Category: Tech Culture

Posted on
by

I recently added “Your LLM was trained on my blog” to the intro on my home page. I’m sort of being facetious, but it’s also true: my old site (hyperborea.org) has been in the Common Crawl data set for years, this blog has been online since 2002, and the major LLMs have used Common Crawl’s data in their training.

Way back when I switched to WordPress in 2003, one of the things I found annoying about it was that it would auto-convert punctuation from ASCII to “fancy” characters. Curly quotes, curly apostrophes, em-dashes instead of double-hyphens, ellipses…These were things that bugged the heck out of me when I saw them in broken emails and Word documents. Over the next year, seeing the difference it made in legibility, I came to appreciate real typography. Since then I’ve been happy to let WordPress, and later ClassicPress and Eleventy convert my plain typing.

Side note: I still have trouble using some apps with code snippets (ex: Apple Notes and Stickies), ’cause I haven’t figured out how to stop them from converting ASCII punctuation that means something in the code to Unicode punctuation that means something more specific in printed human language. Also, notice in that sentence that ClassicPress was smart enough to convert a straight up and down apostrophe used on a contraction to a curly apostrophe, and not to a curly single quote like it does with ‘here.’

Anyway, WordPress powers a huge amount of the web. I’ve seen stats bandied about such as 42% of all websites, 60% of content management systems, >50% of the top 10,000 websites (by some measure or another). The exact numbers aren’t important, it’s just important to know that a whole lot of the web uses WordPress to convert what people write into HTML pages for the web.

Now let’s get back to LLMs:

  • People think they can identify LLM-generated text because it tends to include em-dashes.
  • LLMs were trained on writing by actual people on the web.
  • A whole lot of that writing by actual people is presented by WordPress.
  • WordPress has auto-converted typography including em-dashes since 2003.
  • That means a large chunk of LLMs’ training data includes text by real people that uses real em-dashes.

“AI” doesn’t use em-dashes because real people don’t, it uses em-dashes because real people do [note: lots of swearing] (via).

The only place I can imagine it would be even a semi-reliable indicator would be in social media posts, on platforms where that kind of auto-conversion doesn’t happen. Even then, I can easily imagine someone writing a draft in Word, or copying a sentence or two from their WordPress post, or just hitting option+shift+hyphen on a Mac (or whatever the key combo is on Windows).

Posted on
by

I remember a brief period shortly after Instagram introduced in-feed advertisements when I was getting mostly travel ads that consisted of well-composed scenic landscapes and cityscapes and sponsored nature photos. Which…well, was fine! They blended in with all the scenic and nature photographers I was following! I almost hit “like” on a few!

Back in 2017, I wasn’t sure whether to be disturbed, or to look at it in terms of XKCD’s idea of constructive spambots. (Mission accomplished? Maybe, but looking back from today, that’s basically what “generative AI” does, and it turns out it’s still disturbing.)

It’s probably the only time I’ve come close to appreciating targeted advertising. It was possible to use just context and not full behavioral surveillance, and it actually surfaced something worth seeing.

That said, I never clicked through to arrange a trip through any of the posts. Apparently, it was ineffective across the board, because as I mentioned, that period was brief. (Targeted advertising doesn’t work as well as its proponents claim, and oh how I wish it hadn’t become the standard method of paying for online services.)

By 2019 I was seeing big box stores and fast food, crackers and cold medicine, movie posters, brand logos and slogans. They weren’t even trying. It was fully Facebook-ified, they were mining as much of my data as they possibly could, and this was the best they could do? Plus, by then they’d also tweaked the feed algorithm to push more ads, more sponsored posts, more allegedly-popular posts instead of the pictures from friends and photographers I wanted to see. In short, it no longer sparked joy.

Instagram had the chance to be like a magazine, with ads that at least align with the content, but the more Facebook tried to monetize it, the more jarring and blatant the ads became, and the more they were based on what Facebook thinks it knows about you instead of trying to fit with your actual interests based on what’s posted by the people you’re following.

That’s around the time I mostly shifted to Pixelfed for casual photo sharing. I cross-posted for a while, but eventually deleted my account after leaving it unused for several years. Since then I’ve moved from Pixelfed to a compatible self-hosted site.

From what I’ve read, Instagram has continued to double-down on shoveling ads/sponsored content/influencers (now with more AI!) since then. I haven’t felt like dipping my toe back in. Though I have on occasion tried to visit some local business’ online presence only to discover that all they have is an Instagram account…which I can’t see because Instagram hates the open web (and always has, even before Facebook bought them).

And yet I’m still on Flickr. As much as it lost its way during the Yahoo years, it never stopped being about the photos.

Posted on
by

In retrospect, it’s wild that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing (“never underestimate Microsoft on marketing”) than technical merits…fell for the idea that a “marketplace of ideas” would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the loudest ones.

Posted on
by

Automattic has announced that they are “realigning” their contributions to WordPress due to fending off “attacks” from the “community” and WP-Engine.

Automatticians who contributed to core will instead focus on for-profit projects within Automattic, such as WordPress.com, Pressable, WPVIP, Jetpack, and WooCommerce. Members of the “community” have said that working on these sorts of things should count as a contribution to WordPress.

In the interest of, as you put it, “secur[ing] the future of WordPress for generations to come,” I trust you’ll be releasing the WordPress trademark, core project management and the infrastructure at WordPress.org, (the latter of which which CEO Matt Mullenweg has repeatedly pointed out that he owns personally) over to the community so you can “focus on for-profit projects within Automattic” without the distraction of the wider WordPress ecosystem.

Either that, or you’ve just told the entire WordPress community — excuse me, “community,” I forgot to include the scare quotes you so meticulously included throughout your article — that we should never trust you to have the community’s interests at heart, only your own.

I suppose this means I should start looking for alternatives to the handful of Automattic-built plugins I’m still using, as it sounds like I shouldn’t anticipate them continuing to be maintained.

Update January 10: It gets worse. Mullenweg just deactivated the accounts of several high-profile people at WordPress-adjacent companies who dared to question his leadership, in a post that goes increasingly off the rails.

Posted on
by

Looks like IEEE has finally renamed their sustainable tech conference. Now it’s “IEEE SustainTech Expo.” Not only is it a bit clearer than the old name, but ever since Among Us came out, “SusTech” always made me giggle a bit. I doubt I was the only one.

Update: apparently I was mistaken, and SustainTech is entirely separate from SusTech, which is still going on. Looking at it a bit more, it seems that SustainTech is more of a marketing/trade show, while SusTech continues to be a technical conference.

Posted on
by

Popped over to Twitter to delete the last handful of posts I left there when I deleted most of them back in December. Decided to leave two for now, though I might still delete them before the new TOS takes effect.

Oct 2008:

If only the super high-tech jet fighters had identified, clarified & classified, they’d have seen the attack for what it really was.

Nov 2022:

Weird, it’s almost like the needs of a “town square” for people to communicate and exchange ideas aren’t compatible with the incentives for a single for-profit entity to maintain it.

Posted on
by

I think there’s been a lot of talking past each other on privacy lately because there are so many layers to it.

Google or Dropbox keeping your cloud files from showing up on someone else’s drive or a public share is one layer. Keeping your data from leaking in a data breach is another. Protecting messages in transit from your device to their service. Google and Meta (Facebook, Instagram, and now Threads) are good at those.

But then there’s ensuring that Google or Meta doesn’t misuse it themselves, or sell it to someone who will.

And, well, to put it mildly, they’re not so big on that aspect!

Continue reading →

»All pages site-wide with this tag