danyork

[danyork]

AVFTCN 035 - 3 Articles To Read On Earth Day

Today is Earth Day… and when I climb up into that crow’s nest, hold up my spyglass, and look out at the horizon… it can look pretty bleak. It seems like the whole world is on fire in different ways. But amidst the chaos… what gives me hope is seeing people taking action. And they are! Today I offer you three articles to hopefully provoke some thoughts on this day: one by me and two by…

View On WordPress

#Hope #kiwix #lora #meshtastic #offline #wikipedia

[danyork]

AVFTCN 034 - The Cautionary Tale of the Death of Ello

Do you remember… Ello? For a brief time in 2014 to 2016-ish, it flared up as “the next emerging social network” and even as a “Facebook-killer”. And then it flamed out… and… in the summer of 2023, it disappeared completely as the site was taken offline. I was all in with Ello for a time! Kind of as Mastodon is today for me, Ello was where I was focused on posting and engaging. And then it…

View On WordPress

#Hope #kiwix #lora #meshtastic #offline #wikipedia

[danyork]

AVFTCN 033 - Kiwix, Meshtastic and content and connectivity during an outage

Tonight here in northwestern Vermont we’re supposed to get the double trouble of heavy, wet snow and a windstorm with winds up to 49 mph (79 kph). The combination will undoubtedly cause trees to fall, taking down power and Internet cables. Forecasters are expecting power outages all across the state. In these moments, I often think about what we would do in an extended power or Internet outage.…

View On WordPress

#Hope

[danyork]

AVFTCN 032 - Finding Hope Amidst the Chaos

Happy New Year! Climbing up into the proverbial crow’s nest as 2024 begins, it looks a bit bleak up ahead. LOTS of icebergs! Of course here in the USA we have the US presidential election, that is sure to bring out an added level of nastiness. We are not alone in this… a colleague of mine points out that in 2024 there will be 106 elections in 67 countries! Given the current state of generative…

View On WordPress

#AI #artificial-intelligence #metaverse #technology #virtual-reality

[danyork]

AVFTCN 030 - Book: “Making A Metaverse That Matters”

I have always been intrigued by “what comes after the web browser” for how we interact with information online. After all, the web browser has been our primary way of interacting with information since the early 1990s. Even when we are using “apps” on our phones today, in many cases they are effectively web browsers wrapped in a customized layer. Could there be something more? Could we get to a…

View On WordPress

[danyork]

AVFTCN 030 - Want to run an AI on your laptop? Just download one file...

5:42 am Mind = 🤯 Would you like to run a large language model (LLM) on your own local computer? So that all your data and requests stay local? Would you like your own private “ChatGPT”-like thing that you could ask questions of? I happened to be looking at my personal email the other afternoon when Simon Willison’s email newsletter appeared. As I scanned his text (now available as a blog post)…

View On WordPress

[danyork]

AVFTCN 029 - Sunday Smorgasbord: Humane AI Pin, LEOs, Livestreaming Wikipedia editing

5:03 am Greetings from basement isolation. The dog has been let out and I’m back here in the dark. Instead of a specific topic, I want to catch up on some updates to past newsletters. So today’s note is a collection of smaller updates of different flavors. I’ll call it a smorgasboard, which of course Wikipedia has more info about than you probably ever cared to know! 😀 Now on to some updates…

View On WordPress

[danyork]

AVFTCN 028 - Let’s Not Forget the Magic of the Internet

6:23 am It is so easy to get so used to how the Internet works*, that sometimes we forget to pause and just think about how amazing this technology can be. We just expect that it will work – and for the most part it does. I’m had some experiences this week… and plenty of time to think… that reminded me about how magical the Internet can be at times. * – for those of us privileged enough to…

View On WordPress

[danyork]

AVFTCN 027 - The Paywalling of the Web

5:03 am Is the future of the Web really one where so much of the content is behind a paywall or a registration screen? (some call it a “regwall”) Are we returning to the pre-Internet days where so much information was locked away in gated “walled gardens” of online activity such as CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, Delphi, etc.? ✓ Subscribed Each morning after our dog wakes me up sometime between 4:30…

View On WordPress

[danyork]

AVFTCN 026 - Humane’s “AI Pin” gets closer to the Star Trek:TNG Communicator

5:09 am From 1987-1994, Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) brought an updated version of the classic show to our TV sets. Through my later years in university and first years out on my own, I tuned in each week to see the latest saga of Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Data, Worf, Deanna Troi, Geordi LaForge, the Crushers, and so many more. Set 100 years after the original Star Trek series…

View On WordPress

[danyork]

Canonical enshittification

This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system."

Next will be: "We block links to other sites because they might be malicious."

Then some kind of "pivot to video."

Probably not video (though who knows?) but some other feature that a major rival has, which Twitter will attempt to defraud its captive, commodified suppliers into financing an entry into.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is canonical enshittification. Lure in business customers (publishers) by offering surpluses (algorithmic recommendation and an ensuing traffic funnel). Lock them in (by capturing their audience and blocking interop and logged-out reading).

Then rug the publishers, clawing back all the surpluses you gave them and more, draining them of all available capital and any margins they have, until they die or bite the bullet and leave.

I would also give good odds on this leading to a revivification of the "Pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month for a platinum checkmark and we'll actually show what you post to the people who asked to see it."

That will be pitched as the answer to publishers' complaints about not wanting to turn themselves into commodity Twitter inputs. It will be priced at the same (or more) as the revenues publishers expect to lose from being commodified, making it a wash.

All of this seems to me to be an "unfair and deceptive business practice" under Sec 5 of the FTC Act.

If I sign up to follow you because I want to see what you post, and Twitter shadowbans your posts unless they are formatted to maximize your dependence on Twitter, they have deceived me, and are being unfair to you.

This is *very* analogous to the Net Neutrality debate, where a platform blocks or deprioritizes the things its users ask to see, based on whether the suppliers of those things are its competitors.

I've written about how an end-to-end principle for social media could be enforced under Sec 5 of the FTCA, how it would address this kind of sleazy practice, how it would be easy to administer, and wouldn't form a barrier to entry for new market entrants:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

[danyork]

AVFTCN 025 - Mozilla, Mastodon and the Fediverse - and also Pebble

5:18 am When I climb up into the crow’s nest and look out at the horizon, one of the “lands of opportunity” I continually see is the world of “decentralized social media”, and in particular Mastodon and the other services that use the ActivityPub protocol and are broadly referred to as the “Fediverse”. Subscribe For context, I first joined Mastodon back in 2016 when Twitter was going through…

View On WordPress

#TwitterMigration

[danyork]

AVFTCN 024 - A long walk-through of using WordPress’ “Jetpack AI Assistant”

4:06 am Jenna (our 16yo miniature poodle) didn’t get the memo about the time change. Can someone remind me why we do this again? Subscribe I was going to write about Mozilla and their plans with Mozilla.social this morning… but in trying out WordPress as a platform for a combined newsletter and blog, well… there’s something bright and shiny in the interface… WordPress’ experimental “AI…

View On WordPress

[danyork]

AVFTCN 023 - What WILL happen with all the LEO satellites burning up in the atmosphere?

5:19 am What’s going to happen when 25+ satellites are burning up in our upper atmosphere EVERY DAY? In a really weird bit of synchronicity, after sending out my message yesterday where I ended saying that the environmental effects of low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites was an entirely separate conversation… I was scrolling through Mastodon and the very first posts I saw were on this topic! 🤔 They…

View On WordPress

#LEO

[danyork]

AVFTCN 022 - The Global Chokepoint Where SpaceX Is The Only Consistent Launch Provider

5:09 am We’re in this really strange place where we have amazing ambitions for space, including launching 100s of thousands of satellites into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), and yet at this moment in November 2023, we have only ONE single launch provider – globally – that is consistently launching rockets – SpaceX! If you have been following me on social channels, you have no doubt seen that I often…

View On WordPress

#LEO

[danyork]

AVFTCN 021 - Moving Away From Substack

👋 Hi! It’s Dan York. And I wanted to let you all know that you’ll be getting this newsletter from a different email system now. I’ve decided to move away from Substack and instead host this newsletter on WordPress.com . Substack may be a fine platform for people looking to host a commercial newsletter… … but I’m not looking to do that. Type your email… Subscribe All I want to do is share my…

View On WordPress

[danyork]

Happy Spring! #Vermont style 🤣 #spring #springequinox (at Shelburne, Vermont) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqB_GR_JHpE/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#vermont #spring #springequinox