Notes for Week 41, 2024

Song of the week:

Notes

I have a tab listed below about blogs being in full swing, while the internet as a whole goes into some stagnant, AI-fuelled mess. I mentioned this last week, but we're in an ironic paradox where a huge amount of content is being sucked up by AI to create new, consolidated content, that now the AI is training itself on it's own consolidated content pool. Which makes the regular hallucinations or outright lies published even worse as it over-indexes on it's own nonsense.

Put more clearly, you could probably technically eat your own faeces after having a gourmet meal, and still reap some nutrients. Maybe even some flavour. Though let's not dive too far down this particular rabbit hole. But my point is that sure, the core ingredients might be the same, but the package, when re-consumed, isn't good for you. At some point, most of it winds up being waste.

So yeah, AI is entering a human centipede era or consuming and re-consuming content online.

Meanwhile no one wants to read it. I keep hearing from marketers about the value of auto-publishing emails, newsletters or website content with your tone. But I've yet to hear any of those exact same marketers talk about how they consume this kind of content elsewhere.

What is happening is that people are going to blogs. My RSS feeds are on fire. Substack is processing millions in subscription fees on behalf or writers annually. Even established news organisations are re-articulating their "opinion" sections as, in effect, blogs.

And all of that organic stuff is happening while Wordpress, the engine behind most online blogging, is having a full-on meltdown moment with it's founder/CEO going scorched earth on the ecosystem itself. It's targeted right now, but we've all seen this movie before. This week his team forked an existing plugin, took it as their own and offered it to the community. Because, as useful as the plugin appears to be, allowing WPEngine (the enemy in their mind for using "WP" in their name and not paying for it... in an open source community) access to any of the open source tooling on Wordpress.org would be in bad taste while everyone sues everyone in the room.

Imagine if the Linux foundation with Linus Torvalds decided to sue Canonical (makers of Ubuntu) for using the word 'Linux' and "not contributing to the community" enough. It would be ridiculous. And yet, here we are.

So while the internet gets fed AI diarrhoea, organic blogging grows nicely, the main platform folks skew towards to run their little corners of the internet decides to shart all over itself.

What a time to be alive.

(via my flickr)

Tabs

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Published on: 13th October, 2024

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