…
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Is anybody working on algorithmic, engagement-led feed generation for Mastodon?
Serious question. One reason I still visit & use Twitter is: there are people in other time zones whose fediverse content is basically unseen by me, since they post at times when I’m parenting/asleep and so are buried under a chronological timeline. Mostly they also post to Twitter which mostly automatically solves that problem for…
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When you have plumbers working on your house, you also get plumber-grade radio … and it’s wall-to-wall 1980s hits
So they’re playing Adam & The Ants’ “Kings of the Wild Frontier” which was released 43 years ago in 1980… and I did some maths: If, in 1980, I was listening to music that was 43 years old, it would have been released in 1937. Oh dear.
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New Boiler Day
Our old Baxi died on Sunday evening; it was briefly resurrected by an engineer the morning after, but it was also clearly beyond its useful lifetime and so today — amazingly, at short notice — it’s being replaced with a ATAG iR15 condenser which comes with an 18 year warranty. By that point heat pumps…
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Things that I am eating because my toddler did not eat them 2: Lentil & Chorizo stew with Penne, extra Broccoli and Fish Finger bits
It’s actually pretty good. Spicy lentils and paprika sausage under fish with plenty of greens.
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I’ve just thought of a whole new way to feel terribly old…
Give yourself 1 point if you know what “Cc:” means. Give yourself 10 points if you’ve ever used “carbon paper.”