2023
Marc Maron interviews Quinn Cummings, writer and former child star who won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar when she was 10 years old for her role on “The Goodbye Girl.”
Quinn tells Marc why she rejected acting after her early success and why she prefers to write. They also talk about homeschooling, avoiding marriage and how Quinn became a patent-holding inventor.
Cummings reminds me of those people who used to appear on talk shows in the 1970s for no other reason than because they were great at talking.
“We are living through the end of the useful internet.”
The Last Page of the Internet, by Alex Pareene:
The internet’s best resources are almost universally volunteer run and donation based, like Wikipedia and The Internet Archive. Every time a great resource is accidentally created by a for-profit company, it is eventually destroyed, like Flickr and Google Reader. Reddit could be what Usenet was supposed to be, a hub of internet-wide discussion on every topic imaginable, if it wasn’t also a private company forced to come up with a credible plan to make hosting discussions sound in any way like a profitable venture.
We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.”
Reddit is speedrunning enshittification.
Hypothesis: The owners of the company are no longer interested in keeping the business going, and are just trying to maximize financial return by selling off every possible asset.
In Reddit’s case, the upcoming IPO isn’t the beginning of a new chapter in the business. It’s the end of the business.
The most valuable part of Reddit is its fat corpus of content, built by volunteers over many years, suddenly made valuable for training AI. Now, Reddit’s corporate owners want to sell access to that corpus. That is Reddit’s new business. It’s not a long-term business, because the corpus will decay in value over time. But it’s enough for the owners to cash out.
I’m inspired in this thinking by yesterday’s edition of Rusty Foster’s “Today in Tabs.”. I don’t think he’s making this exact point, but he’s putting all the dots down, without necessarily connecting them.
John Gruber at Daring Fireball notes that OpenAI already scooped up Reddit’s corpus of data when the APIs were free. The data has no value anymore.
Reddit already gave all its data to large companies for free. Huffman is trying to charge now for horses that were let out of the barn years ago. And he obviously doesn’t care about Apollo or other third-party Reddit clients, or what these moves do to Reddit’s reputation as a platform vendor. He’s just trapped in a fantasy where investors are going to somehow see Reddit as a player in the current moment of AI hype.
Also, on Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day: “Platforms Don’t Really Make Sense Anymore”:
We tolerated large platforms, that were never all that good to begin with, because they were convenient and useful and part of a larger interconnected network of tools and apps and systems that made the digital world safer and more dynamic. So you’d think, if they were actively deciding to stop being part of that larger system and no longer interested in making the internet, as a whole, function better, they would, at the very least, try and be more convenient! But instead we’ve ended up in a situation where all the local stores are gone, Main Street is deserted, and the large Walmarts on the edge of town are being set on fire and left to rot.
I’m going to move linkblogging to other platforms, primarily Facebook, atomicrobotlive.tumblr.com, @mitchw@mastodon.social, and maybe mitchw.bsky.social. I’ll keep using mitchw.blog for my own original writing, images, and other content. This will continue until it doesn’t.
An Anti-Porn App Put Him in Jail and His Family Under Surveillance. After an Indiana man pleaded not guilty to possession of child pornography, courts installed Covenant Eyes spyware on the phones and other electronic devices of everybody in his family as a condition of his release before trial. The man went to jail after the software reported someone using his wife’s phone went to Pornhub. She says it never happened—it’s a bug in the software—and tests of the software confirm that’s very possible.
The Binge Purge. TV’s streaming business model is broken.
A good long read by Josef Adalian at Vulture.com:
It’s absolutely conceivable that the streaming subscription model is the crypto of the entertainment business. Like cryptocurrency, which has created massive on-paper fortunes built atop 1 + 1 = 3 arithmetic, streaming TV has always seemed too good to be true but seduced a lot of smart people anyway.”
Also, about a TV adaptation of “Field of Dreams” by Mike Schur, who created “The Good Place:”
Peacock pulled the plug on Schur’s TV adaptation of Field of Dreams even though it was deep into preproduction. “They just changed their mind,” says Schur. “They didn’t want to spend the money anymore.” He notes that the project will have one lasting artifact, perhaps the ultimate monument to Peak TV’s unfulfilled potential: “We built a baseball stadium in a cornfield in Iowa that’s still sitting there as we speak.” They built it, and nobody came.
And more good advice about exercise and fitness. It’s easier than you might think.
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It doesn’t matter a lot how fast you walk.
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Forget about the US government’s guidelines of “at least 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity” per week. Too confusing.
Well, I’d like to see ol Donny Trump wriggle his way out of THIS jam!
Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily
Ah! Well. Nevertheless,
That’s a popular meme from 2016 that still holds up.
Gavin Newsom wants 28th Amendment for guns in U.S. Constitution. The amendment doesn’t go far enough. Swing for the fences. Repeal the Second Amendment outright.
OpenAI Hit With First Defamation Suit Over ChatGPT Hallucination. A Georgia radio host is suing OpenAI after ChatGPT generated a fictional embezzlement suit against him.
The Apollo story is even uglier. Apparently, Reddit CEO Huffman is telling people that Apollo developer Christian Selig tried to blackmail Reddit for $10 million. Selig says that’s bullshit and he has recordings to prove it.
According to Selig, he said something on a call with Reddit officials that the officials initially took as blackmail. He said it was nothing of the kind, and explained himself, and the Reddit officials apologized—five times.
Enshittifying the Internet seems to be a theme this week. In addition to Reddit knifing third-party apps, Wordpress is adding generative AI capabilities to its blogging software, which will only lead to an explosion in clickbait search engine spam. It’s a naked revenue grab by Wordpress’s parent company, Automattic, at the expense of making the Internet vastly less usable for the rest of us. I thought Automattic was better than that.