The interesting dynamic is that it seems like they’re making things that could lay lots of foundations for a lot of independent decentralised stuff, but people and devs need to actually pick that up and make it happen, and many users just want something that works.

So somewhat like lemmy-world and mastodon-social, they get stuck holding a centralised service whose success is holding hostage the decentralised system/protocol they actually care about.

For me, the thing I’ve noticed and that bothers me is that much of the focus and excitement and interest from the independent devs working in the space don’t seem too interested in the purely decentralised and fail-safe-rebuilding aspects of the system. Instead, they’re quite happy to build on top of a centralised service.

Which is fine but ignores what to me is the greatest promise of their system: to combine centralised and decentralised components into a single network. EG, AFAICT, running ActivityPub or similar within ATProto is plausible. But the independent devs don’t seem to be on that wavelength.

Yea, it would seem the embrace from those “who should maybe know better” is based on it being the appropriate compromise to make progress in this field.

BlueSky is not just another centralised platform. It’s open source (or mostly), based on an open protocol and an architecture that’s hybrid-decentralised. The “billionaire” security, AFAICT, is that we can rebuild it with our own data should it go to shit.

This thread from Andre Staltz is indicative I think: https://bsky.app/profile/staltz.com/post/3lawesmv6ik2d

He worked on scuttlebut/manyverse for a long while before moving on a year or so ago. Along with Paul Frazee, a core dev with bsky who’d previously done decentralisation, I think there’s a hunger to just make it work for people and not fail on idealistic grounds.

Kinda funny, not too long ago it was a fun mental exercise if you were paying attention to the tech industry to try to think of the ways in which Google or MS could fall.

Now, AFAICT, neither are falling any time soon, but there certainly seems to be a shift in how they’re perceived and how their brand sits in the market (where even so I’m still probably in a bubble on this).

But I’m not sure how predictable it would have been that both would look silly stumbling for AI dominance.

And, yea, I’m chalking recall up to the AI race as it seems like a grab for training data to me, and IIRC there were some clues around that this could be true.

So I’ve been ranting lately (as have others) about how big tech is moving on from the open user-driven internet and aiming to build its own new thing as an AI interface to all the hoovered data (rather than conventional search engines) …

which makes this (and the underlying Bing going down) feel rather eerie.

How far away (in time or probability) is a complete collapse of the big search-engines … as in they just aren’t there any more?

Yea but this feels quicker than anyone expected. It’s easy to forget, but alpha Go beating the best in the world was shocking at the time and no one saw it coming. We hadn’t sorted out what to do with big monopoly corps yet, we weren’t ready for a whole new technology.

Oh yea, it’s basically a vibe now for those who see it, which I was mostly channeling.

I dunno, my feeling is that even if the hype dies down we’re not going back. Like a real transition has happened just like when Facebook took off.

Humans will still be in the loop through their prompts and various other bits and pieces and platforms (Reddit is still huge) … while we may just adjust to the new standard in the same way that many reported an inability to do deep reading after becoming regular internet users.

The moment word was that Reddit (and now Stackoverflow) were tightening APIs to then sell our conversations to AI was when the game was given away. And I’m sure there were moments or clues before that.

This was when the “you’re the product if its free” arrangement metastasised into “you’re a data farming serf for a feudal digital overlord whether you pay or not”.

Google search transitioning from Good search engine for the internet -> Bad search engine serving SEO crap and ads -> Just use our AI and forget about the internet is more of the same. That their search engine is dominated by SEO and Ads is part of it … the internet, IE other people’s content isn’t valuable any more, not with any sovereignty or dignity, least of all the kind envisioned in the ideals of the internet.

The goal now is to be the new internet, where you can bet your ass that there will not be any Tim Berners-Lee open sourcing this. Instead, the internet that we all made is now a feudal landscape on which we all technically “live” and in which we all technically produce content, but which is now all owned, governed and consumed by big tech for their own profits.

I recall back around the start of YouTube, which IIRC was the first hype moment for the internet after the dotcom crash, there was talk about what structures would emerge on the internet … whether new structures would be created or whether older economic structures would impose themselves and colonise the space. I wasn’t thinking too hard at the time, but it seemed intuitive to that older structures would at least try very hard to impose themselves.

But I never thought anything like this would happen. That the cloud, search/google, mega platforms and AI would swallow the whole thing up.

It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.

EDIT:

Torvalds’s anti-anti-left post (I was curious to read it again):

I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.

Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.

I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?

I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.

And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.

Fantastic framing! Not just of the internet, but the whole economic sector including big tech, various publishers, of course the ads industry and now all of the push for winning the AI platform wars.

It’s a toilet economy! Fueled by the attention, tastes, inclinations and urges of people taking a shit! And now, as AI “learns” from the internet, also fed by and literally made of the writings and thoughts of people … taking a shit.

It’s also a nice litmus test for what kind of internet space somewhere online is based on where people are when they comment or post: “Is this a toilet or desk space”. Depending on what you’re after, you will probably want to know if you’re in the right kind of place.

Oh for sure. All of this is clearly a situation where the law is slow to catch up.

There are obvious responses here along the lines of embracing piracy and (re-)embracing hard copy ownership.

All that aside though, this feels like a fairly obvious point for legal intervention. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are already existing grounds for legal action, it’s just that the stakes are likely small enough and costs of legal action high enough to be prohibitive. Which is where the government should come in on the advice of a consumer body.

Some reasonable things that could be done:

• Money back requirements
• Clear warnings to consumers about “ownership” being temporary
• Requiring tracking statistics of how long “ownership” tends to be and that such is presented to consumers before they purchase
• If there are structural issues that increase the chances of “withdrawn” ownership (such as complex distribution deals etc), a requirement to notify the consumer of this prior to purchase.

These are basic things based on transparency that tend to already exist in consumer regulation (depending on your jurisdiction of course). Streaming companies will likely whinge (and probably have already to prevent any regulation around this), but that’s the point … to force them to clean up their act.

As far as the relations between streaming services and the studios (or whoever owns the distribution rights), it makes perfect sense for all contracts to have embedded in them that any digital purchase must be respected for the life of the purchaser even if the item cannot be purchased any more. It’s not hard, it’s just the price of doing business.

All of this is likely the result of the studios being the dicks they truly are and still being used to pushing everyone around (and of course the tech world being narcissistic liars).

Yea wow. As a 90s kid I’d never thought of comparing smart phones to consoles. Great point. Gaming together on the couch or a truly fun and social activity and way more wholesome than doom scrolling

Thanks!

When Stewart started his show on Apple TV, I was interested, because I figure he wouldn’t have gone there unless he had some assurances about being able to do whatever he wanted. And in some ways, the show seemed to be produced in a way that backed up that guess. It seemed pretty serious and not too concerned with ensuring ratings/engagement, and resulted in some awesome interviews from Stewart (better journalism than anything he’s doing on the Daily Show AFAICT, though I haven’t seen this interview).

I figured for Apple it made business sense to sell themselves as a media business that enables high quality content including some freedom of press values. I figured that they thought through how to distance themselves as a tech company from any views they disliked from their TV product, so long as people paid the subscriptions.

Of course, that they couldn’t help themselves is of no surprise to anyone. The real surprise was that the show happened in the first place, and it’d be interesting to know if there was a struggle within Apple about the whole thing.

In the end though, the whole thing IMO is a good lesson in how news/journalism cannot be mixed with conflicting interests, at all.

It’s really good that the story is being spoken about too by Stewart having first hand experience of how it went down … because these sorts of interests are all over the industry and really need to be addressed.

My understanding is that this is what’s happening everywhere. Instead of establishing some precedent, every party is just cashing out with licence agreements or settlements. Basically hedging their bets it seems.

Meanwhile the game plan from big AI is obviously to keep burning cash until they rule the world (or die).

I’ve been harping on about this for a while on the fediverse … private/closed/non-open spaces really ought to be thought about more. Fortunately, lemmy core devs are implementing local only and private communities (local only is already done IIRC).

Yes they introduce their own problems with discovery and gating etc. But now that the internet’s “you’re the product” stakes have gone beyond what could have been construed as a reasonably transaction, “my attention on an ad … for a service”, to “my mind’s products to be aggregated into an energy sucking job replacing AI … for a service” … well it’s time to normalise closing that door on opportunistic tech capitalists.

Yea … I personally don’t get it … but people are down for it.

The biggest example I’ve seen people excited about is office work … instead of screens it’s all just a VR. On which I’m expecting to see posts/blogs about why that doesn’t work too well in the long term. I just don’t see a big heavy thing on your face working out as a product. And while Apple may have done a lot of things well here, they haven’t gotten around that essential problem it seems (??) and may have jumped the gun here out of desparation to find new product markets. For me this is a 50/50 as their first major flop in a while (does homepod count?)

I was listing easy to imagine AI scenarios not current realities.

It controls a military drone.

It controls surgical equipment.

It’s filtering your CV before any human sees it.

It controls a robot taking care of your children.

It’s involved in law enforcement or legal judgments.

It’s involved in government policy setting.

Saw all the complaints about the web page, and as someone who likes creative web lanes from time to time, I was curious …

And yea that shit was dumb and embarrassing. Like the verge has had their branding damaged as far as I’m concerned.