Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
From the video “websites are still websites. Videos are still videos”. The problem of course is that this is not true.
The problem is that technology is still our servant. What are we asking it to do?
First, this video itself. If this same story was being told 20 years ago, it would be a blog post, mostly plain text, maybe one image. It would not be a 1080p or 4K YouTube video. That, in a nutshell is the real problem. The OP, by posting this video, has already chosen a side in that fight. But let’s compare apples to apples.
20 years ago, a web page was made up up a few dozen kb of HTML, a dozen kb of CSS, and a few 100 kb of JavaScript. Images were few, low resolution, and low bit depth. The fonts used were probably bitmaps and installed locally. The “computing power” was on the server. It was all sent as clear text. The networks were too slow to send much more. Today, a website sends me megabytes, maybe dozens of megabytes, of JavaScript. And I am probably downloading a bucket of vector fonts too. Not only is the “web application” much, much fancier but now all the “computing power” is expected to be in my browser (on my computer). And all the “assets” like images and video have to be local too. Instead of small 8 bit GIFs, I have huge high-resolution 24 bit AVIF and PNG files. I am rendering SVG and font vector files at high resolutions on my local CPU / GPU. Maybe there is an animated background. To cap things off, everything is encrypted with 2048 bit or 4096 bit keys. It is not that my local computer or my local operating system has become less efficient (like the video implies). It is that the websites have become 100 times more difficult to render. Browse some of those old websites (if you can find them). They are blazing fast and take very little RAM.
And what were videos? YouTube was probably 360p with a video codec designed to be easy to decompress on an underpowered client. Now, YouTube is 4K or at least 1080p and in a codec that is much more computationally intensive to render. It has to be to support storage of these otherwise immense files. A 4K file is literally 40 times the number of pixels in 360p. This is before we consider that the color space probably went from 16 bits to 24 or 32 as well. So, back to 100 times harder like above.
And the premise that “20 years ago” that you were running your web browser and a file manager and a command line all while editing a video on your laptop is nonsense. You had a 1280x800 screen. If you were editing a video, it was probably the only thing you had running. And again, what resolution and color depth were these videos you were making? Were you even editing video? Be honest. How many “content creators” were there then. The multimedia we were editing was probably audio only. The video work we did was more transcoding (maybe cutting out ads) than it was “video editing” like today.
If this same message was being told 20 years ago, it would be a blog post, mostly plain text, maybe one image.
And you know what, my 10 year old computer can still do the modern stuff and it absolutely blazes though the old stuff.
If this were a blog post, I could have a hundred similar tabs open on that 2 GB of RAM he talks about.
So, it is not that computers and software are built wastefully. It is that users expect things they did not expect before. If you are willing to watch 360p YouTube, read mostly text blog posts with the ads tuned off, make simply edited videos in the same 360p resolution, and run a simple Wayland compositor or X11 Window Manager, a totally up-to-date Linux distro will run just as well on your old hardware as you remember. At least, pretty close.
The only really truly wasteful step has been the move to 64 bit instead of 32 bit. We could save at least a third of the RAM used for any modern task if it were 32 bit. But, 32 bit only gives us 4 GB of RAM, which means I could get a 32 bit computer that performs like 6 or 7 GB 64 bit system today. But of course that is not nearly enough. As the YouTube author states, they need 16 GB for the huge videos he is editing. So, 64 bit is not wasted either I guess.
And, of course, on a Windows machine, a third of my RAM and 20% of my CPU is dedicated to running a bunch of crap that ships with my OS to serve the goals of the OS provider, not me the user. But that is an entirely different problem (or, this is his point, I concede this point to him).
An additional message in this video is about “freedom” and “exponential complexity” and “commercial masters”. Of course, there is some truth there. But again, step back.
This video starts with the OP editing a video in KDENLIVE on Linux. What video editing software and OS was he using 20 or 30 years ago as he says. Be honest. We have more freedom and more non-commercial choice than ever before. It is not even remotely arguable.
And complexity. If I install a distro today with say XFCE as a desktop environment, what is the complexity compared to the early 2000s or late 90s? Try to configure your video card and monitor and get back to me. Explain how to configure your WiFi in 1999. If anything, a Linux distro is less complex and daunting now than before.
Of course there is lots to criticize. And it does not get worse than electron. But it is pretty easy to run a fairly lean desktop in 2025. And bloated applications are not a new invention.
I guess we can talk about the “rise” of interpreted languages. As long as we ignore that the Lingua Franca of the 8 bit era was BASiC I guess. Or Logo! We also have to ignore hugely popular languages in their era like Perl 5, Lisp, TCL, Scheme, and PHP. How about all those Bash scripts? And Javascript is less interpreted than it used to be as you say. I assume you mean Python but it is over 30 years old and PyPy is a thing. Most newer languages are JIT or fully compiled. Rust, Go, Swift, Carbon, and Zig are all compiled languages. Kotlin, Gleam, and Elixir are JIT. What are all the new interpreted languages? If anything, I would say the trend is towards performance and efficiency.
JavaScript works against his point in a big way. Javascript was released 30 years ago and yet javascript code runs dramatically faster (on the same hardware) in a modern web browser than it will on one from back then. JavaScript engines are VERY heavily optimized and browser devs will move mountains for another percent or two. And WASM is even faster.
You can build Rust applications on Windows 95 and they are faster than C++ was back then. Not everyone has given up on performance.
Modern code can be much more parallel and asynchronous (faster). And there is a strong recent focus on memory safety and efficiency.
Networking and file systems are both much faster and more efficient than they used to be.
And of course modern processors are not just faster but have many more performance focussed instructions (SIMD, AVX, vector extensions, etc). And we have hardware acceleration for media codecs and of course virtualization which speed up applications dramatically. And technologies like hypervisor clusters and containers can lead to significantly better resource utilization in practice.
Anyway, his point is obvious and of course true to an extent. Not nearly to extent he claims though.
Israel's military said it struck on Monday several tanks in the Suweida province of southern Syria, where dozens have been killed in clashes between Sunni Bedouin tribes and Druze fighters.
The military struck "several tanks a short while ago in the area of Sami village (in the Suweida region) in southern Syria. To be continued", the military's Arabic language spokesman Avichay Adraee posted on X.
The announcement comes after reports that six members of Syria's security forces deployed to halt deadly sectarian clashes were killed in the predominantly Druze city of Suweida, a security source told Reuters.
Sunday's fighting between Druze militiamen and Bedouin tribal fighters was the first time that sectarian violence erupted inside the city of Suweida itself, following months of tensions in the province.
The death toll from the ongoing clashes has risen to 89, according to one Syrian monitor but The New Arab could not verify the figure.
La nuna estraro de UEA estas la plej nerespondema dum la pli ol 20-jara historio de Libera Folio – nur en esceptaj okazoj ni ricevis ajnan reagon al niaj demandoj. La sekva estraro ankoraŭ ne estas elektita, sed la kandidatoj jam sekvas la saman praktikon. El la naŭ kandidatoj nur unu respondis al demandoj senditaj de Libera Folio.
Celebrate Christopher Dalby (Robonuggie), whose 500+ FreeBSD videos have been invaluable to beginners and experts alike, inspiring many to explore the system.
Christopher Dalby (aka Robonuggie) is one of the most significant and prolific video contributors to FreeBSD. To date, he’s published over 500 videos, covering a vast range of topics and providing important information for both beginners (with tutorials, walkthroughs, etc.) and those looking to delve deeper into the subjects he addresses. Many people I’ve spoken with have confirmed they started exploring FreeBSD thanks to him and his videos.
The entire FreeBSD community is grateful to him, and I’m happy to share his latest video, “What Can You Do With FreeBSD?“
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
On a recent episode of the Dot Social podcast, John O'Nolan of Ghost said;
"For the size of the group [working on federating long form articles], which as you say is not large, man, we are spread across Mastodon DMs sometimes, an email thread other times, a Discord backchannel on the other hand, it's all over the place. We could get more organised here I think, but it's a start."
The fragmentation of dev discussions is something I hear about a lot lately. Forum federation could be a solution!
Imagine every federated software project has its own forum space. Smaller projects might be content with a dedicated category on a community-hosted dev forum. More well-resourced projects might host their own instance of Discourse or NodeBB or whatever suits them.
Cross-project forums like SocialHub can then have a dedicated category for each software they know about, and use forum federation to sync that with the home forum space preferred by that project.
Eg the Discourse category on SocialHub is synced with the ActivityPub tag on meta.discourse.org. Any post in that SH category appears on Meta with that tag, and vice-versa.
With enough careful plumbing, that solves the fragmentation of public dev discussion across forums. But a lot of potentially insightful chats start in micro-posting threads. Adding a limited ability to start a new forum topic, by mentioning the relevent category or tag actor (eg @discourse@socialhub.ActivityPub.rocks), could bring those in too.
However, most of the examples John gives are private chats (fedi DMs, email, Discord, etc). I encourage devs to gird their loins and apply the 'release early, release often' principle to dev chat. Make public the default for dev chatter, unless it really is sensitive.
That said, with some careful work, support could be added for federating private conversations between forums too. Ideally in a way where AP actors could be included, that automatically open the chat to trusted groups.
Rediscovering the Magic of the Blogosphere, with John O’Nolan and Matthias Pfefferle
Social networks were built on short posts designed for speed and scale. But what if the next era of the web was built for something deeper?
Two of the social web’s “longformers” are working on this. John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, and Matthias Pfefferle, the developer behind the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, are at the forefront of integrating social features with blogs, newsletters, essays — anything that doesn’t fit in a box of 500 characters or less.
In this episode of Dot Social, they talk with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about rediscovering the magic of the blogosphere; why formatting, identity, and interoperability are tricky problems to solve; and where writing belongs in the next chapter of the internet.
Highlights of this conversation: 1:24 Why should writers and bloggers care about this topic? 8:35 How the plugin has been received 12:15 Building social into blogs 17:35 Will this increase discovery? 20:15 Models for discovery 23:03 Tumblr in its heyday and status of integration 25:17 How they’re thinking about AT Proto 33:20 Thoughts on bridging 37:16 Core principles around integrating long-form content into protocol 44:06 Leveraging lessons from email? 46:16 Need for collaboration 49:10 Rough edges 52:50 New experiences
🔎 You can find John at john.onolan.org/ and Matthias at pfefferle.dev/. ✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @[url=https://flipboard.social/users/mike]Mike McCue[/url] and @mmccue.bsky.social. 🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new beta from the people at Flipboard. about.surf.social/
Webworker, podcaster and blogger, advocate of the #openweb and citizen of the @indieweb and the @fediverse, working on #activitypub & @IndieWeb for @WordPress
loosely, we want the posts that end up on SocialHub to be relevant/valuable/etc, and we don’t want those posts to only exist on SocialHub
This! Imagine we could get to the point where SH is a display layer on top of a distributed data layer of dev discussions. So deleting stuff from SH didn't delete it from the underlying data layer. Then we could develop a process for pruning SH down to the strong wood. Akin to using git rebase to prune version history down to the key info.
OR we could keep SH as is, and use a federated forum at distillery.activitypub.rocks to create a more curated portal. If anyone disagreed with the curation approach, the underlying data is all still there, so they could fork the effort to demonstrate their approach on top of the same shared data layer.
Does this sound familiar? It should. It's exactly how existing fediverse moderation works. julian:
Mentioning a group actor doesn't work reliably because someone could mention the group actor in passing, and not mean to have the entire conversation imported.
Fair point. This could be addressed by having action-specific Actor addresses (eg @discourse-crosspost@socialhub.ap.rocks). In the longer term there could be a different character to denote actions (eg !crosspost@ @discourse@socialhub.ap.rocks), although that would need pan-fediverse buy-in.
On top of this, I mentioned the option of limiting crossposting permission to fediverse accounts with privileges on the receiving forum (eg forum and category admins/mods only). That could further reduce the likelihood of accidental misuse, as well as intentional flooding.
loosely, we want the posts that end up on SocialHub to be relevant/valuable/etc, and we don’t want those posts to only exist on SocialHub
This! Imagine we could get to the point where SH is a display layer on top of a distributed data layer of dev discussions.
This is the more interesting discussion to me, and where a design-first approach can be very innovative and valuable. This is what I meant above when saying "what is a Forum once it becomes fully federated?". Adding federation support to any app changes the nature, characteristics, and audience of it in ways that should be well-known and anticipated.
This design focus at ecosystem level is almost entirely missing in fediverse evolution, and with its bottom-up processes the demand is often "I have this app feature, so I need that AP extension to support it". No matter how high-quality your own app is, for the ecosystem where your foundational technology evolves, this constitutes a Big Ball of Mud anti-pattern: A software system that lacks a perceivable architecture.
Now the tradeoff of the 3-stage bottom-up standardization process that we need in our decentralized grassroots environment is that we likely should allow this anti-pattern to an extent, as it stimulates bottom-up innovation of the fediverse by freeing devs to experiment with new things. The FEP Process allows for this by being non-normative and completely open to any participant to contribute to. And it has many overlapping mechanisms and good-practices that need to be reconciled later to assure the broad interoperability of the fediverse long-term.
Summarizing you can say that both a bottom-up and a top-down standardization process are needed. They should meet and help realign and reinforce each other, and give direction to the ecosystem as a whole. Bottom up we absorb the technical reality and best-practices, and top-down we craft and chisel an open interoperable fediverse able to support the social experiences that people need.
---
Tangential. Social coding commons is a movement of people interested in exploring these more social sides of decentralized social networking environments and focuses on building solutions that serve people's needs: social experiences. For this we explore a methodology called Social experience design (SX) tailored to cocreating Sustainable open social systems (SOSS) with participants withing the commons, in order to deliver and evolve services for the social web. A fediverse that may result from these efforts goes "beyond the app" into app-free computing, towards the vision of a peopleverse. A place where online technology serves our daily lives.
For anyone interested, there is a Social experience design chatroom (social / sociosphere) and a Groundwork labs chatroom (technical / technosphere) to join.
So, with big parties making entry to the Fediverse, things are accelerating significantly. Without going into the particulars we all know from the ways that big corporations conduct business, as well their involvement in standards processes, that thi…
Who, among the people using Fediverse to discuss ActivityPub, is unaware that this discussion is taking place on the Fediverse and as part of a SocialHub discussion? Heads up! This is a federated group.
The technical specifics behind how forum federation works, and how it is accessible in other sites shouldn't be top of mind (or thought about at all) for anybody except those who are maintaining it.
TEHRAN, Jul. 15 (MNA) – Iran has awarded a contract to a Chinese company to electrify its east-west railway amid plans to increase freight transit from China to other countries via the Iranian railway.
Sono trascorsi quasi quarant'anni dalla sua prima pubblicazione "Hangin' Around the Observatory" targata 1974, in mezzo ci sono vent'uno dischi, alcuni memorabili come Bring the Family del 1987 e il successivo Slow Turning del 1988, altri ottimi come Perfectly Good Guitar, Crossing Muddy Waters, Master of Disaster e The open Road, alcuni sufficienti, tra gli ultimi Same Old Man del 2008... Leggi e ascolta...
Sono trascorsi quasi quarant'anni dalla sua prima pubblicazione “Hangin' Around the Observatory” targata 1974, in mezzo ci sono vent'uno dischi, alcuni memorabili come Bring the Family del 1987 e il successivo Slow Turning del 1988, altri ottimi come Perfectly Good Guitar, Crossing Muddy Waters, Master of Disaster e The open Road, alcuni sufficienti, tra gli ultimi Same Old Man del 2008. Ora, dopo la sua ultima prova Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns dell'anno scorso, disco che non ho avuto il piacere di ascoltare, ritorna con questo Mystic Pinball ed è ancora buona musica... artesuono.blogspot.com/2014/11…
At NATO prompting, the Trump Administration has now dismissed the Russian terms of June 2 and the new July 10 Lavrov proposals as perfunctorily as the Biden Administration dismissed the proposed treaties for the US and NATO, which Lavrov’s ministry submitted on December 17, 2021.
Those were the final terms before Russian strategy was compelled to pre-emptive and preventive war, but on Putin’s orders, that was a “special military operation” short of war.
Moscow sources now say that on the evidence of Trump’s latest statements, he will not negotiate on any terms Russia has already submitted or will submit. He can only understand terms of capitulation he dictates himself. But even those ceasefire and peacemaking agreements Trump claims the credit for negotiating himself are garbled in his recitation of them. In addition to the Pakistan-India, Israel-Iran, Congo-Rwanda and Serbia-Kosovo agreements he has mentioned before, he told Rutte he is now claiming credit for two new ones he hasn’t mentioned earlier – for which there is no evidence at all.
Russian sources believe that Trump's incapacity is well understood by his own officials to be as useful to them for continuing their war against Russia as it was for their predecessors to have under the President Joseph Biden who was incapacitated by Lewy Body dementia associated with his late-stage Parkinson's Disease
do you know of a source somewhere that confirms that biden actually has parkinsons?
also: it's funny that there's no room for doubt about this on trump. lol
I love how the world is burning and the people needing to bury their heads in distractions are filing a petition that their distractions need to be protected and remain high quality.
Cambridge scientists have spotted gut bacteria that greedily soak up PFAS “forever chemicals,” then ferry them safely out of the body in animal tests, removing up to three-quarters of the toxins within minutes.
The voices of women who have died at the hands of a partner or former partner are being ignored and the government is failing to heed warnings from their deaths, a damning report from the domestic abuse commissioner reveals today.
An examination into how the government learns lessons from the deaths of domestic abuse victims has found that half of the national recommendations made in domestic homicide reviews (DHRs) are not put into action, with only a quarter fully implemented.
The domestic abuse commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, told the Guardian that a study of DHRs – carried out whenever anyone over 16 is murdered in a domestic setting – revealed a “deeply concerning” lack of oversight at the top of government.
People chilling at home, going to a festival, etc. Then getting attacked, burned alive, kidnapped, raped, bombed, etc.
Totally ignoring the cyclical nature of the violence. As if it's helpfull to pretend that isn't the case. To me it seems more so that ignoring the larger cycles, people not venturing beyond their ideological bubble, is why they reoccur.
Too vague to agree on this. All conflicts are more complicated than this, even where there's a clearcut culprit. I've seen it misused too many times.
Just by seeing iii's comments one can see the confusion. Where he thought the one holding the missile is what the author thinks is clearly the one chilling and vibing, I thought of another conflict entirely that this doesn't apply to, but seen the argument used at least three times.
I hereby end my post stating that the US, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa and France's New Caledonia should give back its land to its indigenous people. Thank you.
light blue guy then proceeds to attack the dark blue guy and media starts saying that dark blue guy has a right to defend itself and light blue guy is a terrorist.
Il National Hurricane Center (NHC) ha acceso i riflettori su una nuova area di bassa pressione situata attualmente al largo della costa atlantica della Florida, identificata con il nome "Invest
There have been a few minor issues in the past. For example, when moving from FreeBSD 13.x to 14.X, it was necessary to run a command on each jail:
bastille cmd JAILNAME sed -i '' '/pam_opie*/d' /etc/pam.d/*
But, in general, stability has been excellent.
Version 1.0 introduces many new features, but there are also some breaking changes. I’ll be testing it in the coming days, starting with more standard systems (at BSD Cafe, I also use fibs, which might complicate things).
Another fantastic announcement from the team is the creation of a pre-configured ISO. This includes FreeBSD 14.3, BastilleBSD, and Rocinante already configured, some hardening options, zsh as the default shell, and everything set up for pkgbase. I’ve just installed it and am running some tests, but I believe it can be considered an excellent way to get a system up and running immediately for working with jails.
In short, a huge thanks to the BastilleBSD team and… vive les BSD!
Introducing BastilleBSD: A Modern, Secure-by-Default FreeBSD Distribution with Built-in Automation and Privacy
We're excited to announce BastilleBSD, a new FreeBSD-based distribution designed for modern system administrators, privacy-conscious users, and DevOps professionals. BastilleBSD is built to be secure-by-default, automated from first boot, and ready for serious work—right out of the box.
This is more than just FreeBSD with pre-installed packages. BastilleBSD is a curated, hardened FreeBSD experience with a modern toolset and sane defaults, tailored for both servers and power users.
What's Included: Bastille – Container automation for FreeBSD, pre-installed and auto-configured.
Rocinante – Host configuration management using Bastillefile-style templates.
Modern shells and tools – Zsh (default), with bash, fish, vim-tiny, git-tiny, htop, and more.
Pre-configured automation – On first boot, BastilleBSD automatically:
Runs 'bastille setup', configuring the host networking, ZFS storage, and a secure firewall
Bootstraps the host release and applies latest patches
Privacy & Security by Default: Hardened sysctl values inspired by HardenedBSD
Secure SSH defaults (no DSA/ECDSA, modern ciphers, stricter MACs/KEX)
Firewall (pf) enabled out of the box
doas configured for the wheel group – no sudo required
DNS-over-HTTPS with blocky, preconfigured to forward encrypted DNS to privacy-friendly Quad9
openntpd – lightweight and privacy-respecting time sync, already set up
smartd – pre-installed and ready to monitor drive health
Plus: Uses pkg-base by default — no freebsd-update needed
Custom boot graphics and branding
Clean ZFS defaults, periodic snapshots optional
BastilleBSD is fully compatible with FreeBSD and will track upstream point releases (e.g., BastilleBSD-14.3-RELEASE). This is a distribution for people who want FreeBSD to just work with modern tools, privacy-first defaults, and zero guesswork.
Get it, test it, break it! We're eager to hear your feedback and ideas for future improvements.
We're excited to announce BastilleBSD, a new FreeBSD-based distribution designed for modern system administrators, privacy-conscious users, and DevOps professionals. BastilleBSD is built to be secure-by-default, automated from first boot, and ready for serious work—right out of the box.
This is more than just FreeBSD with pre-installed packages. BastilleBSD is a curated, hardened FreeBSD experience with a modern toolset and sane defaults, tailored for both servers and power users.
What's Included: Bastille – Container automation for FreeBSD, pre-installed and auto-configured.
Rocinante – Host configuration management using Bastillefile-style templates.
Modern shells and tools – Zsh (default), with bash, fish, vim-tiny, git-tiny, htop, and more.
Pre-configured automation – On first boot, BastilleBSD automatically:
Runs 'bastille setup', configuring the host networking, ZFS storage, and a secure firewall
Bootstraps the host release and applies latest patches
Privacy & Security by Default: Hardened sysctl values inspired by HardenedBSD
Secure SSH defaults (no DSA/ECDSA, modern ciphers, stricter MACs/KEX)
Firewall (pf) enabled out of the box
doas configured for the wheel group – no sudo required
DNS-over-HTTPS with blocky, preconfigured to forward encrypted DNS to privacy-friendly Quad9
openntpd – lightweight and privacy-respecting time sync, already set up
smartd – pre-installed and ready to monitor drive health
Plus: Uses pkg-base by default — no freebsd-update needed
Custom boot graphics and branding
Clean ZFS defaults, periodic snapshots optional
BastilleBSD is fully compatible with FreeBSD and will track upstream point releases (e.g., BastilleBSD-14.3-RELEASE). This is a distribution for people who want FreeBSD to just work with modern tools, privacy-first defaults, and zero guesswork.
Get it, test it, break it! We're eager to hear your feedback and ideas for future improvements.
I see others comment that they dislike DoH too, but nobody offers viable alternatives. How else do you recommend encrypting DNS queries other than DoT? (DoH and DoT being similar implementations. I have reasons for selecting DoH over DoT, but open to hearing alternate solutions if you have any).
Mondays are always tough, I think that’s true for everyone. But one thing that makes me happy it’s Monday is the consistent arrival of the “Valuable News” from Slawomir Wojciech Wojtczak – or simply Vermaden – [url=https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@vermaden]@ver
Mondays are always tough, I think that’s true for everyone. But one thing that makes me happy it’s Monday is the consistent arrival of the “Valuable News” from Slawomir Wojciech Wojtczak – or simply Vermaden – @vermaden – as we know him. His newsletter covers the world of *BSD and Unix, technology in general, and offers a look at articles (both old and new) about the world and life in general.
Vermaden has been publishing his weekly newsletter for many years, and it’s a go-to resource for many. I can only thank him, on my behalf and, I imagine, on behalf of the entire community.
Here’s the link to this week’s edition, 14 July 2025.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon…
Sorry if this is not the high brow discussion this com is for.
I travel a lot between different countries in the Middle East which have restrictive laws, and I live in one that is slowly becoming more competent technologically. I have to stay for an extended time in different places, so I’ve been connecting through always-on VPN out of the same place and it’s been working fine for now. But Digital ID laws are quickly going to close things off from me.
My risks that I’m trying to avoid are as follows: Locally, I want to make sure my IPs aren’t connected to public accounts. I don’t say anything online that can put me in jail for the most part, but I don’t trust that this will always be the case. I also would appreciate being a bit separated from the local internet. Elsewhere, I also don’t want my traffic to be monitored or my accounts to be tied back to my personal identity. For example, I don’t want to land in Dubai and to have my Steam account permanently affected by having “Spec Ops the Line” (banned game there) in my account (silly thing to worry about, but this is one tiny example out of many small issues that pile up). Plus, a lot of the internet is not accessible from these places, and I don’t like that, regardless of whether or not I want to peruse inaccessible internet stuff from there.
This has come with some serious downsides (online services are more expensive in Europe, where I have historically exited from), but it was/is worth the cost for me. Ironic that many VPN users seem to be trying to connect in the opposite direction than me (out of rich countries rather than in).
I’ve just been permanently using a single reputable VPN and single exit city for all of my traffic for the past while. Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible and I will probably have to exit out of somewhere new like Switzerland. I don’t know if those servers might be more trouble due to increased abuse for example.
Just want to know how others are dealing with this. Is just stomaching the wave of verifications after logging into all my emails from a new country the only price to pay? Is the world going to shit and should I rethink “just” using a VPN? Is it VPS time now that more and more things are being blocked from VPN access? Do I give up on the internet a decade ahead of schedule and chop wood in the woods until Israel’s AI mistakes my shack for a children’s hospital and drops heavy munitions on me?
I’m really hesitant to start using two sets of devices, some for insecure local traffic and some for encrypted traffic. I don’t think carrying like four laptops through airport security would keep eyes off of me.
Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible
Sorry I might have missed something... Is this Tony Blair's little hobby horse for the past 30 years or is a more substantial plan in the works?
TBH I am getting discouraged on the VPN thing. I have been using it 100% of the time for years. I used to get ads corresponding to the exit location. But now I occasionally get ads corresponding to my actual location (down to the neighborhood).
But of course I do all sorts of online business where my address is provided, and when I do that I can easily be fingerprinted I assume. So somehow, it's gotten linked up in the back end.
As of right now, Nexus Mods and Reddit are enforcing these new laws. I don’t use either site very often (the latter not since the API exodus). My understanding is that it’s mandatory for platforms of a certain size in the UK after the 25th of July.
The UK is kind of a perfect exit node country (everything is in English!)
I use reddit via the Firefox extension LibRedirect which sends you to a mirror instead. Between VPN, ublock and attempting to access dodgy mirrors, sometimes I have to reload a few times but it eventually works.
Disable IPv6 on your router or primary interface, and enable it on your VPN. If anything can discover an Internet IP on your PC, the link can be formed. Worst case, you are not using the VPN for IPv6 at all.
What kind of device are you using? There was recently there was a leak that Meta is using technology to have web browsers talk to the Facebook and Instagram apps on your phone without your permission and link your identity to every website you visit that has any Meta plugins. I'm sure other companies are doing the same or similar like Amazon and Google. I've been using GrapheneOS on my Android Pixel phone which isolates apps. There are other ways to do this as well if your phone is unlockable. And I use IronFox web browser wherever possible to reduce the capabilities of the browser to do things without my knowledge. And use ReThink and a pihole to reduce the cross site communication where possible. I also left all Meta platforms, but still am migrating away from Google, Amazon, and some other platforms. And make sure your advertising ID is disabled at the OS level.
Those are where I've found most of the targeted ads were coming from. Not from the IP address alone.
I agree it's not only the IP because there are other people on it.
I don't have any meta apps or google accounts for years. I buy on amazon very rarely. I have no apps of any of that type installed. 98% of my apps are f-droid and I flashed a rom. I use tracker blocker to sift through all traffic and limit to only what seems required.
I think it's very difficult to control what the phone is doing. Using the tracker blocker app has made me aware of how much data is flying all around at all times.
I should set up a pihole. It's been on my list of 5 or 6 years.
Yeah there's a lot that apps are doing to uniquely identify you. Not just the apps themselves, but the advertising systems and unfortunately, the telemetry systems which were originally meant only for tracking errors and how apps are used so they could be improved. And often you can't block those systems without blocking the app from working, usually by design, but sometimes more because developers don't understand how their customers' data is at risk by using those systems. Often because their told it's not used that way, but actually is, just in a convoluted way so it's technically true. It's quite confusing as someone who used to develop apps myself.
Not sure I follow the problem here. Is it easier in the countries you are in to get blocked for using vpns? I mean if the goal is to access games and stuff i would just use a good vpn , mullvad is the only one i still have good trust in.
Start using onion sites for sensitive stuff. If you use a always on vpn , then you dont have to worry about state actors seeing that you are using tor.
The thing you really should watch it for is your phone. If you can the best is to use a phone without sim card and with GOS on it, preferably with a broken papertrail and no sim card use previously. If you need internet on the go use a sim card in a travel router and connect that via vpn to your devices. But no tech solution would save you from user error of course.
And use a secure email service , I use tuta wich never complaints about my vpn. Other stuff sure but i dont miss those sites. Good ones will lift any blocks if you ask.
VPS is of course an option , but it does have the downside of not being able to blend in with the crowd.
For the legal issues yeah UK is a bad option. But any EU country should be fine even if they in the eyes programme. Germany have decent privacy laws still. Iceland as well. But for me I just use another closer to home. I trust mullvad enough (and they dont know anything about me in form of payments or identification)
And stop using services that blocks you. There are alternatives for a lot.
OpenWRT has a package called mwan3 that in tandem with dnsmasq can allow you set the IP addresses associated with a DNS entry to a particular VPN/country.
Finding a unicorn country where everything works and all traffic is routed is getting increasingly difficult. For example, if a US news site didn't want to implement GDPR, it geolocates all users outside the US and blocks them, whilst other US services start to require ID/age verification to post content for non-US users so accessing both easily requires switching location.
I suspect we will see more services and technology to be able to deal with this complex cat and mouse game of destinations (websites/services) and origin counties. You can typically get by with a few rules/countries today, but I think that is getting harder.
CDN's may pose a problem if the DNS resolves to a shared IP address, so IPv6 can help, but many VPN's do not support it. For some services we may just have to accept there is no easy way to use them unless tools improve (e.g. the browser/application auto-selecting from multiple interfaces)
Finding a unicorn country where everything works and all traffic is routed is getting increasingly difficult. For example, if a US news site didn’t want to implement GDPR, it geolocates all users outside the US and blocks them, whilst other US services start to require ID/age verification to post content for non-US users so accessing both easily requires switching location.
You've hit the nail on the head, my own post is a bit meandering and this is what I was going for. I hate how many hoops one needs to jump through for basic anonymity online nowadays.
OpenWRT has a package called mwan3 that in tandem with dnsmasq can allow you set the IP addresses associated with a DNS entry to a particular VPN/country.
I think this would be infeasible outside of very narrow use cases, but I don't know. I don't have an advanced networking setup, but the way I see it, if I, say, route service A and B to connection 1 and service C to connection 2, I only have control over individual IP ranges/DNS entries. So if my bank IP is routed to connection 1 and one new security background service their app/site uses goes to connection 2, something can get flagged, and I could face an unpleasant with the bank/law. I've been trying to avoid things like this. (I have a very rudimentary understanding of networking, I'm not super comfortable doing all of this manually).
I feel as though the most logical way about it would be to compartmentalize connections by application, but I wasn't able to find an easy way to do this. For example, splitting off a browser window and having that exit from somewhere else. I know split tunneling exists in the basic Mullvad client, and I guess I can just throw my whole network on Connection 1 and route Connection 2 through it (meaning when I split tunnel I find myself on connection 1) but in that scenario I'm doing myself even less favors re: latency and headroom and all that good stuff.
And that's just the computers. I use a phone as well.
I feel as though the most logical way about it would be to compartmentalize connections by application, but I wasn’t able to find an easy way to do this. For example, splitting off a browser window and having that exit from somewhere else
I use multiple gluetun containers with connections to various endpoints, each provides a proxy and I use foxyproxy firefox addon to switch between the proxies manually (as well as setting up rules), works pretty well for me.
As to phone, wireguard to your computer will minimize duplicating effort.
@deffard@lemmy.world mentioned getting a openwrt travel router as the last and kind of most extreme thing on the list. But its the easiest thing to do. Glinet has good ones with a custom (proprietary) openWRT variant on it with a simpler GUI but they are compatible with plain openWRT if you are able to manage it its probably better.
You can do much of that other stuff on the router then connect from other devices and have it follow the rules.
I don't think you need separate laptops, but a separate router may be useful.
If you use Linux, you can have apps isolated to their own lightweight network namespaces (like containers), using different VPNs. Otherwise VMs can serve a similar purpose on Windows and Macs.
Iptables can also be used to block traffic, and force it through proxies (which can be whitelisted by uid/gid) or VPNs.
If you want a more secure VPN setup, I'd even recommend having the VPN(s) running on the router (eg. portable OpenWRT setup) so your laptop never gets offered a public IP / connects directly to network. Put a proxy on it for special (eg. DNS based) routing exceptions, like banking from real IP, reddit via the US, etc.
Wipe before you leave and restore when you arrive. Carry a second, minimal device with limited smartphone features for when you need to contact someone between those times.
While in some place that worries you, audit and change your behavior and the way your software works in order to be more secure and less convenient. Limit computer use.
Figure out what method of storing data remotely works for you and use it, but don’t treat it as a backup.
Hey, all! I’m seeking some help testing an application I whipped up for the Geosocial task force of the W3C Social Web Community Group. It’s called [url=https://checkin.swf.pub/]https://checkin.swf.pub/[/url] , and it’s a barebones checkin service, simila
It logs into your account on an ActivityPub server using OAuth 2.0. It then reads your inbox, filtering the activities there to only show geosocial ones. You can use the geolocation services in the browser, and the places.pub/ service for a place vocabulary, to find nearby places. You can then “check in” to one of the places, with a note, and control of the privacy of the activity.
Geosocial activities are part of the core Activity Vocabulary that underlies ActivityPub. But, they’re not as widely implemented as other activities in the vocabulary. This app is trying to change that, by making them available on the network, and making it easy to create them.
To test the client, your service will need to support:
As of this writing, Mastodon does not work for either of these. If you want to test receiving federated messages, follow me on evan@onepage.pub . I’ve been using it a lot!
This is my second ActivityPub API client (ap, the command-line client, was my first), and my first one for the Web. I found this process really fun and invigorating. I was able to create a new kind of social networking application (well, new on the Fediverse…) purely from the client side. The app saves no data to the server; everything is done in the browser.
Please reach out on GitHub or comment here if you want to work on interoperability. I’m happy to help debug connections if needed.
I should be clear, this app has been one of my dreams since we started the Social Web Working Group at the W3C -- maybe even before. I'm so amped that it's working; I am looking forward to refining it further.
we did some initial testing in order to show places from places.pub on a map in bonfire. Proper previews for Arrive/Leave activities and the like should be straightforward to add. Happy to continue testing and share progresses over the coming weeks. Let us know if there are specific scenarios you'd like us to explore 😀
Overview This issue explores implementing a basic geosocial extension for Bonfire that enables location-based social interactions without the privacy concerns, gamification and corporate overhead o...
> We're tracking mockups and implementation progress here
FYI I'd love to help. But from Jan 1 2025 onwards, I refuse to do anything that requires logging in to GritHub. For the same reason I refuse to maintain an account on FarceBook.
Even reading GH pages on mobile is starting to require allowing this BorgSoft-controlled platform to run JS in my browser.
copied the GH issues and mockups in a article and published on our bonfire instance for you to read and partecipate directly from the fediverse 🔥 here you go bonfire.cafe/post/01K0V1SMG293…
Cameroon's President Paul Biya, the world's oldest serving head of state at 92, has announced he will run in this year's presidential election in October.
"I am a candidate in the presidential election. Rest assured that my determination to serve you matches the urgency of the challenges we face," he posted on his X (formerly Twitter) account on Sunday.
A new term would keep Biya in office until he is nearly 100. He came to power more than four decades ago in 1982, when his predecessor Ahmadou Ahidjo resigned. The country has had only two presidents since its independence from France and the United Kingdom in the early 1960s.
Biya scrapped presidential term limits in 2008, clearing the way for him to run indefinitely. He won the 2018 election with 71.28 percent of the vote, although opposition parties alleged there were widespread electoral irregularities.
His re-election bid had been widely anticipated, although his age and health are the subject of frequent speculation and criticism.
Biya also used social media to announce his candidacy for 2018's presidential contest, in a rare show of direct engagement with the public on social media.
In his recent post, Biya described an "increasingly restrictive international environment" and acute challenges for Cameroon, adding that he had decided to "respond favourably to the urgent calls coming from the 10 regions of our country and from the diaspora" to stand for election.
Members of the ruling Cameroon People's Democratic Movement (CPDM) and other supporters have publicly called for Biya to seek another term since last year.
Grégoire Owona, deputy secretary-general of the CPDM, told RFI: "At the party level, we had no doubts about this candidacy."
However, two former allies have quit the ruling coalition and announced their own plans to run in the election.
Issa Tchiroma Bakary, Minister of Employment and Vocational Training, left the government before declaring his presidential candidacy under the banner of his party, the FSNC.
Bello Bouba Maïgari, a minister of state and former prime minister – and a long-standing ally of Biya's for nearly 30 years – also declared his candidacy.
Opposition parties and some civil society groups argue that Biya's long rule has stifled economic and democratic development. The opposition remains deeply divided however, and is struggling to unite behind a single candidate.
Maurice Kamto, Biya's fiercest opponent of Biya, who came second in the 2018 presidential election, and Cabral Libii, a prominent opposition figure, are already in the running for the presidency.
Sunday's announcement has revived the debate over Biya's fitness for office. He seldom makes public appearances, often delegating responsibilities to the chief of staff of the president's office.
Last October, he left Cameroon for 42 days with no explanation, sparking speculation that he was unwell. The government responded by banning any discussion on his health, saying it was a matter of national security.
Under Biya's rule, Cameroon has faced economic challenges and insecurity on several fronts, including a drawn-out separatist conflict in its English-speaking regions and ongoing incursions from the armed Islamist group Boko Haram in the north.
The date of the presidential election was set for 12 October last Friday by the head of state himself. Candidates have until 21 July to declare their intention to run.
Cameroon's President Paul Biya, the world's oldest serving head of state at 92, has announced he will run in this year's presidential election in October.
Last October, he left Cameroon for 42 days with no explanation, sparking speculation that he was unwell. The government responded by banning any discussion on his health, saying it was a matter of national security.
Tesla will face a jury over whether it is at fault for a fatal 2019 crash involving Autopilot. The company has dodged responsibility for Autopilot deaths in the past.
Ah yes, the magical get out of a jail card. Just add random disclaimer on page 424 that contradicts everything the company said for years in their official communications and marketing.
Con “Dentro me”, Elis Martins irrompe sulla scena musicale con un'esplosione di autenticità e visione artistica. Un brano che non si limita a raccontare: vive, respira e conquista.
In questa intervista Elis ci parla della realizzazione di un sogno e del suo cammino con il Produttore Salvo De Vita.
Elis Martins, finalmente abbiamo conosciuto il tuo inedito " Dentro me". Cosa hai provato quando è uscito?
Ho provato grande soddisfazione per la realizzazione di un sogno che, prima di conoscere il Produttore Salvo De Vita, non pensavo potesse mai avverarsi e lo ringrazio per la sua professionalità e dedizione, nell'affiancarmi, passo passo in tutte le fasi di pre e post produzione.
Potresti raccontarci qualcosa riguardo alla sua produzione?
Certo... il brano “Dentro me” e il relativo video clip, sono stati interamente realizzati a Napoli. Due giorni di pura emozione un full immersion in cui sono stata catapultata in un in un mondo a me totalmente sconosciuto, un mondo in cui tutto quello che avevo sognato prendeva finalmente vita e io ne ero la protagonista, con un intero staff completamente dedicato a me che mi seguiva e indirizzava in ogni momento con enorme competenza e organizzazione tutto ovviamente sotto la supervisione del Produttore Dott. Salvo De Vita.
Cosa ti aspettavi succedesse dopo la sua uscita ? Quali sono state le tue aspettative a riguardo?
Cosa mi aspettavo?... La mia unica aspettativa era di arrivare a più persone possibili e, grazie al lavoro mirato e costante dell'Ufficio Stampa MP, il mio obbiettivo è stato raggiunto ed è in continuo aggiornamento.
Il tuo è un brano autobiografico. Pensi di aver toccato nel cuore delle persone con " Dentro me"?
Come dicevo poc'anzi “Dentro me” ha raggiunto una quantità di visualizzazioni, sui social e sulle piattaforme, più che soddisfacente e stando alle interazioni del pubblico.. Sì!.. posso affermare di aver toccato il cuore di molte persone e questo mi riempie immensamente di gioia e voglia di proseguire questo cammino.
Cosa ci possiamo aspettare, in futuro, riguardo a questo grandioso progetto musicale?
Il mio percorso è in continua evoluzione e ogni giorno mi confronto con il mio produttore sui progetti futuri, che a dir la verità sono numerosi e veramente interessanti, il 24 Agosto ad esempio parteciperò all'evento dell'Associazione Letteraria Engel Von Bergeiche al Castello di Venosa e, concedendovi un piccolo spoiler, per l'anno 2026, c'è in progetto l'uscita del mio nuovo inedito.
Seguitemi per scoprire tutte le novità!
Articolo: Dott.ssa Mietto Elisa
Dirigente del servizio: Dott. Salvo De Vita
Supervisore e Resp. Pubblicazione: Ufficio Stampa e Produzioni MP
SORELLA DI PERFEZIONE di Giuseppe Iannozzi - Il nuovo booktrailer
💥💥💥 SORELLA DI PERFEZIONE di Giuseppe Iannozzi, LFA Publisher - E una poesia bonus 🥳🥳🥳
PER TE SONO MORTO (*)
Per te sono morto, sono morto! Te lo gridai ben forte Non ti pregai di ricordarmi, d’esser un po’ immortale sui gradini del tuo poetare
Per te sono morto, sfortunatamente non a sufficienza, perciò continuo a pregarti di buttarmi giù dalle scale di quei tuoi pensieri che di tanto in tanto ti riportano a me, ché solo così potrò io coglione raggiungere la pace
(c) Iannozzi Giuseppe
(*) Questa poesia non è inclusa in "Sorella di Perfezione".
"Sorella di Perfezione" è la mia ultima opera. ❤️❤️❤️ La poesia è come la magia: sorprende il lettore, lo emoziona, gli fa palpitare il cuore. La poesia è la forma più nobile di letteratura. Con questo non voglio assolutamente dire di essere un profeta. Ho scritto un libro di circa 230 pagine. Ho impiegato ben quattro anni per scrivere le poesie che sono nell'antologia “Sorella di perfezione” (LFA Publisher). Perché dovreste leggere le mie poesie? Una risposta non ce l'ho, e non intendo stupirvi con effetti speciali e paroloni. "Sorella di Perfezione" accoglie tante poesie, circa duecento. Ogni lirica affronta uno o più temi e tutti di grande attualità: amore, vita, morte, povertà, malattia, guerra, etc. Sostanzialmente parlo degli ultimi e dei penultimi, parlo di persone che dalla vita hanno ottenuto poco o niente. - Giuseppe Iannozzi
REPETITA IUVANT! 😊 "SORELLA DI PERFEZIONE" DI GIUSEPPE IANNOZZI". ❤️❤️❤️ LEGGETE CON ATTENZIONE, HO DELLE INFORMAZIONI IMPORTANTI DA DARVI. GRAZIE. 😘😘😘
⚠️⚠️⚠️ ATTENZIONE: Alcuni store online potrebbero segnalare che il libro non è disponibile. In realtà "Sorella di Perfezione" è disponibile. 🌹🌹🌹 Nel momento in cui effettuate l'ordine di acquisto online, l'ordine viene immediatamente inviato al distributore Libro Co Italia che subito provvederà a inviare il libro "Sorella di Perfezione". E scomparirà anche l'eventuale avviso "non disponibile". 💪💪💪
☎️☎️☎️ Sono a Vostra disposizione; se avete dubbi o perplessità, non esitate a contattarmi. Grazie infinite. 😘
Fatevi un regalo, regalate e regalatevi "Sorella di Perfezione". Un po' di buona poesia non può che fare bene all'anima. 😘😘😘❤️❤️❤️
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
If only sites would switch to non JavaScript option. I block all JavaScript by default (NoScript) on new sites and Anubis is cancer in current form which just leads to me adding these sites to a blocklist and them losing human traffic as a result. Time will tell I guess.
Mamdani has appointed Jeffrey Lerner—a former top Obama White House aide and Democratic National Committee political director—as his communications chief.
Please keep your opinion to the comments - this is a news community and the title makes it look like the author of the article is saying something they're not.
But they never said that. You just mashed up the article title with a YouTube video...
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Sen. Sanders: I have talked to CEOs. Funny that you mention it. I won’t mention his name, but I’ve just gotten off the phone with one of the leading experts in the world on artificial intelligence, two hours ago.
. . .
Second point: This is not science fiction. There are very, very knowledgeable people—and I just talked to one today—who worry very much that human beings will not be able to control the technology, and that artificial intelligence will in fact dominate our society. We will not be able to control it. It may be able to control us. That’s kind of the doomsday scenario—and there is some concern about that among very knowledgeable people in the industry.
taking a wild guess it's Yudkowsky. "very knowledgeable people" and "many/most experts" is staying on my AI apocalypse bingo sheet.
even among people critical of AI (who don't otherwise talk about it that much), the AI apocalypse angle seems really common and it's frustrating to see it normalized everywhere. though I think I'm more nitpicking than anything because it's not usually their most important issue, and maybe it's useful as a wedge issue just to bring attention to other criticisms about AI? I'm not really familiar with Bernie Sanders' takes on AI or how other politicians talk about this. I don't know if that makes sense, I'm very tired
The Vermont senator discusses his fears that artificial intelligence will only enrich the billionaire class, the fight for a 32-hour work week, and the ‘doomsday scenario’ that has some of the world’s top experts deeply concerned.
From my understanding, the prominent fediverse implementations implement fanout via writing to other instances.
In other words, if user A on instance A makes post A, instance A will write or sync post A in all instances that have followers for user A. So user B on instance B will read post A from instance B.
Why this is Done
From my understanding, to prevent a case where post A is viral and everyone wants to read it, and instance A's database gets overwhelmed with reads. It also serves to replicate content
My Question: Why not rely on static files instead of database reads / writes to propagate content?
Instead of the above, if someone follows user A, they can get user A's posts via a static file that contains all of User A's posts. Do the same for everyone you follow.
Reading this file will be a lot less resource intensive than a database read, and with a CDN would be even better.
Cons
posts are less "Real time". Why? Because when post A is made, the static file must be updated (though fediverse does this already), and user B or instance B must fetch it. User B / instance B do not have the post pushed to them, so the post arrives with a delay depending on how frequently they fetch. But frequent fetches are okay, and easier to handle heavy loads than database reads.
if using a CDN for the static files, there's another delay based on the TTL and invalidation. This should still be small, up to a couple minutes at most.
Pros
hosting a fediverse server is more accessible and cheaper, and it could scale better.
Federation woes of posts not federating to other instances can potentially be resolved, as the fanout architecture is less complex (no longer necessary to write to a dozens or hundreds of instances for a single post).
Clients can have greater freedom in implementing how they create news feeds. You don't have to rely on your instance to do it. Instances primarily make content available, and clients can handle creating news feeds, content sorting and filtering (optional), etc.
I write a post, and send a request to the server to publish it
The server takes the post and preprends it to the file housing all my posts
Now, when someone requests my posts, they will see my new one
If a CDN is involved, we would have to properly take care of the invalidations and what not. We would have to run a batch process to update the CDN files, so that we are not doing it too often, but doing it every minute or so is still plenty fast for social media use cases.
Have to emphasize that I am not expert, so I may be missing a big pitfall here.
Yes, precisely. The existing implementation in the Fediverse does the opposite: everyone you follow has to insert their posts into the feed of everyone that follows them, which has its own issues.
But only once. If an account doesn't post/interact for a year, it doesn't cause any traffic. With your approach, I constantly need to pull that account's profile to see if something new showed up.
Sure, but constantly having to do it is not really a bad thing, given it is automated and those reads are quite inexpensive compared to a database query. It's a lot easier to handle heavy loads when serving static files.
I'm really not sure about that being inexpensive. The files will grow and the list of people to follow usually grows as well. This just doesn't scale well.
I follow 700 people on Mastodon. That's 700 requests every interval. With 100-10000 posts or possibly millions of interactions in each file.
Of course you can do stuff like pagination or something like that. But some people follow 10000 accounts and want to have their timeline updated in short in intervals.
Pulling like this is usually used when the author can't sent you something directly and it works in RSS Feeds. But most people don't follow hundreds of RSS feeds. Which reminds me that every mastodon profile offers an RSS feed - you can already do what you described with an RSS reader.
bringing up RSS feeds is actually very good, because although you can paginate or partition your feeds, I have never seen a feed that does that, even when they have decades of history. But if needed, partioning is an option so you don't have to pull all of its posts but only recent ones, or by date/time range.
I would also respectfully disagree that people don't subscribe to 100's of RSS feeds. I would bet most people who consistently use RSS feed readers will have more than 100 feeds, me included.
And last, even if you follow 10,000, yes it would require a lot more time than reading from a single database, but it is still on the order of double digit seconds at most. If you compare 10,000 static file fetches with 10,000 database writes across different instances, I think the static files would fare better. This isn't to mention that you are more likely to have to write more than read more (users with 100k followers are far more common than users with 100k subscriptions)
And just to emphasize, I do agree that double digit seconds would be quite long for a user's loading time, which is why I would expect to fetch regularly so the user logs onto a pre made news feed.
Before I do, one benefit of this method is that your timeline is entirely up to your client. Your instance becomes primarily tasked with making your posts available, and clients have the freedom of implementing the reading and news feed / timeline formation.
Hence, there are a few ways to do this. The best one is probably a mix of those.
Naive approach: fetch posts and build news feed when user requests it
This is not a good approach, but I mention it first because it'll make explaining the next one easier.
User opens app or website, thereby requesting their timeline / news feed
server fetches list of user's subscriptions and followees
for each followee or subscription, server fetches their content via their static file wherever they are hosted
server performs whatever filtering and ordering of content they want
user sees the result
Cons: loading time for the user may be long, depending on how many subscriptions they have it could be several seconds. P90 may even be in double digits.
Think like a periodic job (hourly, or every 10 min, etc) , which fetches posts in a similar manner as described above, but instead of doing it when user requests it, it is done in advance
Pros: - fast loading time compared to previous solution - when the job runs, if users on the same instance share a followee or subscription, we don't have to query it twice (This benefit already exists on current fediverse implementations) Cons: posts aren't real-time, delayed by the batch job frequency.
Best approach: hybrid
In this approach, we primarily do the second method, to achieve fast loading time. But to get more up-to-date content, we also simultaneously fetch the latest in the background, and interleave or add the latest posts as the user scrolls.
This way we get both fast initial load times and recent posts.
Surely there's other good approaches. As I said in the beginning, clients have the freedom to implement this however they like.
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Se qualcuno mai stesse cercando prove della mia assoluta pigrizia, o comunque della mia ormai sempre incontrastata procrastinazione, sicuramente non avrebbe molta difficoltà a trovarne… tra le volte che non rifaccio il letto o che non spolvero la stanza, o come mi riduco sempre letteralmente al giorno prima per studiare (cioè proprio oggi 14 luglio, […]
procrastinanza sisamministrativa: aggiungere le righe è roba di notte…
Se qualcuno mai stesse cercando prove della mia assoluta pigrizia, o comunque della mia ormai sempre incontrastata procrastinazione, sicuramente non avrebbe molta difficoltà a trovarne… tra le volte che non rifaccio il letto o che non spolvero la stanza, o come mi riduco sempre letteralmente al giorno prima per studiare (cioè proprio oggi 14 luglio, ma questa è un’altra storia), o alle 23:55 per fare Duolingo, o come ci sono tanti miei post che durante la giornata ritardano e spesse volte addirittura spariscono, o tranquillamente come finisco sempre a letto 2 ore più tardi del normale, insomma… 💀
Eppure, nonostante la mia esistenza altro non è che una sfilza di fallimenti, certi sbagli sono più sbagliati di altri, come si suol dire… Quella che penso sia la dimostrazione più semplice e lampantedella mia incapacità di fare, infatti, si è vista ieri sera, quando finalmente mi sono decisa a sistemare una fonte di disperazione che parzialmente mi attanagliava: ho aggiunto un WebManifest alla mia istanza di Shiori, così che il sito possa essere da me installato come PWA su Android anche da Chromium, e non solo da Firefox (dove invece ho il mio userscript marcio per forzare qualsiasi sito come PWA)… vabbé, e quindi? 😴
Beh, questa era una cosa che banalmente andava fatta da secoli… non solo perché la app nativa di Shiori fa cadere i maroni (e quindi non la uso), e la webapp in Firefox altrettanto (visto che Firefox di per sé li fa cadere, essendo che ci mette tipo il triplo del tempo di Chromium a partire e poi lagga pure)… ma perché bastava aggiungere una (1) riga nella mia configurazione di nginx. sub_filter '</head>' '<link rel=\'manifest\' href=\'data:application/json;utf8,{ ... malloppone di roba tra nome ed icone ... }\' /></head>';. Basta, (almeno nel suo modo più semplice) era solo questo. 😐 …Cioè, rendiamoci un attimino conto della situazione. Io ho procrastinato per anni — non ricordo più quanti anni ormai, ma decisamente troppi, considerato che quando ho iniziato ad usare questo software ero ancora al liceo e hostavo ancora sul Raspino — una procedura che ammontava a spendere 5 minuti di tempo per copiare i link alle icone dal sorgente della pagina HTML, incollarle in una singola fottuta riga così, e buttare tutto in un file di configurazione già esistente. Tutte cose che ho già fatto in tanti altri casi eh, che quindi non mi hanno richiesto di scervellarmi neanche un po’, ma, per qualche motivo, porca di quella puttana, quando c’avevo voglia non mi ricordavo e quando invece serviva mi seccavo. 😭
La beffa (la cui presenza, come dico ogni volta, con me è la costante di autenticità delle mie storie disperate) stavolta è che ho fatto questa semplice operazione, che avrei dovuto fare letterali anni fa, praticamente giusto il giorno dopo quello in cui ho rilasciato Pignio… software che di per sé non centra niente ma che, con i prossimi aggiornamenti, potrebbe potenzialmente inglobare tutte le funzioni [che mi servono] di Shiori, e in tal caso sarebbe per me assolutamente ovvio togliere di mezzo un software che si rivelerebbe completamente ridondante. (C’è in realtà un motivo per questa coincidenza, stavolta non sono stati gli spiriti a dirmi di fare così… c’è una sequenza più logica che, nel caso, approfondirò.) 😾
Giusto per chiarezza, comunque: in realtà Shiori include un WebManifest, ma solo da 4-5 mesi, stando a quanto vedo dai commit; pochissimo tempo rispetto a quello in cui ho avuto questa maledetta applicazione… e stavo per dire che allora avrei in teoria dovuto avere la funzione a quest’ora, ma invece no, perché anche i manutentori di questo progetto sono grandi procrastinatori, e non fanno uscire una release precompilata da gennaio, e io ovviamente non mi sbatterò per compilare da sorgente. Meglio così, dai… altrimenti avrei dovuto ammettere che sono talmente pigra che non aggiorno il software dal giorno in cui lo installai sul nuovo server, ~2 anni fa! (Ok, no, scherzi a parte, non sono così pigra… bensì è anche peggio: non aggiorno da quando l’ho installato per la prima volta, perché se lo facessi non avrei più accesso ad una vulnerabilità che io stessa scoprii e riportai agli sviluppatori, ma di cui faccio uso… se fosse patchata sulla mia istanza, uno script che feci all’epoca non funzionerebbe più bene e, neanche a dirlo, dover sistemare pure quello mi seccherebbe tremendamente… Sono veramente irrecuperabile!!!)
Wall Street is betting big on Microsoft’s AI infrastructure play. A fresh analyst upgrade signals the tech giant’s cloud and artificial intelligence businesses are just hitting their stride.
On May 23, we got a very interesting email from Ghost, the service we use to make 404 Media. “Paid subscription started,” the email said, which is the subject line of all of the automated emails we get when someone subscribes to 404 Media. The interesting thing about this email was that the new subscriber had been referred to 404 Media directly from chatgpt.com, meaning the person clicked a link to 404 Media from within a ChatGPT window. It is the first and only time that ChatGPT has ever sent us a paid subscriber.
From what I can tell, ChatGPT.com has sent us 1,600 pageviews since we founded 404 Media nearly two years ago. To give you a sense of where this slots in, this is slightly fewer than the Czech news aggregator novinky.cz, the Hungarian news portal Telex.hu, the Polish news aggregator Wykop.pl, and barely more than the Russian news aggregator Dzen.ru, the paywall jumping website removepaywall.com, and a computer graphics job board called 80.lv. In that same time, Google has sent roughly 3 million visitors, or 187,400 percent more than ChatGPT.
This is really neither here nor there because we have tried to set our website up to block ChatGPT from scraping us, though it is clear this is not always working. But even for sites that don’t block ChatGPT, new research from the internet infrastructure company CloudFlare suggests that OpenAI is crawling 1,500 individual webpages for every one visitor that it is sending to a website. Google traffic has begun to dry up as both Google’s own AI snippets and AI-powered SEO spam have obliterated the business models of many media websites.
Every time "tech" comes up with a journalism "solution," journalists get laid off while the product gets worse. First it was SEO, then Facebook, then Twitter ... you'd think people trained to detect patterns can do better than just hopping on the latest hype that kills traffic.
The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work
On May 23, we got a very interesting email from Ghost, the service we use to make 404 Media. “Paid subscription started,” the email said, which is the subject line of all of the automated emails we get when someone subscribes to 404 Media. The interesting thing about this email was that the new subscriber had been referred to 404 Media directly from chatgpt.com, meaning the person clicked a link to 404 Media from within a ChatGPT window. It is the first and only time that ChatGPT has ever sent us a paid subscriber.
From what I can tell, ChatGPT.com has sent us 1,600 pageviews since we founded 404 Media nearly two years ago. To give you a sense of where this slots in, this is slightly fewer than the Czech news aggregator novinky.cz, the Hungarian news portal Telex.hu, the Polish news aggregator Wykop.pl, and barely more than the Russian news aggregator Dzen.ru, the paywall jumping website removepaywall.com, and a computer graphics job board called 80.lv. In that same time, Google has sent roughly 3 million visitors, or 187,400 percent more than ChatGPT.
This is really neither here nor there because we have tried to set our website up to block ChatGPT from scraping us, though it is clear this is not always working. But even for sites that don’t block ChatGPT, new research from the internet infrastructure company CloudFlare suggests that OpenAI is crawling 1,500 individual webpages for every one visitor that it is sending to a website. Google traffic has begun to dry up as both Google’s own AI snippets and AI-powered SEO spam have obliterated the business models of many media websites. This general dynamic—plummeting traffic because of AI snippets, ChatGPT, AI slop, Twitter no workie so good no more—has been called the “traffic apocalypse” and has all but killed some smaller websites and has been blamed by executives for hundreds of layoffs at larger ones.
Despite the fact that generative AI has been a destructive force against their businesses, their industry, and the truth more broadly, media executives still see AI as a business opportunity and a shiny object that they can tell investors and their staffs that they are very bullish on. They have to say this, I guess, because everything else they have tried hasn’t worked, and pretending that they are forward thinking or have any clue what they are doing will perhaps allow a specific type of media executive to squeeze out a few more months of salary.
But pivoting to AI is not a business strategy. Telling journalists they must use AI is not a business strategy. Partnering with AI companies is a business move, but becoming reliant on revenue from tech giants who are creating a machine that duplicates the work you’ve already created is not a smart or sustainable business move, and therefore it is not a smart business strategy. It is true that AI is changing the internet and is threatening journalists and media outlets. But the only AI-related business strategy that makes any sense whatsoever is one where media companies and journalists go to great pains to show their audiences that they are human beings, and that the work they are doing is worth supporting because it is human work that is vital to their audiences. This is something GQ’s editorial director Will Welch recently told New York magazine: “The good news for any digital publisher is that the new game we all have to play is also a sustainable one: You have to build a direct relationship with your core readers,” he said.
Becoming an “AI-first” media company has become a buzzword that execs can point at to explain that their businesses can use AI to become more ‘efficient’ and thus have a chance to become more profitable. Often, but not always, this message comes from executives who are laying off large swaths of their human staff.
In May, Business Insider laid off 21 percent of its workforce. In her layoff letter, Business Insider’s CEO Barbara Peng said “there’s a huge opportunity for companies who harness AI first.” She told the remaining employees there that they are “fully embracing AI,” “we are going all-in on AI,” and said “over 70 percent of Business Insider employees are already using Enterprise ChatGPT regularly (our goal is 100%), and we’re building prompt libraries and sharing everyday use cases that help us work faster, smarter, and better.” She added they are “exploring how AI can boost operations across shared services, helping us scale and operate more efficiently.”
Last year, Hearst Newspapers executives, who operate 78 newspapers nationwide, told the company in an all-hands meeting audio obtained by 404 Media that they are “leaning into [AI] as Hearst overall, the entire corporation.” Examples given in the meeting included using AI for slide decks, a “quiz generation tool” for readers, translations, a tool called Dispatch, which is an email summarization tool, and a tool called “Assembly,” which is “basically a public meeting monitor, transcriber, summarizer, all in one. What it does is it goes into publicly posted meeting videos online, transcribes them automatically, [and] automatically alerts journalists through Slack about what’s going on and links to the transcript.”
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are doing all sorts of fucked up shit that definitely no one wants but are being imposed upon their newsrooms because they are owned by tech billionaires who are tired of losing money. The Washington Posthas an AI chatbot and plans to create a Forbes contributor-esque opinion section with an AI writing tool that will assist outside writers. The Los Angeles Timesintroduced an AI bot that argues with its own writers and has written that the KKK was not so bad, actually. Both outlets have had massive layoffs in recent months.
The New York Times, which is actually doing well, says it is using AI to “create initial drafts of headlines, summaries of Times articles and other text that helps us produce and distribute the news.” Wirecutter is hiring a product director for AI and recently instructed its employees to consider how they can use AI to make their journalism better, New York magazine reported. Kevin Roose, an, uhh, complicated figure in the AI space, said “AI has essentially replaced Google for me for basic questions,” and said that he uses it for “brainstorming.” His Hard Fork colleague Casey Newton said he uses it for “research” and “fact-checking.”
Over at Columbia Journalism Review, a host of journalists and news execs, myself included, wrote about how AI is used in their newsrooms. The responses were all over the place and were occasionally horrifying, and ranged from people saying they were using AI as personal assistants to brainstorming partners to article drafters.
In his largely incoherent screed that shows how terrible he was at managing G/O Media, which took over Deadspin, Kotaku, Jezebel, Gizmodo, and other beloved websites and ran them into the ground at varying speeds, Jim Spanfeller nods at the “both good and perhaps bad” impacts of AI on news. In a truly astounding passage of a notably poorly written letter that manages to say less than nothing, he wrote: “AI is a prime example. It is here to a degree but there are so many more shoes to drop [...] Clearly this technology is already having a profound impact. But so much more is yet to come, both good and perhaps bad depending on where you sit and how well monitored and controlled it is. But one thing to keep in mind, consumers seek out content for many reasons. Certainly, for specific knowledge, which search and search like models satisfy in very effective ways. But also, for insights, enjoyment, entertainment and inspiration.”
At the MediaPost Publishing Insider Conference, a media industry business conference I just went to in New Orleans, there was much chatter about AI. Alice Ting, an executive for the Daily Mail gave a pretty interesting talk about how the Daily Mail is protecting its journalism from AI scrapers in order to eventually strike deals with AI companies to license their content.
“What many of you have seen is a surge in scraping of our content, a decline in traffic referrals, and an increase in hallucinated outputs that often misrepresent our brands,” Ting said. “Publishers can provide decades of vetted and timestamped content, verified, fact checked, semantically organized, editorially curated. And in addition offer fresh content on an almost daily basis.”
Ting is correct in that several publishers have struck lucrative deals with AI companies, but she also suggested that AI licensing would be a recurring revenue stream for publishers, which would require a series of competing LLMs to want to come in and license the same content over and over again. Many LLMs have already scraped almost everything there is to scrape, it’s not clear that there are going to consistently be new LLMs from companies wanting to pay to train on data that other LLMs have already trained on, and it’s not clear how much money the Daily Mail’s blogs of the day are going to be worth to an AI company on an ongoing basis. Betting that this time, hinging the future of our industry on massive, monopolistic tech giants will work out is the most Lucy with the football thing I can imagine.
There is not much evidence that selling access to LLMs will work out in a recurring way for any publisher, outside of the very largest publishers like, perhaps, the New York Times. Even at the conference, panel moderator Upneet Grover, founder of LH2 Holdings, which owns several smaller blogs, suggested that “a lot of these licensing revenues are not moving the needle, at least from the deals we’ve seen, but there’s this larger threat of more referral traffic being taken away from news publishers [by AI].” youtube.com/embed/La2R3iIL9BE?… In my own panel at the conference I made the general argument that I am making in this article, which is that none of this is going to work.
“We’re not just competing against large-scale publications and AI slop, we are competing against the entire rest of the internet. We were publishing articles and AI was scraping and republishing them within five minutes of us publishing them,” I said. “So many publications are leaning into ‘how can we use AI to be more efficient to publish more,’ and it’s not going to work. It’s not going to work because you’re competing against a child in Romania, a child in Bangladesh who is publishing 9,000 articles a day and they don’t care about facts, they don’t care about accuracy, but in an SEO algorithm it’s going to perform and that’s what you’re competing against. You have to compete on quality at this point and you have to find a real human being audience and you need to speak to them directly and treat them as though they are intelligent and not as though you are trying to feed them as much slop as possible.”
It makes sense that journalists and media execs are talking about AI because everyone is talking about AI, and because AI presents a particularly grave threat to the business models of so many media companies. It’s fine to continue to talk about AI. But the point of this article is that “we’re going to lean into AI” is not a business model, and it’s not even a business strategy, any more than pivoting to “video” was a strategy or chasing Facebook Live views was a strategy.
In a harrowing discussion with Axios, in which he excoriates many of the deals publishers have signed with OpenAI and other AI companies, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, said that the AI-driven traffic apocalypse is a nightmare for people who make content online: “If we don’t figure out how to fix this, the internet is going to die,” he said. youtube.com/embed/H5C9EL3C82Y?… So AI is destroying traffic, ripping off our work, creating slop that destroys discoverability and further undermines trust, and allowing random people to create news-shaped objects that social media and search algorithms either can’t or don’t care to distinguish from real news. And yet media executives have decided that the only way to compete with this is to make their workers use AI to make content in a slightly more efficient way than they were already doing journalism.
This is not going to work, because “using AI” is not a reporting strategy or a writing strategy, and it’s definitely not a business strategy.
AI is a tool (sorry!) that people who are bad at their jobs will use badly and that people who are good at their jobs will maybe, possibly find some uses for. People who are terrible at their jobs (many executives), will tell their employees that they “need” to use AI, that their jobs depend on it, that they must become more productive, and that becoming an AI-first company is the strategy that will save them from the old failed strategy, which itself was the new strategy after other failed business models.
The only journalism business strategy that works, and that will ever work in a sustainable way, is if you create something of value that people (human beings, not bots) want to read or watch or listen to, and that they cannot find anywhere else. This can mean you’re breaking news, or it can mean that you have a particularly notable voice or personality. It can mean that you’re funny or irreverent or deeply serious or useful. It can mean that you confirm people’s priors in a way that makes them feel good. And you have to be trustworthy, to your audience at least. But basically, to make money doing journalism, you have to publish “content,” relatively often, that people want to consume.
This is not rocket science, and I am of course not the only person to point this out. There have been many, many features about the success of Feed Me, Emily Sundberg’s newsletter about New York, culture, and a bunch of other stuff. As she has pointed out in many interviews, she has been successful because she writes about interesting things and treats her audience like human beings. The places that are succeeding right now are individual writers who have a perspective, news outlets like WIRED that are fearless, publications that have invested in good reporters like The Atlantic, publications that tell you something that AI can’t, and worker owned, journalist-run outlets like us, Defector, Aftermath, Hellgate, Remap, Hearing Things, etc. There are also a host of personality-forward, journalism-adjacent YouTubers, TikTok influencers, and podcasters who have massive, loyal audiences, yet most of the traditional media is utterly allergic to learning anything from them.
There was a short period of time where it was possible to make money by paying human writers—some of them journalists, perhaps—to spam blog posts onto the internet that hit specific keywords, trending topics, or things that would perform well on social media. These were the early days of Gawker, Buzzfeed, VICE, and Vox. But the days of media companies tricking people into reading their articles using SEO or hitting a trending algorithm are over.
They are over because other people are doing it better than them now, and by “better,” I mean, more shamelessly and with reckless abandon. As we have written many times, news outlets are no longer just competing with each other, but with everyone on social media, and Netflix, and YouTube, and TikTok, and all the other people who post things on the internet. They are not just up against the total fracturing of social media, the degrading and enshittification of the discovery mechanisms on the internet, algorithms that artificially ding links to articles, AI snippets and summaries, etc. They are also competing with sophisticated AI slop and spam factories often being run by people on the other side of the world publishing things that look like “news” that is being created on a scale that even the most “efficient” journalist leveraging AI to save some perhaps negligible amount of time cannot ever hope to measure up to.
Every day, I get emails from AI spam influencers who are selling tools that allow slop peddlers to clone any website with one click, automatically generate newsletters about any topic, or generate plausible-seeming articles that are engineered to perform well in a search algorithm. Examples: “Clone any website in 9 seconds with Clonely AI,” “The future of video creation is here—and it’s faceless, seamless & limitless,” “just a straightforward path to earning 6-figures with an AI-powered newsletter that’s working right now.” These people do not care at all about truth or accuracy or our information ecosystem or anything else that a media company or a journalist would theoretically care about. If you want an example of what this looks like, consider the series of “Good Day” newsletters, which are AI generated and are in 355 small towns across America, many of which no longer have newspapers. These businesses are economically viable because they are being run by one person (or a very small team of people) who disproportionately live in low cost of living areas and who have essentially zero overhead.
And so becoming more “efficient” with AI is the wrong thing to do, and it’s the wrong thing to ask any journalist to do. The only thing that media companies can do in order to survive is to lean into their humanity, to teach their journalists how to do stories that cannot be done by AI, and to help young journalists learn the skills needed to do articles that weave together complicated concepts and, again, that focus on our shared human experience, in a way that AI cannot and will never be able to.
AI as buzzword and shiny object has been here for a long time. And I actually do not think AI is fake and sucks (I also don’t really believe that anyone thinks AI is “fake,” because we can see the internet collapsing around us). We report every day on the ways that AI is changing the web, in part because it is being shoved down our throats by big tech companies, spammers, etc. But I think that Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor are basically correct when they say that AI is “normal technology” that will not change everything but that over time will lead to modest improvements in people’s workflows as they get integrated into existing products or as they help around the edges. We—yes, even you—are using some version of AI, or some tools that have LLMs or machine learning in them in some way shape or form already, even if you hate such tools.
In early 2023, when I was the editor-in-chief of Motherboard, I was asked to put together a presentation for VICE executives about AI, and how I thought it would change both our journalism and the business of journalism. The reason I was asked to do this was because our team was writing a lot about AI, and there was a sense that the company could do something with AI to make money, or do better journalism, or some combination of those things. There was no sense or thought at the time, at least from what I was told, that VICE was planning to use AI as a pretext for replacing human journalists or cutting costs—it had already entered a cycle where it was constantly laying off journalists—but there was a sense that this was going to be the big new opportunity/threat, a new potential savior for a company that had already created a “virtual office” in Decentraland, a crypto-powered metaverse that last year had 42 daily active users.
I never got to give the presentation, because the executive who asked me to put it together left the company, and the new people either didn’t care or didn’t have time for me to give it. The company went bankrupt almost immediately after this change, and I left VICE soon after to make 404 Media with my co-founders, who also left VICE.
But my message at the time, and my message now two years later, is that AI has already changed our world, and that we have the opportunity to report on the technology as it already exists and is already being used—to justify layoffs, to dehumanize people, to spam the internet, etc. At the time, we had already written 840 articles that were tagged “AI,” which included articles about biased sentencing algorithms, predictive policing, facial recognition, deepfakes, AI romantic relationships, AI-powered spam and scams, etc.
The business opportunity then, as now, was to be an indispensable, very human guide to a technology that people—human beings—are making tons of money off of, using as an excuse to lay off workers, and are doing wild shit with. There was no magic strategy in which we could use AI to quadruple our output, replace workers, rise to the top of Google rankings, etc. There was, however, great risk in attempting to do this: “PR NIGHTMARE,” one of my slides about the risks of using AI I wrote said: “CNET plagiarism scandal. Big backlash from artists and writers to generative AI. Copyright issues. Race to the bottom.”
My other thought was that any efficiencies that could be squeezed out of AI, in our day-to-day jobs, were already being done so by good reporters and video producers at the company. There could be no top-down forced pivot to AI, because research and time-saving uses of AI were already being naturally integrated into our work by people who were smart in ways that were totally reasonable and mostly helpful, if not groundbreaking. The AI-as-force-multiplier was already happening, and while, yes, this probably helped the business in some way, it helped in ways that were not then and were never going to be actually perceptible to a company’s bottom line. AI was not a savior then, and it is not a savior now. For journalists and for media companies, there is no real “pivot to AI” that is possible unless that pivot means firing all of the employees and putting out a shittier product (which some companies have called a strategy). This is because the pivot has already occurred and the business prospects for media companies have gotten worse, not better. If Kevin Roose is using AI so much, in such a new and groundbreaking way, why aren’t his articles noticeably different than they ever were before, or why aren’t there way more of them than there were before? Where are the journalists who were formerly middling who are now pumping out incredible articles thanks to efficiencies granted by AI?
To be concrete: Many journalists, including me, at least sometimes use some sort of AI transcription tool for some of their less sensitive interviews. This saves me many hours, the tools have gotten better (but are still not perfect, and absolutely require double checking and should not be used for sensitive sources or sensitive stories). YouTube’s transcript feature is an incredible reporting tool that has allowed me to do stories that would have never been possible even a few years ago. YouTube’s built-in translations and subtitles, and its transcript tool are some of the only reasons that I was able to do this investigation into Indian AI slop creators, which allowed me to get the gist of what was happening in a given video before we handed them to human translators to get exact translations. Most podcasts I know of now use Descript, Riverside, or a similar tool to record and edit their podcasts; these have built-in AI transcription tools, built-in AI camera switching, and built-in text-to-video editing tools. Most media outlets use captioning that is built into Adobe Premiere or CapCut for their vertical videos and their YouTube videos (and then double check them). If you want to get extremely annoying about it, various machine learning algorithms are in ProTools, Audition, CapCut, Premiere, Canva, etc for things like photo editing, sound leveling, noise reduction, etc.
There are other journalists who feel very comfortable coding and doing data analysis and analyzing huge sets of documents. There are journalists out there who are already using AI to do some of these tasks and some of the resulting articles are surely good and could not have been done without AI.
But the people doing this well are doing so in a way where they are catching and fixing AI hallucinations, because the stakes for fucking up are so incredibly high. If you are one of the people who is doing this, then, great. I have little interest in policing other people’s writing processes so long as they are not publishing AI fever dreams or plagiarizing, and there are writers I respect who say they have their little chats with ChatGPT to help them organize their thoughts before they do a draft or who have vibecoded their own productivity tools or data analysis tools. But again, that’s not a business model. It’s a tool that has enabled some reporters to do their jobs, and, using their expertise, they have produced good and valuable work. This does not mean that every news outlet or every reporter needs to learn to shove the JFK documents into ChatGPT and have it shit out an investigation.
I also know that our credibility and the trust of our audience is the only thing that separates us from anyone else. It is the only “business model” that we have and that I am certain works: We trade good, accurate, interesting, human articles for money and attention. The risks of offloading that trust to an AI in a careless way is the biggest possible risk factor that we could have as a business. Having an article go out where someone goes “Actually, a robot wrote this,” is one of the worst possible things that could ever happen to us, and so we have made the brave decision to not do that.
This is part of what is so baffling about the Chicago Sun Times’ response to its somewhat complicated summer guide AI-generated reading list fiasco. Under its new owners, Chicago Public Media, The Sun Times has in recent years spent an incredible amount of time and effort rebuilding the image and good will that its previous private equity owners destroyed. And yet in its apology note, Melissa Bell, the CEO of Chicago Public Media, said that more AI is coming: “Chicago Public Media will not back away from experimenting and learning how to properly use AI,” she wrote, adding that the team was working with a fellow paid for by the Lenfest Institute, a nonprofit funded by OpenAI and Microsoft.
Bell does realize what makes the paper stand apart, though: “We must own our humanity,” Bell wrote. “Our humanity makes our work valuable.”
This is something that the New York Times’s Roose recently brought up that I thought was quite smart and yet is not something that he seems to have internalized when talking about how AI is going to change everything and that its widespread adoption is inevitable and the only path forward: “I wonder if [AI is] going to catalyze some counterreaction,” he said. “I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the slow-food movement and the farm-to-table movement, both of which came up in reaction to fast food. Fast food had a lot going for it—it was cheap, it was plentiful, you could get it in a hurry. But it also opened up a market for a healthier, more artisanal way of doing things. And I wonder if something similar will happen in creative industries—a kind of creative renaissance for things that feel real and human and aren’t just outputs from some A.I. company’s slop machine.”
This has ALREAAAAADDDDYYYYYY HAPPPENEEEEEDDDDDD, and it is quite literally the only path forward for all but perhaps the most gigantic of media companies. There is no reason for an individual journalist or an individual media company to make the fast food of the internet. It’s already being made, by spammers and the AI companies themselves. It is impossible to make it cheaper or better than them, because it is what they exist to do. The actual pivot that is needed is one to humanity. Media companies need to let their journalists be human. And they need to prove why they’re worth reading with every article they do.
Urgh man I pro the Ukranian people’s right to self determination and staunchly against Putin’s imperialism.
But this
“We also need to significantly reduce noncritical state expenditures and, as much as possible, through deregulation, direct public forces for the sake of economic development.” (Zelenskyy)
just_another_person
in reply to chimay • • •atzanteol
in reply to chimay • • •No, it doesn't. You know what would though? My old Pentium 120mhz with 16MiB of RAM.
MyNameIsRichard
in reply to chimay • • •My microwave is more powerful than the machines that sent humans to the moon.
LeFantome
in reply to MyNameIsRichard • • •UnhingedFridge
in reply to chimay • • •LeFantome
in reply to chimay • • •From the video “websites are still websites. Videos are still videos”. The problem of course is that this is not true.
The problem is that technology is still our servant. What are we asking it to do?
First, this video itself. If this same story was being told 20 years ago, it would be a blog post, mostly plain text, maybe one image. It would not be a 1080p or 4K YouTube video. That, in a nutshell is the real problem. The OP, by posting this video, has already chosen a side in that fight. But let’s compare apples to apples.
20 years ago, a web page was made up up a few dozen kb of HTML, a dozen kb of CSS, and a few 100 kb of JavaScript. Images were few, low resolution, and low bit depth. The fonts used were probably bitmaps and installed locally. The “computing power” was on the server. It was all sent as clear text. The networks were too slow to send much more. Today, a website sends me megabytes, maybe dozens of megabytes, of JavaScript. And I am probably downloading a bucket of vector fonts too. Not only is the “web application” much, much fancier but now all the “computing power” is expected to be in my browser (on my computer). And all the “assets” like images and video have to be local too. Instead of small 8 bit GIFs, I have huge high-resolution 24 bit AVIF and PNG files. I am rendering SVG and font vector files at high resolutions on my local CPU / GPU. Maybe there is an animated background. To cap things off, everything is encrypted with 2048 bit or 4096 bit keys. It is not that my local computer or my local operating system has become less efficient (like the video implies). It is that the websites have become 100 times more difficult to render. Browse some of those old websites (if you can find them). They are blazing fast and take very little RAM.
And what were videos? YouTube was probably 360p with a video codec designed to be easy to decompress on an underpowered client. Now, YouTube is 4K or at least 1080p and in a codec that is much more computationally intensive to render. It has to be to support storage of these otherwise immense files. A 4K file is literally 40 times the number of pixels in 360p. This is before we consider that the color space probably went from 16 bits to 24 or 32 as well. So, back to 100 times harder like above.
And the premise that “20 years ago” that you were running your web browser and a file manager and a command line all while editing a video on your laptop is nonsense. You had a 1280x800 screen. If you were editing a video, it was probably the only thing you had running. And again, what resolution and color depth were these videos you were making? Were you even editing video? Be honest. How many “content creators” were there then. The multimedia we were editing was probably audio only. The video work we did was more transcoding (maybe cutting out ads) than it was “video editing” like today.
If this same message was being told 20 years ago, it would be a blog post, mostly plain text, maybe one image.
And you know what, my 10 year old computer can still do the modern stuff and it absolutely blazes though the old stuff.
If this were a blog post, I could have a hundred similar tabs open on that 2 GB of RAM he talks about.
So, it is not that computers and software are built wastefully. It is that users expect things they did not expect before. If you are willing to watch 360p YouTube, read mostly text blog posts with the ads tuned off, make simply edited videos in the same 360p resolution, and run a simple Wayland compositor or X11 Window Manager, a totally up-to-date Linux distro will run just as well on your old hardware as you remember. At least, pretty close.
The only really truly wasteful step has been the move to 64 bit instead of 32 bit. We could save at least a third of the RAM used for any modern task if it were 32 bit. But, 32 bit only gives us 4 GB of RAM, which means I could get a 32 bit computer that performs like 6 or 7 GB 64 bit system today. But of course that is not nearly enough. As the YouTube author states, they need 16 GB for the huge videos he is editing. So, 64 bit is not wasted either I guess.
And, of course, on a Windows machine, a third of my RAM and 20% of my CPU is dedicated to running a bunch of crap that ships with my OS to serve the goals of the OS provider, not me the user. But that is an entirely different problem (or, this is his point, I concede this point to him).
An additional message in this video is about “freedom” and “exponential complexity” and “commercial masters”. Of course, there is some truth there. But again, step back.
This video starts with the OP editing a video in KDENLIVE on Linux. What video editing software and OS was he using 20 or 30 years ago as he says. Be honest. We have more freedom and more non-commercial choice than ever before. It is not even remotely arguable.
And complexity. If I install a distro today with say XFCE as a desktop environment, what is the complexity compared to the early 2000s or late 90s? Try to configure your video card and monitor and get back to me. Explain how to configure your WiFi in 1999. If anything, a Linux distro is less complex and daunting now than before.
John
in reply to LeFantome • • •LeFantome
in reply to John • • •Of course there is lots to criticize. And it does not get worse than electron. But it is pretty easy to run a fairly lean desktop in 2025. And bloated applications are not a new invention.
I guess we can talk about the “rise” of interpreted languages. As long as we ignore that the Lingua Franca of the 8 bit era was BASiC I guess. Or Logo! We also have to ignore hugely popular languages in their era like Perl 5, Lisp, TCL, Scheme, and PHP. How about all those Bash scripts? And Javascript is less interpreted than it used to be as you say. I assume you mean Python but it is over 30 years old and PyPy is a thing. Most newer languages are JIT or fully compiled. Rust, Go, Swift, Carbon, and Zig are all compiled languages. Kotlin, Gleam, and Elixir are JIT. What are all the new interpreted languages? If anything, I would say the trend is towards performance and efficiency.
JavaScript works against his point in a big way. Javascript was released 30 years ago and yet javascript code runs dramatically faster (on the same hardware) in a modern web browser than it will on one from back then. JavaScript engines are VERY heavily optimized and browser devs will move mountains for another percent or two. And WASM is even faster.
You can build Rust applications on Windows 95 and they are faster than C++ was back then. Not everyone has given up on performance.
Modern code can be much more parallel and asynchronous (faster). And there is a strong recent focus on memory safety and efficiency.
Networking and file systems are both much faster and more efficient than they used to be.
And of course modern processors are not just faster but have many more performance focussed instructions (SIMD, AVX, vector extensions, etc). And we have hardware acceleration for media codecs and of course virtualization which speed up applications dramatically. And technologies like hypervisor clusters and containers can lead to significantly better resource utilization in practice.
Anyway, his point is obvious and of course true to an extent. Not nearly to extent he claims though.