Tag: Technology

The PPV Phenomenon

Journalist Scum, Media Assholes

Making a living from writing is extraordinarily difficult — ask me how I know this — and I have often been tempted to put much if not all of my non-novel writing behind a paywall (SubStack, etc.).  There are two problems with this action:  the first is that my blogging has never been a serious attempt to make money, which is why I have to resort to the occasional ad hoc  beg-a-thon for crises, and Patreon for “subscription” support.  (And to those of you who participate in the latter, thank you again:  you have no idea how much it helps.)

The second reason I don’t charge for access is that to be perfectly frank, I don’t think my blogging is that valuable in the grand scheme of things, and charging for access would be somewhat… impertinent on my part.  Put baldly, anyone with a little spare time can find pics of beautiful women, cars, guns and so on for themselves.  As for my commentary:  well, I know that many people — in the beginning, anyway — told me that my blog made them realize that they weren’t the only ones who felt this way, especially whether it came to political outlook and social perspective.  Of gun love, we will not speak.  But is it all that valuable?

And that’s all I care to say about that.

What I really want to talk about is how the various online media are starting to charge readers, most often not for their entire opus, but for certain articles only.  Here are a few examples:

  • The Daily Mail:
  • The Sun:  and we all know about
  • PJMedia: 

This, as opposed to other outlets who have pretty much set upon putting their entire publication behind a paywall, like The New York Times (lol never gonna happen), The Epoch Times, Britain’s Daily Telegraph and so on.  In several cases, I would really like to read their stuff but I can’t afford the subscription — not individually, but cumulatively, all those subscriptions would add up to a considerable amount which I cannot possibly afford.  (Ditto TV/Internet streaming services, but that’s a story for another time.)

Look, I don’t have a problem with any of this.  It costs a great deal to run a media company — although I would argue much less than when they were reliant on newsprint for their distribution — but even with the economies of Internet publication, they still have to pay for content (writers, photographers) and production (editorial/site maintenance staff etc.) as well as hosting bandwidth, which means that they have to charge for access.  TANSTAAFL, and this is as true for them as for any other business which offers a product to consumers.

We consumers have been spoiled in this regard, because when the Internet started, so much of the content came free and we became spoiled thereby.  So now when we get confronted by a paywall, we get all huffy and say, “It ain’t worth it!” and in many cases it isn’t.

I know that many people find my reading of the often-dreadful Daily Mail inexplicable, but let me nevertheless use them as an example for how I treat the mini-paywalls.  Here’s an example of yesterday’s Mail headlines:

I find this interesting.  If the Mail thinks that Gold-Digger story is enticing enough to make me want to join their little subscription club, they are sadly mistaken.  (Given the profile of their average reader, however, they may not be altogether wrong.)  And the prurient reader will find several examples of the Pineapple Sack type, all for free.

The only one of the four example articles which interests me at all is the one about pay-per-mile driving charges, not because it would affect me or most of my Readers, it being a UK phenomenon;  but because if the stupid Green Nude Heel program were to be implemented Over Here by various Green politicians of the Biden/Harris/Obama stripe, it would very much be relevant.  And as I so often say:  stuff that happens Over There will often make its way Over Here at some point, so we need to be vigilant.

Anyway, while there may occasionally be a paywalled article in any of the places I frequent for my daily news, generally speaking the PPV aspect is mostly an irritant — and as I’ve illustrated above, often not even that because the topic, details and/or commentary thereon is of little interest to me.

What I’m discovering is that there are a few writers / commentators whose stuff I might be tempted into paying for on a subscription basis — Victor Davis Hanson and Jordan Peterson come to mind — but honestly, they are few and far between.

And Megyn Kelly would have to broadcast her show in the nude to get my subscription dollar, and maybe not even then.

I am not at all averse to media putting adverts and commercials in their product to generate revenue, similar to what newspapers and broadcast TV stations have always done — provided that said ads are not too large, too many, too obtrusive or too repetitive.  And the internet print outlets have only themselves to blame for the arrival of services like AdBlock, when the ads suddenly started shouting at me or auto-loading some fucking mini-movie which interrupted my reading.  I know the rationale for such commercials — I worked in the advertising business for years — but I reject it utterly.  There is a reason why TV channels could only run a few minutes’ worth of commercials per hour back in the day, and that’s because when the commercials became all-pervasive and a considerable irritant, then government had to step in and we all know what happens in such cases.

Anyway, what we’re dealing with now is a media environment which is constantly changing, much as the broadcast media changed with the arrival of cable.  All I can say is that everyone, from the DailyMail to PJMedia to Insty to humble bloggers like me, needs to be aware of their limitations.

I think I know mine, but I’m not so sure about the big guys.

If You Don’t Use It…

Deep Thoughts, Technology

…of course you’re going to lose it.  This post on Musk-X triggered a train of thought from me:

Just had a fascinating lunch with a 22-year-old Stanford grad. Smart kid. Perfect resume. Something felt off though. He kept pausing mid-sentence, searching for words. Not complex words – basic ones. Like his brain was buffering. Finally asked if he was okay. His response floored me.

“Sometimes I forget words now. I’m so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it’s not there, my brain feels… slower.”

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain. And now his internal one was getting weaker.

This concerns me, because it’s been an ongoing topic of conversation between the Son&Heir (a devout apostle of A.I.) and me (a very skeptical onlooker of said thing).

I have several problems with A.I., simply because I’m unsure of the value of its underlying assumption — its foundation, if you will — which believes that the accumulated knowledge on the Internet is solid:  that even if there were some inaccuracies, they would be overcome by a preponderance of the correct theses.  If that’s the case, then all well and good.  But I am extremely leery of those “correct” theses:  who decides what is truth, or nonsense, or (worst of all) highly plausible nonsense which only a dedicated expert (in the truest sense of the word) would have the knowledge, time and inclination to correct.  The concept of A.I. seems to be a rather uncritical endorsement of “the wisdom of crowds” (i.e. received wisdom).

Well, pardon me if I don’t agree with that.

But returning to the argument at hand, Greg Isenberg uses the example of the calculator and its dolorous effect on mental arithmetic:

Remember how teachers said we needed to learn math because “you won’t always have a calculator”? They were wrong about that. But maybe they were right about something deeper. We’re running the first large-scale experiment on human cognition. What happens when an entire generation outsources their thinking?

And here I agree, wholeheartedly.  It’s bad enough to think that at some point, certain (and perhaps important) underpinnings of A.I. may turn out to be fallacious (whether unintended or malicious — another point to be considered) and large swathes of the A.I. inverted pyramids’ points may have been built, so to speak, on sand.

Ask yourself this:  had A.I. existed before the reality of astrophysics had been learned, we would have believed, uncritically and unshakably, that the Earth was at the center of the universe.  Well, we did.  And we were absolutely and utterly wrong.  After astrophysics came onto the scene, think how long it would take for all that A.I. to be overturned and corrected — as it actually took in the post-medieval era.  Most people at that time couldn’t be bothered to think about astrophysics and just went on with their lives, untroubled.

What’s worse, though, is that at some point in the future the human intellect, having become flabby and lazy through its dependence on A.I., may not have the basic capacity to correct itself, to go back to first principles because quite frankly, those principles would have been lost and our capacity to recreate them likewise.

Like I said, I’m sure of only two things in this discussion:  the first is the title of this post, and the second is my distrust of hearsay (my definition of A.I.).

I would be delighted to be disabused of my overall position, but I have to say it’s going to be a difficult job because I’m highly skeptical of this new wonder of science, especially as it makes our life so much easier and more convenient:

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain.

It’s like losing the muscle capacity to walk, and worse still the instinctive knowledge of how to walk, simply because one has come to depend completely on an external machine to carry out that function of locomotion.

P.S.  And I don’t even want to talk about this bullshit.

It’s Not Just Gen Z

Technology

I had no idea that this was the case:

In May a survey found that a third of Brits panic when their phone rings unexpectedly and many don’t even answer calls, with Gen Z pleading ‘just text me’.

In a time where cold callers and scammers ringing you up out of the blue happens more often than not, almost 37 per cent of those asked said they are less likely to answer when they receive a call without notice than they were five years ago.

Some 12 per cent of those surveyed said it has been a week – or even longer – since they last spoke to someone on the phone.

And Gen Z have flocked to TikTok to beg people ‘text me’ and telling their viewers how they just sit ‘watching my phone ring’ if ‘absolutely anyone’ calls. 

Yeah, I don’t ever answer my phone either, unless the number is in my address book, or else it’s an identified call from a company or person I already know.

As it is, I get two to three text messages a day from some unidentified source or other, saying they found my number in their callers’ list and don’t know who I am (or similar nonsense).  And even worse are the texts that say junk like “Hi!  We haven’t chatted for ages.  Can you call me?” (#Trashdump #Unacknowledged)

I did look up the area codes listed by a few of these text callers, and imagine my surprise when I discovered that all of them are commonly-used fronts for spam calls which originate in exotic locales like the Philippines, China or Central Europe.  (They’re the new Nigeria of email fame.)

Hell, I don’t even answer unidentified calls from my own area code.

It’s a minefield out there, folks, and ignoring this bullshit is not paranoia, but prudence.

Parallel thought:  this panic comes from, of all places, the BritGov, who calls people to collect statistics and now can’t get the info they want.  Let us all remember the immortal words of Governor John Cowperthwaite of Hong Kong, talking about his refusal to let his government collect data from the population:

“If I let them compute those statistics, they’ll want to use them for planning.”

Wiser words were seldom spoken.

Bad Back Then, Still Awful

Technology

I see that Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet program has just turned 40, which is proof that you can fool a bunch of the people all the time (provided that you bundle your foul, inadequate software into a compendium suite which just “happens” to work okay with the core operating system which, lest we forget, you also created).

I don’t know a lot about a lot of stuff, and even less about software, except that I’ve been a spreadsheet user — at times, a very heavy spreadsheet user — all the way from early 1980s VisiCalc, to SuperCalc, Lotus 1-2-3 through Quattro Pro, while having all that time avoided Excel because its first iteration was dreadful.

Then I joined a company which only used MS Excel, and insisted that I do too (as well as the stupid Word and even-worse Access.  Of course, it required re-learning all my old commands in a new language — not too difficult — but what was difficult was discovering that Excel had not really improved much over the years.

So I quit using the thing, did all my development and report design work in Quattro Pro — which was still the best spreadsheet program extant — and then translated everything into Excel, which was time-consuming and also counter-productive because a great many commands I’d used in Quattro as a matter of course had no equivalent in Excel.  (Bear in mind that this was back in the 1990s and early 2000s, and things may have changed since then.)

Also, Quattro’s companion database product Paradox was streets better than pretty much all other such programs back then, which hamstrung me even more.

It always struck me that MS products, like Apple’s, are great if you’ve never used anything like that before.  If you have, however, and are familiar with the competitive products, MS always comes up short.

Nowadays, my needs are a great deal more modest than back then, so I use Apache’s Open Office suite (Writer and Calc) because a) they work just fine for me and b) they’re free.

Now, if I have to send someone something I wrote or crafted on a spreadsheet, I just tell the recipient to download Open Office to be able to read the stuff.  (I should point out that the Son&Heir used OO Writer exclusively to write his papers all the way through college, and never had a problem — to this day it’s the only thing he writes with — but at his job at Global MegaBank Inc. he has to use Excel, which he hates more than I do.)

So Happy Birthday, Inferior Spreadsheet Product, for what that’s worth.  (Nothing, by comparison to Open Office’s Calc.)

Dust Settled

Technology

Okay, all that connectivity bullshit seems to have cleared up.  I won’t go into detail, but the past two days have been somewhat nerve-wracking because I kind of like keeping this here back porch of mine going, and because without an Internet connection in my house, I was going to have to go to places like Sta*buck$ or my apartment complex’s front office to use their free wi-fi.  And the rent had to be paid,yesterday — and there was no guarantee that I would be able to do it online.  (Not that I care that much;  my bank has a branch literally in the next block — actual walking distance, no kidding — so at worst I could get a cashier’s check cut in about five minutes.)

Also, my plagues & poxes episode finally seems to have cleared up — although New Wife is now showing some worrying symptoms of same — but at least I’m no longer hacking up bits of lung or whatever.

The downtime meant I had no time to assemble the Monday Funnies or News Roundup for their respective days, but that’s not important in the grand scheme of things, what with so many others putting out the same type of content anyway.  And to be quite frank, both involve quite a lot of work to put together (“curate”? I hate that fucking word), so I might just make the Roundup a weekly thing.

Anyway, normal service will now be resumed.

Assuming, of course, that in the general mood of whatthefuck that I described last week, that there’s anything I feel like ranting about or even giggling at.