I think it’s important to distinguish between social media in general and specific platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc. Don’t say things like “social media is designed to <blank>” when you really mean “Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit are designed to <blank>”.

The first step to fixing a problem is to identify it clearly and accurately.

The problems with social media in practice have little to do with the general concept of social media. There are ways we could regulate our way to a better internet, by heavily disincentivizing dark patterns, and still have thriving social media platforms.

IMHO, there are a couple things to focus on:

1. Restrict or outright ban data collection, sale, and sharing. Targeted advertising is not necessary for a healthy internet. It’s gotten completely out of control. Fuck you and your 872 closest partners.

2. Mandate transparency in algorithms. Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. have all manipulated their users by gaming their algorithms to maximize engagement, promote political ideas, or even outright conduct psychological experiments on unwitting users. There’s no need for a sorting algorithm to be opaque to the user. It’s feasible for it to be user-customizable to one degree or another.

I’m only vaguely familiar with Tailscale, but I am very interested after reading this and will seriously look into it as soon as I have proper time. The author makes a lot of excellent points, and very directly explains a lot of the problems I have with modern computing.

As an industry, we’ve spent all our time making the hard things possible, and none of our time making the easy things easy.

This has been the trend for literally the entire 21st century so far. I’m also one of those “mature” computer users. I started coding before JavaScript was even a thing. And I’ve been repeatedly shocked and frustrated at how things that took me literally one line of code in the 90s somehow require entire custom classes built atop massive frameworks today. Dude, all I want is to add a row to a listbox. It’s not rocket science. I don’t need it to be performant with millions of rows. It’s only going to have, like, ten. This does not require data providers and callbacks and backends. (I’m sure there are modern frameworks that make this easier, but this is a real-world example from the Objective-C/Cocoa era of Mac OS X. Not coincidentally, I stopped caring about writing GUIs around that time.)

What happens when AI advances to the point where it can do everything it does today (and more) without using copyrighted training material?

This is inevitable (and in fact some models already use only licensed training data), so I think it’s a bad idea to focus so much on this angle. If what you’re really worried about is the economic impact, then this is a dead-end argument. By the time any laws pass, it will likely be irrelevant because nobody will be doing that anyway. Or only the big corporations who own the copyrights to a bajillion properties (e.g. Disney) will do it in-house and everyone else will be locked out. That’s the exact opposite of what we should be fighting for.

The concept of “art” changes based on technology. I remember when I first starting fiddling with simple paint programs, just scribbling a little shape and using the paint-bucket tool to fill in a gradient blew my mind. Making in image like that 100 years prior would have been a real achievement. Instead of took me a minute of idle experimentation.

Same thing happened with CGI, synthesizers, etc. Is sampling music “art”? Depends what you do with it. AI should be treated the same way. What is the (human) artist actually contributing to the work? This can be quantified.

Typing “cat wearing sunglasses” into Dall-E will give you an image that would have been art if it were made 100 years ago. But any artistry now is limited to the prompt. I can’t copyright the concept of a cat wearing sunglasses, so I have no claim to such an image generated from such a simple prompt.

I’d love to switch to AntennaPod, but I haven’t figured out how to sync across platforms. I’ve heard of Gpodder, but I guess I’d need to host my own instance? Gpodder.net just gives me errors when I try to sign up, and from a quick web search it seems like this has been normal for quite a while now.

I wish I could just save all my metadata to a standard file format, sync those files any way I want, and have all my clients use that. But I don’t think that’s possible with any existing podcast clients. :/