Well now… Site Maintenance. Time for a change..

Editor’s Note: the AI Generation is still fucking funny. The AI made a backwards PC!

My prior host… Hostgator… I’d say pour out a coffee for, but no.. they in the last 3 years have double their prices, they started pulling the same shit like BMW for heated seats and tried to sell me a story of how much overhead email takes. So you know what, its time for change.

Honestly it’s been time for change for over 2 years with my last host, they kept increasing prices and expected the people who do not want to move or are lazy to keep paying. At the point of what i was paying they should of shown up to my house at least once a week and poured my coffee for me.

But when I got an email saying that the price of emails for me would go up if i send more than 200 emails an hour. I don’t think I send two hundred emails a year. Than another email saying you have 11 email addresses, the irony of that 3 are needed for the server itself , the rest were family emails that were used for family and 2 of them were preserved emails of dead relatives, if my dead relative is sending emails call the ghostbusters.

The thing is, Companies need to stop this act. Take a product… sell it , than raise the price. bullshit the customer saying its so expensive. we’ve all heard bandwidth costs more than printer ink since the first websites. but now we are getting back into the early mobile territory where hosts are micromanaging every part of what they originally sold. My host included unlimited emails. Now they want you to pay per so many email addresses and how many you send, What in the fucking BMW heated seat is that. The funny thing is my prior host if they wanted to reduce the overhead and save money.. Cut off the top 0.05% because that small number there likely is 50% of the email bandwidth on there servers.

But honestly… Companies need to stop micromanaging every part of the whole. They say “its cheaper” no its bullshit.. you create 5 different billing systems . you send out 4 more invoices, you no spam the regular users and push people who have legitimate uses to send more than 200 emails an hour. the factor is that 200 emails doesn’t even account for the first 0.25 seconds of a 1080p youtube video.

Give or take , in an email , The images are hosted elsewhere, the body of the text is the only part that is really an issue with sending an email. yet my prior host is making noise about email and thinks no one is going to look under the hood. They wanted 6$ to send emails a month. I could send The bill of rights, the constitution , the magna carta, the UN charter and They would not even feel the bandwidth.

So as I said pouring one out for hostgator who should know better.. If I posted the absolute braindead support I got tonight trying to say emails cost so much and worse me calling them out on the crappy server they had me on . You all would not of been surprised…

Hallucinated History:Are we on the losing side of history to AI? A historical debate.

I was thinking, and normally I would be debating some article that comes out and this time this was organic thought… Are we losing our history to AI?

I think we will, with all the generative content out there some infection of false material will become fact unfortunately. There are channels out there that are making battle reenactment and they may not pay attention to a small piece of information that gets slipped in. Down the road researchers take that small piece of information as fact. we live in a world that allows history to become transformative in the moment

Anyone can go on to wikipedia and change an article to change history in a moment.. We don’t have the hardbound check points in history anymore like the big encyclopedias anymore. We do not have the ominous set of books on our home bookshelves anymore that was the mainstay of book reports, Papers on subjects anymore. We just google…. and that is a can of worms. We can look at politics and how random things become “fact” and stick with humans no matter how many times its disproven.

The factor is that our last point in Recorded history will come down to the DVD sets of encyclopedias that were a frozen point in time. Rather this snapshot will tell us exactly what was going on to that point. Rather than the liquid historical platforms that can change in a moments notice.

Today’s AI slop might become tomorrow’s history, and that is a dangerous thing. A person wanting to profit releases tons of videos on youtube about history and does not check the content and now General Okafor of the battleship quantum now is a part of history. (if you pick up on this one give yourself a point!) So the real Aris Thorne and Lena Petrova’s of history will be blended out by fictional people that never existed.

LLM’s love injecting random names that are not really random into generative content. So at this point when these names come up we have to now question their reality. This is why some small change can infect the real history of the past and in the future change the context of the whole history. I think wikipedia should release a text version by year that is a frozen point of history, than a year later show changes to the history rather than finding the history of the document and doing a compair from there. That way at the end of the year review the many editors can research and make sure the historical value of the document stays correct.

To which end… at this point it might be a point to go to a thrift store and buy a set of encyclopedias or order yourself a 2010 DVD of Encyclopedia Britannica. Otherwise the history you thought you knew in 5 or 10 years might be changed to a degree you never knew or the thing you did was now a falsehood even though you were there at that exact spot in history.

WordPress and weird new whatever..

Daily writing prompt
Are you a lifelong learner?

So I was looking at the dashboard and saw this… I’ll bite..

I can’t say if I am a lifelong learner or a lifelong experiencer. When a problem comes up I view at as a problem and a learning experience. But, in a way I guess it would make me a lifelong learner, I view life and look for its patterns or how something works. To understand how something works gives me a greater understanding of that around me.

When I’ve made my post criticising AI, I view AI as machine that knows all the words and guesses how to use it. I look at things and want to know how they work. We look at the world around us and pretty much guess that magic makes the world work. Unfortunately it can be much darker than that. Things we’ve taken for granted makes being a lifelong learner a curse to see the word being broken down into small parts and financially sold off.

We base out culture on companies that take away the learning as an art and they present it as a convenience. We can not avoid having a personal learning experience removed from us by Cognitively offloaded to some AI and make some dramatic post that in the end we learn nothing from.

I’d rather learn something every day, some days we don’t, Some days we do. But otherwise the convenience of offloading everything we do into the magic black portal of a screen or a delve into doom-scrolling is a loss. We are losing our creativity day by day , we can type into a prompt and say “make me a beautiful song with violins and kazoos” and some stupid AI prompt spits out a file. Rather than take the route of figuring out how music works. You can start simple, On screen keyboard, piano done simply by the 1 through = keys on your keyboard. than Move up to a small keyboard from alesis or like keyboard.

Even with picking up the basics of a keyboard you will still fail at first but through repetition you learn. Even in the end if your output sounds like banging the side of a trashcan for 10 minutes you have accomplished something. But with the corporate end of things they want you to just spit that file out and pass it on. You have cognitivally learned nothing.

So in the end am I saying offloading is bad? … No… but, you have to use it to learn. Use it to see why something was made the way it was. Find out how it came together and try it yourself, If you don’t nothing is learned nothing is gained.

The Price of Convenience can be the death of lifelong learning or it can be a branch of new life long experiences you otherwise would not of thought of… use the tools to learn not make the tool learn for you.

META enshitification alert- Paywalling tech with the Meta Glasses.

I swear every time I turn around, Meta is doing something stupid because they think it will make them money. But this time they are taking an off the shelf tech and paywalling it. Passthrough or active audio.

Owners of Meta’s AI glasses have been told they must pay a monthly fee if they want full access to a feature that was previously free. Users will have to shell out $19.99 every month to use “Conversation Focus”, which uses the microphones on the glasses to make it easier to hear people you’re talking to, for more than three hours a month.

The fact they are attempting this is just a cash grab like charging monthly for heated power seats.

Meta says those who hit the “free monthly usage limit” will have to wait for their free hours to refresh each calendar month unless they subscribe.

As humans we are making steps back in technological advances, We are headed back to the days were we only make calls after 6pm to use “Free Minutes” and it’s fucking stupid. Meta is seeing how much they can deconstruct tech to see how many parts we will pay for and how many parts they can profit from.

Meta’s plans to test “premium” subscription experiments across Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp were first revealed in January. The firm later confirmed its tests would include trialling paid access to expanded AI features, including those on its smart glasses.

The fact that Meta has fired tens of thousands for their AI experiment and AI engagement features is a dumpster fire everyone saw coming. But on the meta glasses they have the chip built in to handle all of the audio, they just installed a meter on it so they could charge for it. Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple all have the same damn thing, its called Transparency mode, Aware, active mode!

Meta is just trying to get your hard earned money for an already established technology. If Bose, Beats, Sony, Sennheiser and Apple Paywalled this tech, there would be digital lynch mobs. Even worse is…

The company says subscribers to its Meta One Premium tier will be able to use Conversation Focus for up to 15 hours each month.

What.. the.. fuck.. this is truly back to the old mobile days where you paid through the ass and waited for nighttime to make calls. 15 hours?? Good luck if you depend on these if you are deaf, or autistic. What fucking morons. The fact that this feature started as free than went to Fee could be seen as a violation of the ADA… This is a massive greed maneuver, first put the tech out .. Then pull it away. The people that need this tech will pay up in a moment.

It reminds me of netflix, When they first started they chirped up and down “no ads” , “no ads Ever!” than they started injecting small ads in the beginning of shows, Than the tile ads started, Then they jumped the shark with a paid NO AD tier and the price has been skyrocketing since.

Meta here is doing the same thing except with a piece of tech that lives on your body, and moreover they are messing with people who maybe for the first time in their lives have been able to go into a public environment with this. The neurodivergent folks need someone to speak up for them. The deaf should be enraged over this.

Meta’s Glasses have been problematic enough with people finding video of themselves online without their permission and worse.

Women have complained of being filmed without their knowledge or consent – with some only discovering they have been covertly filmed after seeing videos of themselves online.

The sad thing is META’s ai could be used for good and if a person has found their videos online they could make META AI delete the persons face as soon as its recorded using AI , but they won’t do that they would rather make money off engagement and keep doing stupid shit.

I think of it this way, If these glasses worked for an autistic child at school, than, you rip away a child’s focus after 3 hours meaning less than one day of school a month is covered. You have just destroyed that child. The glasses are noninvasive compared to earbuds… If you try to force someone who is neurodivergent to wear Earbuds, most neurodivergent kids will remove your finger before you shove something directly in their ear. 

My final thoughts here is while META is using AI to do stupid things like making fake engagement should not be removing engagement from the disabled from the world at large. They should focus to make the world a better place and not use the SaaS to enshitify day to day living.

Attributions from:
BBC- Meta glasses wearers hit with paywall to use built-in feature