Replying to Doc Searls

🔗 Your AI ~v~ A.I. comment triggered a thought.

Going forward, I am standardizing on AI.
A.I. might imply a two letter acronym for Artificial Intelligence .. and for now, whilst I agree that it’s ‘artificial’, I am far from convinced ‘it’ demonstrates ‘intelligence’.
Meanwhile, AI is a nice handy name to bucket these things under.


Spotify 🔗purged thousands of AI-generated songs uploaded by the music startup Boomy. The streamer said it flagged the tunes it thought were being listened to by bots, which inflated listener numbers.

Not just written by AI - but listened to by bots.

I wonder how much income that cost real artists?


🔗 The summer of decentralized social

Sam Liebeskind provides a nice simple guide to the world of decentralized social networks by comparing to the email world.

🔗 EMAIL : the first, largest and most open social network..


🔗 Is It Time to Quit Coffee for Good? (Apple News) .. of course I haven’t read it … what a stupid question. And if the arguments are real and valid … well count me in the Ostrich camp.


As the hype around BlueSky builds, I am reminded of the hype that surrounded Clubhouse. Looks like that’s what Charles has been thinking.

Velvet rope: it tells you that the people who got past it are special. Unlike you.

💬 Charles Arthur

🔗 Read the whole thing.

{© The Lilywhite Collection on [Flickr](https://www.flickr.com/photos/28845139@N03/3566071999)}

My last 🔗 Travels Without Charley makes for a short, thoughtful read.


Thinking Allowed

This is a People First post that was originally on the People First domain. It has been moved here as part of my domain consolidation program. It’s a steady and slow WIP as I check each entry, so do please bear with me.

Am I missing a step with webmentions?

🔗 A recent post on People First was syndicated to Micro Blog.

I replied to that post in MicroBlog.

And it seems to be approved

So, shouldn’t it appear here?


🔗 Clubhouse is laying off more than half of its workforce - The Verge

Quel surprise … I wrote this when I was still on the wait list … and once in I even guested on a couple … my one word summary of the experiences, the site, the conversations, the quality … ‘crap’.


It is May … I am sitting in LA, with the heating on, while outside it is pouring with rain. This while I read 🔗 How El Niño could affect U.S. weather. (TL;DR .. if you thought it has been hot recently … you ain’t seen nothing yet.)




🔗 The Democrats Unveil a Secret Weapon on the Debt Ceiling.

I’m not am sure that I don’t fully understand this … but definitely intrigued enough to watch how it pans out.



🔗 Trump makes up with CNN

After years of calling CNN “fake news,” Donald Trump has agreed to appear on the network for a town hall. His campaign says it wants to hit reset on its relationship with the channel now that it’s under new management.

Bollocks. Licht has steadily and systematically moving CNN towards ‘the new center’ since he arrived. This will be a total softball.

Meanwhile … who really cares? CNN peaks at around half a million for its biggest star (Anderson Cooper).

Cable TV ratings are blips on the radar


🪦Et tu Gordon. I didn’t believe it when I read it .. but yes it is true. 84 … not a bad run.

Thank-you for the 🎵music.

🔗 A wonderful tribute.


If you are reading this post on my site, you will see that this link is rendered as an embedded video at the bottom of the post. (THANKYOU @rknightuk]. It will render just fine - unless the video owner wants you to watch it over on YouTube (and to be fair - there are very good reasons for that). If that happens, click on the link above and you will be taken to YouTube. The 'error' is only because the creator wants you to got to YouTube to watch it. That said - on rare occasions, it might actually be broken. If it is - sorry about that - try sending me an email and I will check if I made an error.

 


Bernie in the healdines

🔗 ‘They can survive just fine’: Bernie Sanders says income over $1bn should be taxed at 100%

You go Bernie.

… the problem is that nobody earns ‘income’ over $1Billion … isn’t that the real problem?



🔗 Karl Lagerfeld had odious views. We shouldn’t be putting him on a pedestal.

Filed in my bucket of things that I don’t pay attention to, so not aware of the claims. That said, is this another case of judgement of historical behavior because the modern context has changed? If so … is that right?

Discuss.


🔗 Save the Kindles

What if Amazon offered used readers, in bulk, to people in states that are banning books, and in school districts that are limiting what kids can read? What if it offered special deals on banned books, and brought titles to young people some of their “betters” are forbidding for them, to encourage reading?

💬 Dana Blankenhorn


💬 Hate Speech On Core Intuition

🔗 Just finished listening to the latest Core Intuition.

At one point in the conversation @manton and @danielpunkass were talking about community guidelines, social norms et al. Hate speech on Bluesky was specifically brought up. Apparently they have a way to add tags to posts so that posts can be marked as ‘hatespeech’, ‘not safe for work’, etc.

Sounded a pretty neat solution to me - but apparently someone over on @mastodon suggested that this meant BlueSky was allowing hate speech.

Have to say, one of the common threads running through a lot of Mastodians I observe is the ‘superior’, ‘better than thou’, ‘my way or the highway’ attitude … even down to comments like ‘if you don’t ‘alt text’ your images - I will unfollow you'.1

But, ‘allowing’ hate speech? There is no agreement what constitutes hate speech, so I guess this individual is judge and jury? Don’t get me wrong … I think most ‘decent people’ can bucket up the obvious extremes … it’s when it gets to the grey areas it becomes difficult. Like art - we can’t define it - we just ‘know it when we see it’.

I was reminded of a well used amorphism

“One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter”

This also ties into something I wrote just yesterday

1] I wonder if Mastodon is filling up with ‘snowflakes’. (Back when my mum was alive she used to rail on ‘do gooders’ … a term that seems to have fallen out of use these days - but the sentiment remain in these ‘behavioural vigilantes’.

2] I wonder whether the meek have inherited the earth … at least in terms of public discourse?

3] Has the pendulum swung too far? Satire and parody has lost meaning and too many people are cancelling themselves for fear of public admonishment and worse - retribution from the herd.

What do you think?



  1. Too late - I have already unfollowed you. (Not that I disagree with the need to do it - and I try - but it doesn’t always happen and life is too short.) ↩︎