everwas

a blog by Ian Kennedy

Category: Current Events

  • The Internet’s Circle of Life

    The Internet’s Circle of Life

    Paul Ford, great sage of internet culture, has a piece in Wired where he puts the inevitable dismantling of Twitter into perspective.

    Musk is merely the vehicle. The real reason Twitter lies in ruins is because it was an abomination before God. It was a Tower of Babel.

    The internet is always in motion, like the human life it reflects, things are always swinging from one end to another.

    • Online media business models swing from “information wants to be free” to full-locked down paywalls.
    • Content is King one year and the next the power shift to the aggregators, curators, and portals.

    As the internet figures out what works best, it swings back and forth searching for the optimal fit. It’s the internet’s own version of the circle of life. This is what Ford evokes when he says that the teardown of a centralized network like Twitter was inevitable, the internet’s way of bring things back to equilibrium. If there is a ghost in the machine, perhaps this is it.

    But when I go back and read Genesis, I hear God saying: “My children, I designed your brains to scale to 150 stable relationships. Anything beyond that is overclocking. You should all try Mastodon.”

    But in the same breath, while we all begin to navigate this new world of distributed social networks, we must never forget where we came from and that, eventually, the forces of capitalism will figure out how to gather an audience large enough to be targeted and monetizable. Maybe we’re already seeing the fresh roots of this new world with generative AIs that will be able to craft millions of customized sponsorship messages for each splinter of the community.

    If anything is constant, it is that the internet is an excellent platform for testing innovations, at scale.

    But someone will figure out the details. The reason the Babel story matters is not that it happened once but that it happens over and over: We Babelize and de-Babelize. The internet is an engine of both processes. Eventually, brands will find purchase in Mastodon’s rocky soil and grow engagement. Billionaires will order the construction of new marketplaces of ideas. Everything will centralize again, and it will seem eternal, as if the tower could never fall. For now, let’s enjoy the scattering.

    God Did the World a Favor by Destroying Twitter

    Same as it everwas.

  • That was fast

    That was fast

    AI-generated junk suffocating online platforms like algal blooms that choke the life out of ponds. 

    Hustle bros are jumping on the AI bandwagon

    Well that was fast. While still pondering the impact of generative AI technologies such as ChatGPT, we already have the hucksters rushing in to put it to market and make a quick buck. On a more serious note, a Columbian judge has used it to help him draft his judgement and we’ve already about the robots taking over CNet.

    As the graphic in the tweet below has predicted, the first use cases for generative AI will be to scale up correspondence so that the we can produce customized on a grand scale.

    Chat support vendor Intercom demonstrated how AI can be used as an add-in to summarize, make more formal, translate or even write a new article based on simple inputs. Microsoft is already cashing in on their $10 billion investment in OpenAI and making Bing search more conversational and the AI has already been integrated into their enterprise software platforms.

    Viva Sales, which connects Microsoft’s Office and video conferencing programs with customer relations management software, will be able to generate email replies to clients using OpenAI’s product for creating text. The AI tools, which include OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 — the system that is the basis for the ChatGPT chatbot— will cull data from customer records and Office email software. That information will then be used to generate emails containing personalized text, pricing details and promotions. 

    Microsoft Will Use OpenAI Tech to Write Emails for Busy Salespeople

    The AI hype race has a nasty habit of pushing the “should we really do this?” stage of innovation to the side in pursuit of the almighty first-mover advantage. Threatened with Microsoft releasing a conversational AI search engine, Google is now pressured to release their own version. Despite careful consideration to date Google is making investments in what feels like an AI arms race.

    All this to say that it’s going to take awhile for the “algal bloom” mentioned at the top of thIs article to run its course. In time the valuable use cases will become obvious but, to most, it will be in hindsight. There are going to be some road wrecks along the way but hopefully we will not break the internet, democracy, or society while we learn how to be smarter about how to work smarter.

    It’s useful to gain perspective on the coming AI revolution from the great technological historian Kevin Kelly who spoke about how AI would lead to the Second Industrial Revolution six years ago at TED.

    Everything we electrified, we can now cognify. . . The most popular AI product in 20 years from now, that everybody uses, has not been invented yet.

    Kevin Kelly

  • Wonder Goal

    Rising star Kaoru Mitoma scored an amazing goal in the final minutes of Brighton’s match against Liverpool to knock them out of the FA Cup. What was amazing about his goal is that Mitoma had the presence of mind in those final minutes to bobble the perfectly placed cross just enough to throw off the goalie so he was not prepared when he ultimately slammed the ball into the net.

    Such was the speed of the movement, and such was the quality of the execution, that the ball did not even make contact with the floor between those touches. A ‘keepy-uppy’ goal, against Liverpool, in the final minute of a thrilling FA Cup tie: Mitoma continues to go from strength to strength, from defining moment to defining moment. 

    Kaoru Mitoma’s juggling goal knocks holders Liverpool out of the FA Cup

    Reminiscent of another amazing goal, in another sport.

  • Misinterpreted

    Misinterpreted

    Beware of claims that a generative AI can achieve a higher order of intelligence if you let it crawl the internet. Even with all our collective learning, humans still jump to conclusions and misinterpret each other. Is the drawing above from a child with a disturbed obsession with death or just an innocent rendering of a family snorkeling trip?

    Maybe you remember this one from 2008 where a child’s drawing seemingly depicts mom as a pole dancer when in reality she was a Home Depot clerk trying to selling snow shovels before a blizzard.

    Careful again as the drawing and caption have since been revealed to be a re-mixed internet meme.

    Nothing is what it seems on the internet, there is inaccurate information everywhere, willfully created or not. Training an AI must be supervised on carefully curated data sets. Now more than ever we must heed the motto, Garbage in, Garbage out.

  • On the Cusp

    On the Cusp

    One silver lining in getting laid off is that you have time to meet people and learn about things that you may have not had the time or attention to pick up on while in the trenches of a full time job. During the first week of my new no-fixed-schedule life I learned about:

    A company called Helios that uses AI to analyze the voice of the CEO on investor calls to measure the confidence of leadership. The company is offering a product described in their white paper as,

    the first widely available data product that systematically assesses the tone of the voice of an executive during earnings conference calls to produce novel and meaningful sources of quantitative information

    The Tone of Voice Provides a Novel Source of Alpha

    Freaky.

    The search engine as we once knew it has become a thing of the past. Google, originally hailed for its simplicity and clean results has lost its shine. The ten blue links are crowded out by paid placement and other forms of sponsorship. The gradual infection of the open web with cheap clickbait has now ruined even the coveted “organic links” so that if you look for something like “Best Hotels in Osaka” even the non-ad results are SEO optimized sites filled with affiliate links and ads. It’s rotten all the down. For more on this, read Doctorow’s excellent enshitification

    There’s something called a “small modular reactor” (SMR) which is basically a mini nuclear reactor. There are multiple use cases for such a small form factor including replacing old coal power plants but it is also timely for the power-hungry data-centers which have been accused of running dirty.

    WebAssembly (WASM) has evolved to the point where it will not only replace the older browser-based code with something faster. It will also allowing for sandboxed applications to run, on-demand, within your browser heralding the age of truly write-once, run-anywhere applications. If my understanding is correct, this is one of the biggest enhancements to web development since AJAX programming back in 2005.

    So much to learn, so much to do!

  • David Crosby

    David Crosby

    I turn to Crosby’s music when I am feeling melancholy. His sweet voice is like an old friend who had been there, understands, and tells you how events fit into the broader universe. His perspective came from a kind soul who was perhaps too trusting and suffered for it. “Honest to the point of recklessness” as the song goes.

    If you want to listen to some pure Crosby magic, take a listen to this solo concert from a small theater in Berkeley in 1981 – it’s very intimate, just him with his guitar and about 100 people in a beautiful wooden building designed by Julia Morgan.

    Now he is gone. I like to think of him soaring above us, finally free of the weights that held him down, like his mother in his song Carry Me.

    And then there was my mother:
    She was lying in white sheets there and she was waiting to die.
    She said, “If you’d just reach underneath this bed
    And untie these weights,
    I could surely fly.

    She’s still smiling but she’s tired,
    She’d like to hear that last bell ring.
    You know if she could she would
    Stand up, and she could sing, singing

    Carry me, carry me
    Carry me above the world
    Carry me, carry me.

    Carry Me – David Crosby

    If Only I Could Remember My Name was on repeat when I was in boarding school, especially when it was rainy and cold outside, like is in NYC today. Press play and remember David Crosby.

  • Smarted

    I’m not going to go into detail on the why and how the wheels came off, I think this line by my colleague is a pretty good summary,

    Strong dollar + weak yen + difficult macro environment + US tech salaries = Japanese start-up slashing 40% global headcount.

    David Chu on LinkedIn
    Without massive scale, you must diversify revenues beyond advertising.

    So yeah, the SmartNews chapter of my life is over. Here are the facts:

    • I worked at SmartNews for 7 years, 11 months
    • I never got to say goodbye to my colleagues and friends. My Slack access was cut off just minutes after getting my severance notice.
    • I never had time to hand over any of my ongoing tasks to those left behind. I could also not inform any of the hundreds of partners that I’ve worked with over the years. I lost access to my email as well.

    I think it could have been done more gracefully but what’s done is done. I’ve posted on the socials (Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook) and will now turn my focus to the next thing. I’m open and interested in many things but here are three things I’m currently thinking of:

    The online publisher subscription problem. Scroll had an innovative approach but they got bought up by Twitter and Elon shut things down. Apple News is doing this but it seems too much like a restrictive bundle (see below). There has got to be a way to build a more inclusive model for subscriptions that satisfies both users and publishers, It’s time for publishers to realize they can’t charge $25/month for their content and users need to realize they need to pay something to avoid aggressive surveillance capitalism.

    Cable TV’s choke hold on local sports. I will not install basic cable & the extra YES network add-on just to watch local sports. It’s just not worth it just for one game every few days. I cut the cable years ago and would pay for a streaming service for local games alone without basic cable. Just as Kazaa and Limewire were used to allow music fans to pick and choose the songs they wanted from an album, sports fans are jumping through hoops to pick and choose what they want from the cable TV bundles. Why won’t the leagues embrace their role as media companies and sell direct to their fans?

    ChatGPT and services like it are going to be transformational. Sure, it’s early days and there are obvious limitations. Ask it to tell you about Pelé and it will tell you everything except the fact that he’s dead. The algo is not connected to the news and I think that’s a conscious decision. I’m sure they are still supervising the training so the news needs to be filtered for quality, accuracy, and context, by knowledgeable humans. The intersection of generative AI services such as ChatGPT and the news is fascinating.

    I have much to learn and I look forward to meeting as many people as possible to educate myself on the puzzles above and opportunities within.

    Hit me up if you want to talk – I’m available!

  • ChatGPT Fun

    ChatGPT Fun

    I went to today’s State of the Word presentation in person (woohoo, so nice to attend in-person events once again!) and one question was about the dreaded “build-to-launch gap” where you build a website for a client and then it takes them months to post anything into the beautiful container you built for them.

    There was some suggestion of using ChatGPT to automatically generate content to fill the gaps. While it’s debatable that a boring prompt will lead to boring text, there is some use in using tools such as ChatGTP to automatically write website copy, the output of prompt with just a little bit of flair can be quite inspirations.

    While sitting there listening to the question and answer, I fired up ChatGPT and had the AI write something before my eyes. I unfortunately have only a screenshot of the first attempt which I showed to the amazement of the person sitting next to me as we saw the thing get typed up in real time.

    Just to try and re-create the scene so you could see how quickly it worked, I did it two more times. The first time it changed gears with the same prompt and wrote a sonnet about why you need to change your oil.

    The Prompt: Write a blog post about how important it is to change your oil every 3000 miles in the style of William Shakespeare

    Lend me your ears, fair readers, for I come bearing news of utmost importance. ‘Tis a tale of lubrication and maintenance, of the crucial role played by a humble substance in the wellbeing of your trusty steed.

    I speak, of course, of oil – that most vital of fluids, without which the inner workings of your car would grind to a halt and your journeys would come to a swift and unfortunate end. And yet, despite its importance, it is a substance too often ignored and neglected.

    Forsooth, I implore you – do not make the mistake of believing that oil needs changing only when your car begins to show signs of distress. Nay, ’tis a task that must be performed regularly, with the utmost diligence and care. The recommended interval, you ask? Why, every 3000 miles, without fail.

    Some may claim that this is an unnecessary expense, or that modern cars require less frequent oil changes. But I say unto you – the cost of a simple oil change pales in comparison to the expense of repairing the damage caused by neglecting this vital task.

    Think of it thus: the oil in your car is like the lifeblood that courses through the veins of a living being. It keeps all of the moving parts functioning smoothly, preventing friction and wear. Over time, however, this oil becomes contaminated and degraded, losing its ability to do its job effectively.

    When this happens, the various components of your car are left to fend for themselves, rubbing and grinding against one another with no protective barrier. The result? Reduced performance, decreased fuel efficiency, and a heightened risk of costly and inconvenient breakdowns.

    But fear not, dear reader, for all is not lost. By changing your oil every 3000 miles, you can ensure that your car is always running at its best. It may seem like a small and insignificant task, but trust me when I say that it can make all the difference.

    So take heed, and do not neglect this most essential of maintenance tasks. Your car will thank you, and you can rest easy knowing that you have done all that you can to keep it running smoothly.

    Related: I live-blogged this year’s State of the Word on my old tumblr account just for giggles

  • NYC Rat Czar

    NYC Rat Czar

    New York City has a rat problem. If you don’t think so, just watch the video below. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

    It’s not surprising really. Leave bags of hot, steaming food out all night on the sidewalk and pretty soon the critters will come out for a meal – and have babies.

    In response, the city has listed a job opening for a cabinet level post. The Director of Rodent Mitigation, a Rat Czar.

    What’s so amusing about this is that the Mayor is having a bit of fun within the confines of big city politics and had the Job Posting written up with a bit of flair designed to get a bit of media attention. And it worked.

    Here are my favorite bits (bolding is my own).

    The About This Job section opens with a bang:

    Do you have what it takes to do the impossible? A virulent vehemence for vermin?

    They then lean into the job title, full well knowing it’s not the most sexy but, hey, go with it.

    If so, your dream job awaits: New York’s Citywide Director of Rodent Mitigation.

    I think the PR folks that helped write the job description are still hurting from all the earned media from the Pizza Rat. I was in San Francisco and even I heard about the Pizza Rat.

    Despite their successful public engagement strategy and cheeky social media presence, rats are not our friends. . . Cunning, voracious, and prolific, New York City’s rats are legendary for their survival skills, but they don’t run this city – we do.

    That final line echos Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s October 17th speech in which she famously declared “but the rats don’t run the city, we do” which was spotted on signs at the NYC marathon and instantly became a TikTok meme and is even being monetized by the sanitation department.

    But back to the JD. Yadda, yadda, yadda, then they show they mean business.

    The ideal candidate is highly motivated and somewhat bloodthirsty, determined to look at all solutions from various angles, including improving operational efficiency, data collection, technology innovation, trash management, and wholesale slaughter.

    Then on to the qualifications. New York City resident, Bachelor’s Degree, experience in policy and urban planning, strong organizational skills and attention to detail, proficiency with Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, team player, adapts well to change, then:

    Swashbuckling attitude, crafty humor, and general aura of badassery

    This was it. Only in NYC would you see this line in a government job posting. It’s not just be a bad ass, no – they spiffed it up a bit and wrote a “general aura of badassery” Damn – this is a city that will talk straight to you.

    Here you go, read it for yourself.

    Director-of-Rodent-Mitigation-38635Download