Adventures in Sock Knitting

1) marchmetamatterschallenge has begun! I'm particularly excited this year since I will finally come current with my meta archiving. I'm already finished with 2024 and should finish 2025 by tomorrow. One thing I hope is to do more writing this year.

2) The February CheckIn at everykindofcraft has gotten a lot of responses. It's interesting to hear all the different ways that people have learned these skills.

3) In less good news, a bunch of RSS feeds seem to have stopped working. The AO3 vids feed hasn't updated in weeks (so unlikely to be AO3's recent issues), and 4 feeds from Tumblr have stopped as well, though it seems only 2 have been updating lately. It's definitely not the feed service, because at least 3 other feeds I have set up have updated within the last few days. I'm wondering if Tumblr is somehow blocking RSS feeds now?

I also feel like there are people's posts that I have missed though I am less sure about that.

3) I was waiting for a cashier and there were 3 women and 2 small girls ahead of me. The two little girls were racing around everywhere, grabbing things and then having them put back by the women. It was all taking some time, and the squealing was getting on my nerves. But then one grabbed an Easter Bunny and told her mom she wanted it.

The mom asked the cashier if it was solid or hollow, and was told it was hollow (which seemed most likely to me given its size and price!) The little girl then asked what "hollow" was, and her mom struggled to explain it, finally saying "It has a hole inside it." The little girl then said "I'll put it back and get another." We all burst out laughing as her mom then tried to explain that the bunny wasn't defective, it was just the way it was made.

4) So it looks like Paramount will fold HBO into its service. I expect that will put paid to its bundling with Disney services, though it does make it more likely we'll keep Paramount+ around post-The Late Show cancellation. At this point the U.S. looks like it's going to have 3 major streamers, a number of secondary streamers (in which I include Peacock) and a vast number of tiny streamers.

5) Never posted here that I finished the latest season of Strange New Worlds. Thought it somewhat better than earlier seasons, despite the way it started, though I find it a bit jarring to see TOS episodes essentially revised for use here. The finale seemed a cross between Rey at the end of the Skywalker saga and ST:TOS's Lazarus episode. ( Read more... )

1) Squidgeworld will be doing video hosting! So if you have videos you need hosting and, like us, hate Youtube, you'll be able to host your videos on Squidge Images.

Various services are currently down for maintenance but there's more info about that at the link.

2) This post was about how people offer gaming opinions via social media but I think the larger lesson applies to everything, and says a lot about how forceful peer pressure (even of unknown peers!) seems to be:

"The feedback they provide is not about the game, it’s about an opinion they believe to be correct based on the crowd."

"When you share an opinion or give feedback, you are telling a story about yourself. People want to share a story that they like, and that makes them feel skilled, or knowledgeable. They do not write the honest objective truth about themselves into these things. They write the version that they wish they were. We know this because we’ve surveyed a lot of players over the years and then compared their answers with their actual behavior data, and the two rarely have anything in common."

"if there’s ever a conflict between what people say and what they do, believe their actions. People say things that aren’t true all the time, but the way they use buttons that say Play Now and Uninstall tell their ultimate truth."

3) Interesting thoughts in this course introduction on Global Cinema by Henry Jenkins. A few of them here: ( Read more... )

4) I found a way to make AI tell you lies – and I'm not the only one. "People have used hacks and loopholes to abuse search engines for decades. Google has sophisticated protections in place, and the company says the accuracy of AI Overviews is on par with other search features it introduced years ago. But experts say AI tools have undone a lot of the tech industry's work to keep people safe. These AI tricks are so basic they're reminiscent of the early 2000s, before Google had even introduced a web spam team, Ray says. "We're in a bit of a Renaissance for spammers."

Not only is AI easier to fool, but experts worry that users are more likely to fall for it...Even when AI tools provide source, people are far less likely to check it out than they were with old-school search results. For example, a recent study found people are 58% less likely to click on a link when an AI Overview shows up at the top of Google Search."

5) This post speculates about the impact AI will have on economies and frames it as a look "back" to our time period. The whole thing is available to read for free, in part because this analyst group sees this potential economic and social catastrophe happening within the next few years.

"It should have been clear all along that a single GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to 10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is more economic pandemic than economic panacea. The velocity of money flatlined. The human-centric consumer economy, 70% of GDP at the time, withered. We probably could have figured this out sooner if we just asked how much money machines spend on discretionary goods. (Hint: it’s zero.)"

The key to a collapse is the disruption in the historical model of companies that have become outmoded (or undercut) by new technology: ( Read more... )

I disagree with the report in two respects. The first is the speed of the timeline. AI does not work well and there is already public disaffection with the experiences they've had. I don't think it will be adopted as widely as predicted as quickly, because its problems will become apparent as early adopters start pulling back. Should improvements develop quickly though, I could see this playing out, but probably not within the next decade.

I also think they fail to address the power demands of all this accelerated computing, and how that will affect individuals (skyrocketing utility bills are already here) and the likelihood that the grid will collapse from the excessive demand. I didn't watch the State of the Union address, but did hear NPR discussion of it this morning. I found it striking that Trump addressed this issue at all. That tells me that there's way bigger pushback on the rapid development of data centers than has been reported.

Our only hope seems to be that AI will be so incompetent in the near term at solving problems within their customers' businesses and operations that it all collapses before it can spread that widely. And that might kneecap the tech industry enough that they slow down and stop breaking things. That leads me to another rather interesting post about how slowly very disruptive tech develops compared to its hype. Though I'd really recommend it as a read, the post is long so I'm only going to pull out one item from it, which you may have heard about in the news: ( Read more... )