The perceived ‘self’ is an amalgamation shaped by quasi-independent personalities influenced by genetics, upbringing, memories, and trauma. Much of our behavior is driven by animalistic passions and irrepressible emotions.And I think that’s what we hate: We hate not being the boss of our own heads. We hate not being in control. The puppet wishes to overpower the strings—parts of her own body—that keep her upright and sensible.

Girard told us that imitation is the texture of the human experience, that we are constantly orchestrated by desires, and that we are fluid beings who are always becoming more like who we look up to. So, in this light, trying to become the best version of yourself creates an impossible loop: You need the best version of yourself to exist so you know what to strive for in order to become it, but the best version of you can not exist if you do not become it first. Chicken and egg.

the marionette can not be its own puppeteer; that would be a paradox. Trying to improve the self is like Narcissus staring at his reflection: Neither you nor your reflection—who you want to be—changes. You can not improve yourself by staring back at yourself in the same way that a mirror can not become a portrait.1 Self-deficiency implies that external help is needed. You are imperfect at best. You can not produce something from nothing, multiply without a multiplier, or draw straight with crooked lines.

Instead of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, perhaps we are meant to self-deny so we can make room for a Savior. The reason is in its name: Christ-ian, meaning Christ-like, suggests that we shouldn’t be imitating or striving to be some imaginative best-version-of-myself, but rather, someone completely external and objectively Good to the perfect degree.

I'm not sure I agree with *everything* you wrote above, but as I've gotten older, I find myself turning less to self-help books, articles, etc., and more to just hanging out with friends and family.

As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s. The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection.

I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.

In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users. To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.

I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights. Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.

As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me. In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person. Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.

To me it's pretty clearly the same targeted advertising available anywhere with the extra claim of using "voice data". It doesn't say what the voice data is or where it comes from. They could say that when people do google searches using Siri/OkGoogle/the microphone option on Google - it's information they would use in an anonymized way to target ads, or rather Google does on your behalf, and it's technically a derivative of voice data.

I'm skeptical this is what people might think it is. To be clear, I think most readers would interpret this as "your phone is surreptiously listening to you via your microphone." If that were true, then there would be telltale signs of resource draw. Handling rich audio data has practical costs, whether battery, CPU, network, memory, and/or disk; that data has to be stored, transmitted, and processed somehow. I've never seen analysis that shows that's happening. Not to mention this capability is beyond what audio capture APIs in Android and iOS offer, as far as I know.

The importance of user-centricity, demands a broad-based view of where design can make a difference. We live in a world where your smartphone can warn you to leave early for your next appointment because of traffic, and your house knows when you’ll be home and therefore when to turn on the heat. The boundaries between products and services are merging into integrated experiences.

Our research suggests that overcoming isolationist tendencies is extremely valuable. One of the strongest correlations we uncovered linked top financial performers and companies that said they could break down functional silos and integrate designers with other functions. This was particularly notable in consumer-packaged-goods (CPG) businesses, where respondents from companies that were top-quartile integrators reported compound annual growth rates some seven percentage points above those that were weakest in this respect.

By Katharine Schwab4 minute ReadOver the last year, Ideo’s philosophy of “design thinking“–a codified, six-step process to solve problems creatively–has come under fire. It’s been called bullshit, the opposite of inclusive design, and a failed experiment. It’s even been compared to syphilis.Ideo as an institution has rarely responded to critiques of design thinking or acknowledged its flaws. But at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, Ideo partner and leader of its Cambridge, Massachusetts, office Michael Hendrix had a frank conversation with Co.Design senior writer Mark Wilson about why design thinking has gotten so much flack.“I think it’s fair to critique design thinking, just as it’s fair to critique any other design strategy,” Hendrix says. “There’s of course many poor examples of design thinking, and there’s great examples. Just like there’s poor examples of industrial design and graphic design and different processes within organizations.”Part of the problem is that many people use the design thinking methodology in superficial ways. Hendrix calls it the “theater of innovation.” Companies know they need to be more creative and innovative, and because they’re looking for fast ways to achieve those goals, they cut corners.“We get a lot of the materials that look like innovation, or look like they make us more creative,” Hendrix says. “That could be anything from getting a bunch of Sharpie markers and Post-its and putting them in rooms for brainstorms, to having new dress codes, to programming play into the week. They all could be good tools to serve up creativity or innovation, they all could be methods of design thinking, but without some kind of history or strategy to tie them together, and track their progress, track their impact, they end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.'”

“If you make something rigid and formulaic, it could absolutely fail,” he says. “You want to rely on milestones in the creative process, but you don’t want it to be a reactive process that loses its soul.”

“There is a real need to build respect for one another and trust in the safety of sharing ideas so you can move forward,” Hendrix says. “Knowing when to bring judgments is important. Cultures that are highly judgy, that have hierarchy, that are rewarding the person who is the smartest person in the room, don’t do well with this kind of methodology.”

There are a multitude of viable culprits behind this revenue drop. Robson himself pointed to the pandemic and tightened global budgets while arguing that “the widespread adoption of design thinking . . . has reduced demand for our services.” (Ideo was, in part, its own competition here since for years, it sold courses on design thinking.) It’s perhaps worth noting that, while design thinking was a buzzword from the ’90s to the early 2010s, it’s commonly met with all sorts of criticism today.

“People were like, ‘We did the process, why doesn’t our business transform?'” says Cliff Kuang, a UX designer and coauthor of User Friendly (and a former Fast Company editor). He points to PepsiCo, which in 2012 hired its first chief design officer and opened an in-house design studio. The investment has not yielded a string of blockbusters (and certainly no iPhone for soda). One widely promoted product, Drinkfinity, attempted to respond to diminishing soft-drink sales with K-Cup-style pods and a reusable water bottle. The design process was meticulous, with extensive prototyping and testing. But Drinkfinity had a short shelf life, discontinued within two years of its 2018 release.

“Design is rarely the thing that determines whether something succeeds in the market,” Kuang says. Take Amazon’s Kindle e-reader. “Jeff Bezos henpecked the original Kindle design to death. Because he didn’t believe in capacitive touch, he put a keyboard on it, and all this other stuff,” Kuang says. “Then the designer of the original Kindle walked and gave [the model] to Barnes & Noble.” Barnes & Noble released a product with a superior physical design, the Nook. But design was no match for distribution. According to the most recent data, Amazon owns approximately 80% of the e-book market share.

The rise of mobile computing has forced companies to create effortless user experiences—or risk getting left behind. When you hail an Uber or order toilet paper in a single click, you are reaping the benefits of carefully considered design. A 2018 McKinsey study found that companies with the strongest commitment to design and the best execution of design principles had revenue that was 32 percentage points higher—and shareholder returns that were 56 percentage points higher—than other companies.

As the “am I ready?” question continues to ricochet off myself and others, I’m finally viewing it for what it is: a clever, creative way to procrastinate self-actualization. If you’re asking yourself whether you’re ready, or finding reasons why you aren’t, it’s a sign you have let the gap grow too wide between idea and action. Your mind is probably convincing you that there is some existential reason for that buffer, when in reality, you’re just scared to do a new thing wrong or to look weird doing it. That’s okay. Now that you’ve noticed your inaction, you can act. You are as ready as you’ll ever be, because ready-ness is not measured by thinking, it’s measured by starting.

If you keep waiting for permission from some external source long after anyone is responsible for giving it to you, your ideas and ambitions will whither while you become bitter that no one is letting you do what you wanted to do. But in the end: it’s your responsibility to give yourself permission. This doesn’t need to be daunting. It can be the most liberating epiphany of all to realize that you can start now.

are you ready? to be in the relationship? to start the business? to say i love you to your partner? to forgive the person you resent? to have the hard conversation? to tell the truth? to publish the piece? to admit you were wrong? to create the life you imagine? to do what scares you?

what I’ve leapt at before I felt ready has consistently lead to the most expansive journeys of my life. Pursuing jobs I was too young for. Applying for scholarships that seemed impossible to get. Reaching out to people that I had no business knowing.

The whole notion of needing to be ready is highly corrosive to action. Because how can we really measure ready-ness? What if the only measure of “being ready” is just… starting? Trying? Doing the thing. What if ready is something you prove to yourself you are while you’re making the attempt, instead of trying to prove it before you start? What if being ready is not something you can cognitively analyze, but something that can be only demonstrated through action.

The reframe I am now internalizing is that ready is a felt state you can consciously bring yourself to.

You can imagine what the version of you that is ready would feel like and fill yourself up with those feelings. Or to make it even simpler: you can just start. If it doesn’t work, you can ask why, integrate your learnings, and try a different way. Or move on. Or whatever. But action—action!—is the path to ready-ness, not more thinking.

limiting beliefs. Poor attempts at protecting me from some imagined danger. Blocks created by my mind, designed to keep my ideas inside me and keep my creativity away from the world—away from reaching you. I’m now weeding out this ready-ness block and seeding the belief that the ability to imagine is the only sign of ready-ness you need.

You can go back later to refine what you’ve done. But by then, you’re already in the act. You’ve done it instead of remaining stuck in thought. So, the next time you find yourself wondering if you’re ready: don’t. Instead: start. We become ready by trying, not by thinking. Because ready-ness is a question of boldness, and as Bradbury so eloquently reminds us: intellect doesn’t help you very much there.

through the lens of critical media literacy, I argue that shitposting exists as an online pedagogical technology that can potentially reorient the network of relationships within social media spheres and expand the possible range of identities for those involved. To illustrate this argument, I conclude with a close reading of posts from two Twitter accounts: dril, an anonymous user who has managed to inform political discourse through his shitposts, and the corporate account for the Sunny Delight Beverage Corporation. I describe how tweets from these accounts engage shitposts in divergent ways. In doing so, I contend that these tweets reveal shitposting’s potential for contributing to the democratic aims of critical media literacy education, but the appropriation of that practice by large corporations and individuals imbued with political power jeopardize that already fraught potential.

Beyond the narrow framing of previous literature that only considers the use of shitposting for social exclusion or as fascist propaganda, I argue for an encompassing approach to this discursive tool that embodies a polysemic and open-ended cultural politic.

The analysis presented here shows that the circumstances under which shitposts circulate hold significant information when trying to understand the potential of these texts within a critical pedagogy. Expanding this assertion to consider other discursive technologies, it follows that both public pedagogy and critical media literacy research must continue to examine not only media itself but how pieces of media circulate, considering both who (or what) this media circulates between and where in that circulation people can begin to challenge the digital milieu.

I contend that positioning shitposting as a uniform tool in terms of its politics within previous scholarship misrepresents the practice. Instead, shitposting can serve a multitude of pedagogical ends depending on how individuals and groups use shitposts.

shitposting represents one tool within this broader, holistic understanding of public pedagogy, albeit one that often manifests unintentionally. By producing turbulence within social media, shitposting can contribute to the public pedagogies of social media that mirror the goals of critical media literacy education. However, a deployment or engagement with public pedagogy does not guarantee a critically oriented outcome.

in their efforts to provide better products than their competitors and earn higher prices and margins, suppliers often “overshoot” their market: They give customers more than they need or ultimately are willing to pay for. And more importantly, it means that disruptive technologies that may underperform today, relative to what users in the market demand, may be fully performance-competitive in that same market tomorrow. This was the basis for insisting that the iPhone must have a low-price model: surely Apple would soon run out of new technology to justify the prices it charged for high-end iPhones, and consumers would start buying much cheaper Android phones instead! In fact, as I discussed in after January’s earnings results, the company has gone in the other direction: more devices per customer, higher prices per device, and an increased focus on ongoing revenue from those same customers.

Apple seems to have mostly saturated the high end, slowly adding switchers even as existing iPhone users hold on to their phones longer; what is not happening, though, is what disruption predicts: Apple isn’t losing customers to low-cost competitors for having “overshot” and overpriced its phones. It seems my thesis was right: a superior experience can never be too good — or perhaps I didn’t go far enough.

Jeff Bezos has been writing an annual letter to shareholders since 1997, and he attaches that original letter to one he pens every year. It included this section entitled Obsess Over Customers: From the beginning, our focus has been on offering our customers compelling value. We realized that the Web was, and still is, the World Wide Wait. Therefore, we set out to offer customers something they simply could not get any other way, and began serving them with books. We brought them much more selection than was possible in a physical store (our store would now occupy 6 football fields), and presented it in a useful, easy-to-search, and easy-to-browse format in a store open 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. We maintained a dogged focus on improving the shopping experience, and in 1997 substantially enhanced our store. We now offer customers gift certificates, 1-Click shopping, and vastly more reviews, content, browsing options, and recommendation features. We dramatically lowered prices, further increasing customer value. Word of mouth remains the most powerful customer acquisition tool we have, and we are grateful for the trust our customers have placed in us. Repeat purchases and word of mouth have combined to make Amazon.com the market leader in online bookselling.

This year, after highlighting just how much customers love Amazon (answer: a lot), Bezos wrote: One thing I love about customers is that they are divinely discontent. Their expectations are never static — they go up. It’s human nature. We didn’t ascend from our hunter-gatherer days by being satisfied. People have a voracious appetite for a better way, and yesterday’s ‘wow’ quickly becomes today’s ‘ordinary’. I see that cycle of improvement happening at a faster rate than ever before. It may be because customers have such easy access to more information than ever before — in only a few seconds and with a couple taps on their phones, customers can read reviews, compare prices from multiple retailers, see whether something’s in stock, find out how fast it will ship or be available for pick-up, and more. These examples are from retail, but I sense that the same customer empowerment phenomenon is happening broadly across everything we do at Amazon and most other industries as well. You cannot rest on your laurels in this world. Customers won’t have it.

when it comes to Internet-based services, this customer focus does not come at the expense of a focus on infrastructure or distribution or suppliers: while those were the means to customers in the analog world, in the online world controlling the customer relationship gives a company power over its suppliers, the capital to build out infrastructure, and control over distribution. Bezos is not so much choosing to prioritize customers insomuch as he has unlocked the key to controlling value chains in an era of aggregation.

consumer expectations are not static: they are, as Bezos’ memorably states, “divinely discontent”. What is amazing today is table stakes tomorrow, and, perhaps surprisingly, that makes for a tremendous business opportunity: if your company is predicated on delivering the best possible experience for consumers, then your company will never achieve its goal.

In the case of Amazon, that this unattainable and ever-changing objective is embedded in the company’s culture is, in conjunction with the company’s demonstrated ability to spin up new businesses on the profits of established ones, a sort of perpetual motion machine

Owning the customer relationship by means of delivering a superior experience is how these companies became dominant, and, when they fall, it will be because consumers deserted them, either because the companies lost control of the user experience (a danger for Facebook and Google), or because a paradigm shift made new experiences matter more (a danger for Google and Apple).

The company is considering the use of carbon nanotubes to improve the conductivity of battery materials, delivering better performance from lesser-used battery materials. Apple is also looking to increase its battery's silicon content, replacing graphite to increase capacity, and shorten charging and discharging times. The result is expected to be an innovative battery type that has not yet been commercialized. A source familiar with Apple's plans suggested to ETNews that the Vision Pro headset has dramatically increased the company's need for high-performance batteries. The headset features just two hours of battery life. Other devices such as the Apple Watch and iPad have been left with the same "all-day" battery life since their introduction. Apple's custom battery project was reportedly co-developed with the company's electric vehicle project, but the mobile applications are now the main target for the technology. It is expected to begin being added to Apple devices starting in 2025.

Many of the most pressing concerns around AI safety will come with these features, whenever they arrive. The fear is that when you tell AI systems to do things on your behalf, they might accomplish them via harmful means. This is the fear embedded in the famous paperclip problem, and while that remains an outlandish worst-case scenario, other potential harms are much more plausible.Once you start enabling agents like the ones OpenAI pointed toward today, you start building the path toward sophisticated algorithms manipulating the stock market; highly personalized and effective phishing attacks; discrimination and privacy violations based on automations connected to facial recognition; and all the unintended (and currently unimaginable) consequences of infinite AIs colliding on the internet.

That same Copy Editor I described above might be able in the future to automate the creation of a series of blogs, publish original columns on them every day, and promote them on social networks via an established daily budget, all working toward the overall goal of undermining support for Ukraine.

Which actions is OpenAI comfortable letting GPT-4 take on the internet today, and which does the company not want to touch?  Altman’s answer is that, at least for now, the company wants to keep it simple. Clear, direct actions are OK; anything that involves high-level planning isn’t.

For most of his keynote address, Altman avoided making lofty promises about the future of AI, instead focusing on the day-to-day utility of the updates that his company was announcing. In the final minutes of his talk, though, he outlined a loftier vision.“We believe that AI will be about individual empowerment and agency at a scale we've never seen before,” Altman said, “And that will elevate humanity to a scale that we've never seen before, either. We'll be able to do more, to create more, and to have more. As intelligence is integrated everywhere, we will all have superpowers on demand.”

New real-time syncing libraries like Partykit (and my inspired creation playhtml) are making it incredibly easy to make websites multiplayer, which many games incorporate as the default. This prediction is wise in a lot of ways in terms of interaction, narrative, tutorial, and multiplayer design, and more and more people desire a liveness and tactility in websites that we take for granted in video games.

Websites are the future of video games. They are the “end game” of video games. They are spaces where the end players (the website visitors) have the agency to freely interact with others, and not towards any predetermined object, but purely for themselves, discovering who they are in each new environment and finding new ways of relating to one another.

Tokimeki Memorial gives the impression where your agency comes into conflict with several others’, each with their own desires and personalities. At the end of this season, he concludes that more video games should ditch combat mechanics and instead focus on how your choice of actions question and ultimately shape who you are and what you care about.

As I watch Tim talk about all this, I think about how websites feel like multiplayer video games, all of which are part of the broader “internet” universe. One in which the “creatures” are the cursors of other, real people. And where we can’t fight each other at all, only talk to one another.

Somewhere in the push to make the internet the infrastructure of a global capitalist economy, we lost this perspective on what the internet is. If I asked people to define what websites are to them, they might talk about the capabilities they provide: “the world’s information at your fingertips,” “AI that does whatever you ask of it,” “a platform for selling products.” Or as design artifacts: they provide the basis of interactive, creative pieces of art, media, and writing. But if we distill a website down to its base components, it is a space that allows people to talk to each other. In the era when the internet was new and before we had predetermined what it was “for,” everyday internet pioneers found ways to talk to one another by making websites for each other. The conversations spanned webs of personal websites, revealing intimate detail in exchange for intimate detail. They bartered histories for kinship, stories for solidarity, identities for community.

The websites of our modern-day internet experience reflect quite a different perspective on what websites should be “for.” Websites are often the expression of a corporate unit, optimized for flow, retention, or the latest trendy design aesthetic. We focus on animation design and gradient layering rather than the interactions that govern how we relate to one another.

How do we make websites feel more like embodied objects? What does a website that can become well-worn or passed down feel like? How does a website become a living gathering space, one that evolves with the activity of its participants? How can a website enable showing care to each other? How can it facilitate solidarity between people?

As video games have shifted towards hyper-optimization, the internet has gone a similar direction. Friction has been systematically eliminated and sophisticated automated experimentation infrastructure enables optimization of key metrics at a microscopic level of detail. In return, we’ve come to view websites and the broader internet more and more as a purely utilitarian medium. Even social media, which at some point was positioned as something for self-expression and community-making has become almost entirely a space for influence climbing.

We need more websites that gently guide us to trust our own choices and intuitions, that chide us when we try to do it all and work ourselves to the bone, that nudge us to find beauty in unexpected places, to find the poetry in the lazy.

Bridging the gap between James’ “The Turn of the Screw” and Flanagan’s “The Haunting of Bly Manor,” Alejandro Amenábar’s “The Others” remains one the greatest and most instructive movies of its kind because it shows that denial is the real ectoplasm that binds ghost stories together, and love just the most satisfying conduit through which it might be made flesh.

The great project of someone’s life might be the pursuit of a sustainable balance between doubt and conviction, or fear and security; most people will construct and/or cling to whatever answers might spare them from the mortal horror of being hounded by certain questions. To that end, it’s no coincidence that many of the most unsettling ghost stories ever told revolve around characters who refuse to accept that they’re in one to begin with, as no other genre is so fundamentally dependent upon the power of denial. Likewise, no other genre is so determined to erode it.

It's just a bit depressing to see how much it's all become a numbers game, whether those numbers are dollars in your pocket or followers on your Instagram. I'm probably saying nothing new to anybody who's been on the blogging scene for some time, but as a newcomer who's just here to write creatively and have fun, it was a stark reminder of how corporate the web has become. Why is that the end goal of blogging? Of writing? Just to make money and grow our followers? To increase our traffic so we can expose our visitors to 300 repetitive ads that take up their entire phone screen? To "convert" our readers into our customers, because them reading and enjoying what we have to say simply isn't enough? Personally, I want nothing to do with it. I'm sick of everything having to be a hustle now, even something personal like sharing our ramblings with strangers on the internet. I have little else to say other than that I hate how capitalism ruins everything fun it touches. I'll continue to write about things that make me feel passionate, not how to make money or gain followers.

Fundamentally, Diffusion Models work by destroying training data through the successive addition of Gaussian noise, and then learning to recover the data by reversing this noising process. After training, we can use the Diffusion Model to generate data by simply passing randomly sampled noise through the learned denoising process.

When Banks is able to establish sufficient shared vocabulary to ask why the aliens have come, they answer with a statement that could be translated as "offer weapon". China interprets this as "use weapon", prompting them to break off communications, and other nations follow. Banks argues that the symbol interpreted as "weapon" can be more abstractly related to the concepts of "means" or "tool"; China's translation likely results from interacting with the aliens using mahjong, a highly competitive game.

Quality software from independent makers is like quality food from the farmer’s market. A jar of handmade organic jam is not the same as mass-produced corn syrup-laden jam from the supermarket. Industrial fruit jam is filled with cheap ingredients and shelf stabilizers. Industrial software is filled with privacy-invasive trackers and proprietary formats. Google, Apple, and Microsoft make industrial software. Like industrial jam, industrial software has its benefits — it’s cheap, fairly reliable, widely available, and often gets the job done.

Big tech companies have the ability to make their software cheap by subsidizing costs in a variety of ways:

Google sells highly profitable advertising and makes its apps free, but you are subjected to ads and privacy-invasive tracking. Apple sells highly profitable devices and makes its apps free, but locks you into a proprietary ecosystem. Microsoft sells highly profitable enterprise contracts using a bundling strategy, and makes its apps cheap, also locking you into a proprietary ecosystem.

I’m not saying these companies are evil. But their subsidies create the illusion that all software should be cheap or free.

Independent makers of quality software go out of their way to make apps that are better for you. They take a principled approach to making tools that don’t compromise your privacy, and don’t lock you in. Independent software makers are people you can talk to. Like quality jam from the farmer’s market, you might become friends with the person who made it — they’ll listen to your suggestions and your complaints.

Big tech companies earn hundreds of billions of dollars and employ hundreds of thousands of people. When they make a new app, they can market it to their billions of customers easily. They have unbeatable leverage over the cost of developing and maintaining their apps.

Textured with Williams’ usual grain and kept alive by his keen eye for detail, “The Sweet East” essentially sees America as a series of concentric cults. Lillian is like a teenage Virgil leading us on a tour through some kind of stupid new hell where anyone who believes in anything does so with an all-defining religiosity that demands to be mocked.

Everyone sees her as the perfect screen on which to project their own narrow view of the world. That’s true of the self-obsessed filmmakers who “discover” Lillian on the street (they’re played by Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris, both very funny as hyper-talkative artists who assume that everyone sees the genius of their inane period piece). It’s true of the hunky movie star who turns her into the paparazzi’s latest cause célèbre (Jacob Elordi), and it’s true of the set PA Mohammed (Rish Shah), who’s convinced that he alone can “save” her.

She always was something, she never is something, and the movie around her seems unsure if that’s sustainable. On the one hand, Lillian is the only character who avoids the embarrassment that naturally attends sincerity, and there’s a palpable degree of wish fulfillment baked into a character who so convincingly doesn’t give a shit (even though everyone is obsessed with her). To paraphrase one of the people she encounters, Lillian is Teflon enough to defy a digital culture that force-feeds her a series of unworthy choices, and she emerges from every encounter unscathed… whereas other characters are liable to get their heads blown off. In a film that adopts a “South Park”-like approach to making fun of everyone, Lillian is never the butt of the joke.

On the other hand, there are a few fleeting moments in which “The Sweet East” confronts its heroine with something approaching self-awareness. Her wanton use of the word “retarded” — a slur that the Dimes Square crowd embarrassingly tried to reclaim as an expression of their freedom from liberal moralizing — feels at first like an unfortunate side effect of a movie that allegedly features appearances from Peter Vack and Betsey Brown (their names appear in the credits, but I never clocked them on screen). Later, however, someone coolly confronts Lillian about that habit, leaving her at a total loss for words. When another character snipes that they “don’t like being told things about myself,” it almost sounds like the movie is admitting to a posture of its own — that it’s recognizing that lack of belief as a belief system unto itself.

This is a fun — and sometimes very funny — movie that is virtually impossible to make fun of in return, and at the end of the day, that might be the only metric of success that matters to it.

Film geeks don't have a whole lot of tangible things to show for their passion and commitment to film. They just watch movies all the time. What they do have to show is a high regard for their own opinion. They've learned to break down a movie. They understand what they like and don't like about a film. And they feel that they're right. It's not open to discussion. When I got involved in the movie industry I was shocked at how little faith or trust people have in their own opinions. They read a script and they like it - then they hand it to three of their friends to see what they think about it. I couldn't believe it. There's an old expression that goes something like, He with the most point of view wins.

We are simultaneously woefully mired in legacy problems and yet poised for a big leap forward.

As filmmakers, a powerful step forward is merely to recognize that there exists a special skill set unique to a proper color scientist that has little to no overlap with the important but different expertise of a colorist, an on-set digital imaging technician, or a workstation engineer.

It's not Just the same story seen from different point of views, it's the same story in which people act and behave every time with different attitudes according to Who Is watching and his or Her fears, feelings or expectations

But more than anything, they were able to merge with major competitors and buy out small ones. Google made one good product, search, a quarter of a century ago. That opened conduit to the capital markets that gave Google an effectively limitless budget to buy competitors.So it didn’t matter that everything Google made in-house failed — videos, social media, wifi balloons, smart cities, they couldn’t even keep an RSS Reader alive!Because they were able to buy other peoples’ companies — mobile, ad tech, videos, maps, documents, satellites, server management. Google isn’t Willy Wonka’s magic idea factory, they’re Rich Uncle Pennybags, spending other peoples’ money to buy the products they themselves are too ossified and lumbering to create.

They were able to sell goods below cost, which let the deepest-pocketed companies bankrupt their competitors, and prevent new companies from entering the market. Think of Amazon, which tried to buy diapers.com, got rejected, and then lit $100m on fire selling diapers below cost, until diapers.com went bankrupt.

When Apple reversed Office and built iWork, Microsoft just had to suck it up. In the ensuing decades, Apple — and Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other tech giants — have secured changes to law, regulation and their interpretations that make doing unto them as they did unto others radioactivelyillegal.

Tech companies can twiddle the knobs whenever they want, without explanation or transparency, and we can’t get a law passed to make them stop compulsively touching their knobs, because in the world of five giants websites each filled with screenshots of the other four, they can easily agree that these rules are bad, and they can mobilize their monopoly casino winnings to make sure they never pass.

Step one: consolidated industries eliminate competition through predatory pricing and acquisitions. Step two: tech companies play a high-speed shell-game on the back end, and use their consolidation to bigfoot any attempt to constrain their twiddling (like privacy, labor, or fair trading laws). Now we come to step thre: where tech companies embrace tech laws, laws that make it illegal to twiddle back at them, the IP laws that create felony contempt of business-model, criminalizing the adversarial interoperability, that once acted as garbage collection for enshittified, bloated, top-heavy companies, letting nimble, innovative players drain off their users, eat their lunch and dance on their graves.Put these three factors together — consolidation, unrestricted twiddling for them, a total ban on twiddling for us — and enshittification becomes inevitable.

We don’t want to wait that long for a new good internet, and we don’t have to. Because tech is different: it is universal. It is interoperable, and that means we have options we’ve never had before.Interoperability options: options that devolve control over technology from giant companies to small companies, co-ops, nonprofits, and communities of users themselves.Interop is how we seize the means of computation.

First things first: we need to limit twiddling.Pass comprehensive federal privacy laws with private right of action, meaning that you can sue if your privacy is violated, even if the local public prosecutor doesn’t think you deserve justice.End worker misclassification through the so-called gig economy, meaning that every worker is entitled to minimum wages, a safe workplace, and fair scheduling.Apply normal consumer protection standards to ecommerce platforms and search engines, banning deceptive advertising, fake reviews, and misleading search results that put fake businesses and products ahead of the best matches.

Then we need to open the walled gardens. Laws like the EU’s Digital Markets Act will force tech platforms to stand up APIs that allow new platforms to connect to them. This interop will make switching costs low. So you can leave Facebook or Twitter and go to Mastodon, Diaspora — or Bluesky or some new platform — and still exchange messages with the people you left behind, and participate in the communities that matter to you, and connect with the customers you rely on.

To make mandatory APIs work, we need to make robust interoperability preferable to behind-the-scenes fuckery, we need to align tech giants’ incentives so they encourage competition, rather than sabotaging it.

in addition to the mandatory interop that’s already coming down the pike, we need to restore the right to mod, tinker, reverse and hack these services.

If we have the right to mod existing service to restore busted API functionality, then any company that’s tempted to nerf its API has to consider the possibility that you are going to come along and scrape its site or reverse its apps to make the API work again.That means that the choice for tech giants isn’t “Keep the API and lose my discontented users or nerf the API and screw my competitors.” It’s: “Keep the API and lose my discontented users or, nerf the API and get embroiled in unquantifiable guerilla warfare against engineers who have the attackers’ advantage, meaning I have to be perfect, and they only have to find and exploit a single error I make.”

Governments should require that every tech company that sells them a product or service has to promise not to interfere with interop.That’s just prudent public administration. Lincoln insisted that every rifle-supplier for the Union army used interoperable tooling and ammo. Of course he did! “Sorry boys, war’s cancelled, our sole supplier decided not to make any more bullets.”

Every digital system procured by every level of government should come with a binding covenant not to impede interop — from the cars in government motor-pools to Google Classroom in public schools to iPhones in public agencies.

Your shareholders’ priorities are your problem. Public agencies are charged with doing the people’s business.

It’s frankly surreal that the way we keep Facebook’s partners from abusing your info is by asking Facebook to decide what is and isn’t acceptable.Remember: Cambridge Analytica was a Facebook partner. So whether you’re using an API or you’re fielding an interoperable app that relies on scraping and reversing, you will be bound by those same laws, passed by democratically accountable lawmakers in public proceedings, not by shareholder accountable corporate executives in closed-door meetings.

They’re just able to buy their way to dominance, merging with competitors, until they have the money and the unity of purpose to capture our laws, to give them the freedom to abuse us without limit, and to criminalize anything we do to defend ourselves.To stop them we need to block new merger, and unwind existing ones, limit their ability to twiddle the back end to keep their users and business customers in a constant state of confusion, and restore our ability to twiddle back, to give ourselves an internet operated by and for the people who use it: the new, good internet that is the worthy successor to the old, good internet.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

“Some day, there will be a crisis, and when crisis comes, ideas that are lying around can move from the fringe to the center in an instant.”

A generation ago, small, independent operations defined the entire industry. Today, the businesses of beef, pork, and poultry slaughter are all dominated by four giants at the national level. But that greatly understates the problem, as in many regions, a single corporation holds a complete monopoly. Two firms, Dean Foods and the Dairy Farmers of America control as much as 80-90 percent of the milk supply chain in some states and wield substantial influence across the entire industry. As our Food & Power website details, the story is much the same in food-processing, egg production, grain production, and produce farming.

Monopolists have captured control over many lines of manufacturing as well. Corning, an American glass manufacturer, sells 60 percent of all the glass used in LCD screens, and Owens Illinois holds a near monopoly over market for glass bottles in the US. Rexam, a British company, holds a dominant position over the international supply of bottle caps and pharmaceutical bottles.

Hospital corporations across America have also been buying up physician practices in recent years. Hospital ownership of physician practices more than doubled between 2004 and 2011, from 24 to 49 percent. In drug stores, meanwhile, the pending takeover of Rite Aid by Walgreen’s would reduce the market to two giants, along with CVS.

Pharmaceutical companies have been merging at a record pace in recent years, and drug makers often use their concentrated market power to raise the prices of generic drugs, such as Digoxin, Daraprim, Naloxone, and standard vaccines.

Whirlpool’s takeover of Maytag in 2006 gave it control of 50 to 80 percent of U.S. sales of washing machines, dryers, and dishwashers and a very strong position in refrigerators. Maytag also controls the Jenn-Air, Amana, Magic Chef, Admiral, and KitchenAid brands and holds a dominant position over supply of Sears Kenmore products.

The FTC successfully blocked a proposed merger of Staples and Office Depot, but the market is still highly concentrated after Office Depot’s 2013 acquisition of Office Max. Collectively, the two firms control 69 percent of the entire office supplies market.

China’s vitamin cartel controls 100 percent of the market for U.S. Vitamin C, which is also known as ascorbic acid and which is used in almost all preserved foods.

For Google Search to increase its profits, it must shift value from web publishers, advertisers and/or users to itself. The only way for Google Search to grow is to make itself worse.

Google’s product managers are each charged with finding ways to increase the profitability of their little corner of the googleverse. That increased profitability can only come from enshittification. Every product manager on Google Search spends their workdays figuring out how to remove a Jenga block. What’s worse, these princelings compete with one another. Their individual progression through the upper echelons of Google’s aristocracy depends as much on others failing as it does on their success. The org chart only has so many VP, SVP and EVP boxes on it, and each layer is much smaller than the previous one. If you’re a VP, every one of your colleagues who makes it to SVP takes a spot that you can no longer get. Those spots are wildly lucrative. Each tier of the hierarchy is worth an order of magnitude more than the tier beneath it. The stakes are so high that they are barely comprehensible. That means that every one of these Jenga-block-pulling execs is playing blind: they don’t — and can’t — coordinate on the ways they’re planning to lower quality in order to improve profits. The exec who decided to save money by reducing the stringency of phone number checking for business accounts didn’t announce this in a company-wide memo. When you’re eating your seed-corn, it’s imperative that you do so behind closed doors, and tell no one what you’ve done. Like any sleight-of-hand artist, you want the audience to see the outcome of the trick (the cost savings), not how it’s done (exposing every searcher in the world to fraud risk to save a buck).

Google/Apple’s mobile duopoly is more cozy than competitive. Google pays Apple $15–20 billion, every single year, to be the default search in Safari and iOS. If Google and Apple were competing over mobile, you’d expect that one of them would drop the sky-high 30 percent rake they charge on in-app payments, but that would mess up their mutual good thing. Instead, these “competitors” charge exactly the same price for a service with minimal operating costs.

your bank, your insurer, your beer company, the companies that make your eyeglasses and your athletic shoes — they’ve all run out of lands to conquer, but instead of weeping, they’re taking it out on you, with worse products that cost more.

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies: https://killedbygoogle.com/

the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit." And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape." Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).