This week…
- OpenAI begs for copyright to be bent their way
- Why I love iA (not AI)
- Apple doesn’t like interoperability
- The mess of the UK Online Safety Act
- Peter Thiel’s sweatbox interview
- Brian Eno on AI
- Crypto scammers getting an early Christmas
- Gen Z and employment
- The end of hot metal
- Mastodon and referrers
But first, an announcement!
TLDR: Over the holidays, I will be migrating this site from WordPress.com to Ghost. This may mean a little disruption, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.
Why am I doing this?
I’ve been a paying customer of WordPress.com for my site hosting for several years. I have also used WordPress for well over a decade, both self-hosting and paying for hosting. But you might have noted that I have written a lot about Matt Mullenweg’s approach to WordPress lately, and none of it has been complimentary.
Matt has effectively hijacked an open-source project to attack a commercial rival of his company. That’s pretty unforgivable – to me, if you’re the steward of an open-source project, you have to keep your personal business at arms length. Matt’s attitude appears to be “L’État, c’est moi”, and I am not convinced that’s anywhere near good enough for someone steering such an important piece of software.
I could, of course, just move host to one of the many other fine providers that are available. But unfortunately, to a degree, that would still be acknowledging Matt as the sun king. And sadly, while WordPress started out as a great platform, it’s also showing its age.
Enter Ghost. Ghost is an alternative to WordPress which is designed to be simpler and easier to use and without all the bloat that makes WordPress a pain. I backed the original Kickstarter for Ghost because I wanted a more simple alternative to WordPress. It’s taken me this long to get around to using it, but the gamble of backing it has paid off. It’s given me a fire exit.
You can host it yourself, but I’ve chosen MagicPages to host mine, based on both personal recommendations and my interaction with Jannis, who founded and runs the business. It’s a super-small company, and I’ve already experienced some great support from him. I like Jannis’ approach to who he will and will not do business with. Putting that out in public – when it would be easy to have said nothing – is an indication for me that this is someone I like working with.
And pricing is really reasonable (so much so that I’m a little guilty I’ve locked in the current, even lower, price). I’m paying less than £100 for a year’s hosting, and up to 10,000 sent emails per month (over that the prices are reasonable too). Next year that will go up, but it’s still good.
What this means for you
If you are a subscriber via email, the process should be completely invisible. You will have to come to a new page to unsubscribe, and unsubscribe details will, of course, be at the bottom of emails. If you get stuck, you can always just email me and I’ll help out.
If you have a paid subscription, I will be changing things up a bit. One thing that I learned from moving from Substack to WordPress is that, even when you’re using the same payment processor, it’s not particularly seamless. So if you’ve currently paying or have in the past, I’ll be manually grandfathering you in to a free, lifetime subscription. Thank you for ponying up some money in the past! I have plans to do some paid subscriber-only content in the future, but all the stuff I write now will continue to be free.
If you follow me via RSS, you may need to point your feedreader at a new URL. I’m going to try to make that switch over automatically but can’t guarantee it will work.
I should also get cross posting to Mastodon, Threads and so on sorted, so if you follow me there hopefully it will work out. Might break, if it does, I’ll fix it.
On to this week’s links…
1. From the department of “boo hoo, sucks to be you”
OpenAI, a company worth $157bn according to ChatGPT, is begging the British Parliament to make it legal for them to train their models to reproduce creative work without the consent of copyright holders. Imagine, says the company, the immense benefit to ordinary people that its wonderful systems bring! Without having free access to all copyright works, how will anyone estimate the height of people on dating apps, for example?
Of course, it will also mean that the paltry amounts of money that the company has thrown towards short-sighted publishers will end. Complete coincidence, I’m sure!
2. Why I love iA, part 6229
You all probably know that I love using iA Writer, but I also love their presentation software, iA Presenter. It works the way I work: I write what I’m going to say (in iA Writer) and then I bring it into iA Presenter to create the slides. It lets me start with a script, hone what I’m going to deliver, then make the slides for it.
And now, it lets me share those slides in a single click. Not a PDF, not some weird embed, nothing like that. Works on any device you like. Brilliant.
3. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend
More grumbles from Apple about its obligations under the EU Digital Markets Act, this time the ones about interoperability. Apple’s argument is it needs to keep things private to protect customers, and it’s not like Facebook doesn’t have a long history of form when it comes to egregious violations of privacy and generally poor conduct.
I understand Apple fans’ arguments that the company is the good guy here and the EU should be backing them, not investigating them. But do we really want a world where the limits to someone’s privacy are based not on the laws of the democracy they live in, but on which giant company they pay a tithe to or which smartphone they bought?
You can’t trust governments all the time. But you can’t trust companies to do what’s right for anyone but themselves, ever. This is why we have laws which are set by governments, not by companies.
4. On the other hand, here’s the Online Safety Act
That said, not all laws are good ones – and the UK Online Safety Act is an absolute mess of loopholes, gotchas, and the kind of clauses which sound great in principle but then get used in ways Parliament never intended. Russ Garrett has put together a long look at the law and what it means for companies, individuals, and anyone who runs any kind of web service. We have already seen long-standing forums simply shut up shop rather than take the risk of being out of compliance with this crap, and they won’t be the only ones.
5. Be afraid, Peter, be very afraid
How strange the killing of a CEO should be closely followed by Peter Thiel looking very sweaty and worried while discussing the same topic. I mean, what would a man who once wrote that “the extension of the franchise to women… rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron” have to worry about? Or someone who backed something called “national conservatism”? Or someone responsible for Trump’s pick of JD Vance as VP?
Don’t worry, Peter, I’m sure no one is putting you in the same category as a man responsible for setting policies which led to deaths. At least, not yet.
6. ”The magic of play is seeing the commonplace transforming into the meaningful”
Professor Lord Sir Brian Eno on AI and creativity. I agree with everything that Brian says. AI is both intriguing – and boring.
7. Hey, why did all those rich techbros pay for Trump to win, again?
As always, it all comes down to money. Not only has crypto been on a tear since Trump was elected (my own £35 worth of bitcoin is now worth double that, get me, I’m rich) but the odious people that Trump is going to put in charge of regulating finance will make a killing. How? By making sure their side-hustles and scams go as unregulated as possible.
8. What’s up with Gen Z and employers?
It sounds like there may be some issues with how recent graduates in Generation Z interact with the world of employment. “They don’t know basic skills for social interaction with customers, clients, and co-workers, nor workplace etiquette,” account to Holly Schroth, senior lecturer in the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
I would be tempted to put this down as yet another side effect of COVID-19 and having to learn from home, but there are probably other factors in play too. And given that in some places – the UK in particular – the graduate jobs market seems to be in a terrible place, I wonder how much of this is down to poor recruitment too.
9. Hot metal
I started my career in journalism a good ten years after the era of hot metal printing ended. By the time I was working on magazines, everything was digital and the move to desktop publishing and away from expensive dedicated digital systems was well underway.
But I worked with people who had been in that era, and while researching a piece I’m writing about the print era, I came across this article from The Guardian on the death of hot metal. One of the most interesting things about it is how unionised the entire printing process was, with people who weren’t printers prevented from touching the compositing. I’m not sure the world is a better place for a lack of demarkation…
10. Small wins are the best wins
Mastodon is a place where people (rightly) take privacy seriously. But that doesn’t necessarily mean imposing all decisions about privacy in the software. In fact, I would argue that one of the strengths of Mastodon is that it’s a federation of communities, all of which can and should be able to take decisions for themselves about what protections of privacy they want.
That’s why I’m pleased to see a forthcoming release will make it optionally possible to send referrer information to a website when a user clicks on a link. Just to be clear: this does not mean that a website can identify individuals linking to them. It just means the site will know that traffic came from Mastodon.
This is the right approach. If a community doesn’t want to send that information, they don’t have to. But for people who want to encourage the use of Mastodon more broadly, this is a win as it lets websites see that the platform is important to them, and so will encourage engagement.