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#enshittification

45 posts40 participants3 posts today

Another example of legacy #media circling the drain, not unlike certain small college faculty telling their students to use #AI to find sources, summarize text, etc., you know, skills you are supposed to learn, just let the machine do them for you...poorly.

> New York Times Encourages Staff to Create Headlines Using AI futurism.com/new-york-times-ai

Futurism · New York Times Encourages Staff to Create Headlines Using AIBy Noor Al-Sibai

You've probably heard of it by now: Amazon will prevent downloading your ebooks via USB transfer for offline use in 7 days (Febr. 26th). This handy browser skript will help you download your library in batches of 25 at a time instead of having to manually click and download _every_single_ ebook. You don't need any programming knowledge, just this script by Chris Hollindale (not me) and the browser extension Tampermonkey.

github.com/chrishol/greasemonk

Firefox addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firef
Chrome chromewebstore.google.com/deta

But why should you download your ebooks to your own computer? Many people bought a Kindle to read books offline in the first place. Or you use Linux and can't or don't want to "just use the Kindle app". Or your Kindle is old and doesn't have Wifi. Or you may want to use a Kobo or another reader in the future. And last but not least - Amazon has removed ebooks from users Kindle devices in the past (including a version of Orwell's 1984 - of all books 🙄 ).

Replied in thread

4/n #AI #ML #LLM business models are predatory.

Increasingly, platforms position themselves as a 'lens service' (gatekeeper) onto their version of the Internet.

At the same time as seemingly 'bringing you the Internet', they are isolating you from it, and biasing the content.

They hope that a summary in their search page is enough for you, without going to the source.

We need to honour the original WWW vision, allowing individuals to publish and earn from their expertise.

Replied in thread

3/n #AI #ML #LLM business models are predatory.

Now is peak time for those businesses:

The WWW is full of expertise (and plenty of not-expertise, and yes, the Internet can be wrong), so is rich pickings for harvesters of expertise

However, as expertise is hollowed out and concentrated, while isolating the originators, the new expertise becomes superficial. It will eat only its own output.

Expertise is now needed to find expertise in the trash. All the trash looks the same.

Continued thread

2/n #AI #ML #LLM business models are predatory.

AI orgs exploit the 'gateway' or 'gatekeeper' business model, inserting themselves as a service between participants in activities.

They screen out others who might provide expertise, and call it their own.

They will charge for it at *all* points in the workflow:
- As a user, you'll pay for access to expertise, *and* feed it new expertise.
- As a provider of expertise or solutions, you'll bid for placement in the knowledge.

1/n #AI #ML #LLM business models are predatory

If you contribute to systems that use your content to train AI, you are transferring power and your ability to earn.

- It takes expertise from you, giving AI orgs the power to use it anywhere and make money from it.

- It reduces your value as an individual contributor, because a company can "use the AI", and not employ you.

- AI does not attribute sources, so you have no future reward for your expertise. They stole it.

I'll never get Reddit's hype. I closed my account ages ago, never looked back. DNGAF when it was free, sure as fuck ain't going to give a shit if it is paywalled.

> Reddit will lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO says arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/0

An image of a woman holding a cell phone in front of the Reddit logo displayed on a computer screen, on April 29, 2024, in Edmonton, Canada.
Ars Technica · Reddit plans to lock some content behind a paywall this year, CEO saysBy Scharon Harding

🪦 The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal Again

「 Tech critic Ed Zitron calls this phenomenon “The Rot Economy,” where companies are more obsessed with continuous growth than with providing useful products. “Our economy isn’t one that produces things to be used, but things that increase usage,” Zitron wrote in another piece, bringing focus to ideas I’ve been mulling for the past half-decade 」

vintagecomputing.com/index.php

www.vintagecomputing.comVC&G | » The PC is Dead: It’s Time to Make Computing Personal AgainAdventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.

If you’re a YouTube creator, your audience is going to be more limited than it already is. I just had several instances where YouTube would not let me watch videos, at all, unless I was logged into YouTube. I go to look this up to see if it’s a common occurrence, and this is what YouTube has to say on their troubleshoot page.

Make sure you’re signed into YouTube.

In order to protect the YouTube community, we may prevent signed-out users from accessing YouTube videos when they’re attempting to download material for offline use.

If you're a researcher trying to access YouTube data for your academic research, you can apply to YouTube’s researcher program. Learn more about #YouTube #Enshittification #