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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.

It is funny to recognize a clear difference between businesses which used to game the Yellow Pages decades ago — with names like “A Aaaaa Bcalvy” — and those which are doing the same thing for Google today. If the former still exist, they have probably been around since a phone book was the first place you would look for services; it feels ironic that a bit of outdated trickery might be an indicator of long-time quality. Google says this strategy does not work, and my testing seems to confirm that. There is a chain of businesses in Calgary called “Towing Near Me”, but searching both Google and Google Maps for that exact phrase does not surface that business. Instead, I see towing companies with locations near my IP address in central Calgary, which is what I would expect.

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.

Today’s AI models display beyond-human capabilities on a growing list of tasks like impressionist painting, music composition and writing engaging prose. In this fast-paced class students will use generative AI models to paint, write, compose music, code and engage in fluent conversation with a machine.

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

The fundamental failure of Donald Trump’s effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election was that it was predicated on complete nonsense. Trump and his attorneys — particularly Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis — seized upon any allegation of fraud or any analysis that presented an opportunity for skepticism about the results and offered them up as valid. Even, in many cases, after it had been made obvious that the claims were not valid.

That the claims were debunked or irrelevant didn’t matter. His supporters treated subsequent claims as more credible in part because they landed in an environment where people were inclined (thanks to that blizzard) to believe that fraud had occurred.

Noting that individual snowflakes were fake was often too slow and too limited to make people realize that, in reality, the sun was shining — that Giuliani was just shaking a box of soap flakes above their window.

Dubious claims from unreliable actors were used to amplify questions about fraud; those questions were then used to present those and subsequent claims as reliable. Ellis was simply one spigot for the misinformation, one who now claims that she did so unconsciously. In representing Trump, she helped add layers to this house of cards.The core problem, again, was that it was almost all nonsense, that almost none of it was credible. But credibility wasn’t the goal, utility was. So lots of useful, false things were offered up, having the effect of making other false things more useful and making those original false things more useful still. Layers upon layers of nonsense. A blizzard in a snow globe held in Donald Trump’s hand.

With his epilogue, Scorsese offers salient commentary on how mainstream entertainment has — to ensure white comfort — frequently sanitized such brutality against Native Americans, and how this specific tale has been reduced to an oft-forgotten footnote in the pages of white supremacy.

In concept, the idea of a director centering himself during a film's emotional denouement echoes the prototypical image of an ego-driven auteur. However, there's a knowing and mournful humility to Scorsese's performance here, which warps the film's most farcical scene into its most poignant.

She said it's not about just teaching facts, dates and timelines. To teach the book properly, she says she would need her students to delve into why the murders took place. And that, she says, involves talking about race and gender."When you look at it as literature, instead of looking at facts and dates and timelines, you're looking instead at why it's still impactful and what in society at the time actually allowed that to happen," Thoreson said. "Literature is about humanity — why is this story heartbreaking? What is it about this story that draws people in? Why do we still care? You know, what is the connection today? Have those relationships between races changed?"

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.”