[News] The Internet Was a Mistake

A thread for updates on the various ways the internet is destroying everything and the undying hellsites of social media. Let's all laugh at the abyss.

Leon said by 2024 Twitter would be a banking and dating platform. Still a few months left I suppose.

TheGameguru wrote:

Leon said by 2024 Twitter would be a banking and dating platform. Still a few months left I suppose.

That was a typo. He meant to say "wanking and baiting".

Why Mark Zuckerberg thinks AR glasses will replace your phone

“Just like everyone who upgraded to smartphones, I think everyone who has glasses is pretty quickly going to upgrade to smart glasses over the next decade,” Zuckerberg said. (Let’s not dwell on how inherently insane it is to assume that we’re going to be living in a world soon where everyone is just… wearing glasses all the time.)

Zuckerberg was also asked about using his platforms’ massive amount of user-generated content to train their AI models and whether or not he felt the need to compensate creators for it. To which he responded by finally saying the quiet part out loud, “While, psychologically, I understand what you’re saying, I think individual creators or publishers tend to overestimate the value of their specific content in the grand scheme of this.”

I like that he made the point of saying he understood the question “psychologically,” to remind us that he’s a human person. He also went deeper into his thinking about the inherent worthlessness of the content that props up the websites that made him a billionaire, specifically attacking news publishers, which continue to fight for some kind of compensation for all the engagement they generate on those aforementioned platforms. “A lot of folks are constantly asking to be paid for the content,” he said. “And on the other hand, we have our community, which is asking us to show less news because it makes them feel bad.”

What’s interesting about this response is that it was said almost verbatim by Instagram head Adam Mosseri during a Q&A over the weekend. Mosseri was asked why Instagram users can’t default their feeds to following-only and are forced to use Instagram’s new AI-powered slop feed. According to Mosseri, it doesn’t work. “We’ve tested it and tried it a number of times,” he said. “They actually report being less happy with Instagram more and more over time, on average.”

I don’t think Zuckerberg and Mosseri are lying here, nor do I think they’re stupid — or, at least, uninformed — but the fact both of them are so quick to cite some kind of vague user happiness metric when confronted with questions about the integrity of their products is telling.

Most tech companies of Meta’s size tend to see their own systems as the default. The current configuration made us this big, they think, so it must be correct, ignoring millions of iterations over the years that led to Facebook and Instagram prioritizing non-chronological feeds full of worthless slop. And, obviously, if you suddenly put higher quality content from real publishers into your slurry feed or organize your platform’s vast library of gas leak content in a different timeline it’s not going to work. I’ve met a lot of creators who make a living making content for Meta platforms. None of them want to antagonize old people with digital cognitohazards. But all of them have told me they feel like they have to because that’s what the algorithms that power Facebook and Instagram incentivize. Those apps want content that hacks our attention spans, whether it’s videos of beautiful women making soup in a toilets, AI-generated photos of Jesus riding a crab, or Catholic chain letters. And it seems not even Meta is able to imagine anything greater. And if the company was satisfied just running social platforms and an ad monopoly, none of this would probably matter. But Zuckerberg wants more. He wants his empire of viral ephemera to magically power the iOS of the future.

But Meta can’t actually see the future because they continue to rely on a past they refuse to properly learn from. I mean, let’s just think this through for a second. Imagine that tomorrow Orion glasses hit the shelves. An amazing piece of hardware that finally lets you interface with the internet in a new and revolutionary way. And you’re telling me the first thing I’m going to want to do with them is log into to Facebook?

Zuck has no idea what actual humans want or need or will be doing.

Also what is a "digital cognitohazard"? I'm an older person and that term is honestly pretty scary.

He’s a joke. He thinks he's the second coming of Steve Jobs. He’s been coasting on his “success” of a slightly less shitty MySpace by copying every single idea that comes down the pike.

If AR glasses ever ship, they'll be so janky for at least a decade that being first to market won’t matter. He thinks he’s going to be first to ship the next iPhone, but all he'll do is be the first to ship the first cell phone - that needed a damn briefcase to work.

PaladinTom wrote:

He’s a joke. He thinks he's the second coming of Steve Jobs.

I call him the luckiest one-trick pony that ever existed. He got hyper lucky once and has spent the last 2 decades trying to prove that it was because he was a genius and not just the right asshole at the right time (Some similarity to Jobs there.)

But the whole point of his getting hyper lucky once was to help he and his friends become even bigger assholes than they were before.

BadKen wrote:

Zuck has no idea what actual humans want or need or will be doing.

Also what is a "digital cognitohazard"? I'm an older person and that term is honestly pretty scary. :)

A cognitohazard is something that poses a danger just by perceiving it. The term comes from the SCP community, but the concept is much older. It's pretty common in Lovecraftian horror, like how just reading the Necronomicon will drive people insane, or how just knowing about the existence of some of the Old Ones makes you vulnerable to them.

There’s a pretty good SCP novel around this idea called There Is No Antimemetics Division, about a branch of the SCP that battles sentient concepts and entities that prey upon human perception and memory.

BadKen wrote:

Zuck has no idea what actual humans want or need or will be doing.

I would extend that to the majority of the present day tech industry. Crypto? Nope. Metaverse? Nope. A.I.? The jury is still out.
Also didn't Google already try the glasses thing?

Concave wrote:

Also didn't Google already try the glasses thing?

And Apple with the Vision Pro.

Dangit, wrong thread.

I had forgotten that Austria actually has a beer party.

DAMMIT, I keep on posting to the wrong thread!

It's not you, the timeline changed again. Been happening a lot recently. Gotta hope our future selves win the future war decisively enough that there won't be a future war and the timeline can calm down.

I've heard good things about the Ray Ban AR glasses.

ruhk wrote:

There’s a pretty good SCP novel around this idea called There Is No Antimemetics Division, about a branch of the SCP that battles sentient concepts and entities that prey upon human perception and memory.

That sounds amazing. Thank you.

Also note, the OG story here is BLIT by David Langford, from 1988. Influenced a lot of later SF, and still packs a punch.

All this puts me in mind of Charles Stross's Laundry fiction, minus the tongue-in-cheek Office vibe.

Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers

A pair of students at Harvard have built what big tech companies refused to release publicly due to the overwhelming risks and danger involved: smart glasses with facial recognition technology that automatically looks up someone’s face and identifies them. The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members.

The project is designed to raise awareness of what is possible with this technology, and the pair are not releasing their code, AnhPhu Nguyen, one of the creators, told 404 Media. But the experiment, tested in some cases on unsuspecting people in the real world according to a demo video, still shows the razor thin line between a world in which people can move around with relative anonymity, to one where your identity and personal information can be pulled up in an instant by strangers.

Nguyen and co-creator Caine Ardayfio call the project I-XRAY. It uses a pair of Meta’s commercially available Ray Ban smart glasses, and allows a user to “just go from face to name,” Nguyen said.

SCREW THIS HOW WILL I NO WHOS A REAL PSYCHIC

Could just as easily go into the AI thread.

In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media.

This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.

"This synergy between LLMs and reverse face search allows for fully automatic and comprehensive data extraction that was previously not possible with traditional methods alone," their Google document said.

Where previously someone could spend substantial time conducting their own search of public databases to find information based on someone's image alone, their dystopian smart glasses do that job in a few seconds, their demo video said.

Link

@Anna_Giaritelli wrote:

Elon Musk followed me on X a couple years ago and has shared my work and been willing to respond to DMs about stories from time to time, including a back and forth we had for a story on the Secret Service last week.

Earlier this week, when I respectfully approached him via DM about his Sunday claim that Biden-Harris was ‘fast-tracking’ illegal immigrants to vote and provided information showing that confirmed it was not the case, Mr. Musk unfollowed me and blocked me from DMing him and said asking him for comment for a story via DM was inappropriate — despite him being willing to engage in the past. We did reach out to one of his companies, but did not receive a response.

Below is a link to our fact check on Mr. Musk's claims that Biden-Harris are flying migrants into the US and expeditiously granting them citizenship. Buried lede: It's absolutely false though we were unable to reach Mr. Musk for comment.

Toxic Fandom: How Hollywood Is Battling Fans Who Are ‘Just Out For Blood’ — From Social Media Boot Camps to Superfan Focus Groups

“It comes with the territory, but it’s gotten incredibly loud in the last couple years,” says a veteran marketing executive at a major studio. “People are just out for blood, regardless. They think the purity of the first version will never be replaced, or you’ve done something to upset the canon of a beloved franchise, and they’re going to take you down for doing so.”

Sometimes, toxic fandoms behave reactively. A “House of the Dragon” episode featuring two female characters kissing and an episode of “The Last of Us” focusing on a gay couple were both review bombed — the practice of mobbing sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb with negative user reviews, which gained mainstream attention following the premiere of 2017’s “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” And an entire YouTube ecosystem is devoted to declaring projects like “The Marvels” and “The Boys” “woke garbage” (among other pungent sobriquets).

Just as frequently, the backlash begins before the project has seen the light of day: a Reddit mega-thread dedicated to outrage over “Bridgerton” casting a Black woman (Masali Baduza) as the love interest for Francesca (Hannah Dodd); social media epithets directed at the actors of color cast as elves and dwarves in “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power”; death threats aimed at Leslie Jones during the press tour for 2016’s “Ghostbusters.”

Perhaps the greatest irony of this phenomenon is the disproportionate impact these toxic fandoms have relative to their actual number.

“The vast majority of any fandom are casual fans,” says John Van Citters, VP of Star Trek brand development, who has been with the storied franchise since the 1990s. “The number of people who live and die on their franchises are very, very few, and then those who come after things that they espouse to love with venom are a really, really tiny subset of that already smaller subset of fandom. It’s just much easier to see it now. I don’t know that it’s really that much broader than where things were in 1995 — it’s just that the bullhorn wasn’t there.”

For some, combating that bullhorn amounts to acting as if they can’t hear it. “Particularly when it’s a negative, toxic conversation, we don’t even engage,” says a TV marketing executive. “Like with toxic people, you try to not give it too much oxygen.” One principal concern is that reacting to these kinds of attacks risks alienating fans who are unhappy with creative choices about a franchise but haven’t tipped over into abusive behavior. So a studio may attempt to amplify friendlier voices instead. “We’ll reply to comments that are positive and elevate those things,” says the TV exec.

Still, toxic fandoms have grown so pernicious that they’ve become a fact of life for many — and so powerful that while talent, executives and publicists will privately bemoan the issue, fear of inadvertently triggering another backlash kept several studios from speaking for this story even on background. (As one rep put it, “It’s just a lose-lose.”)

Those who did talk with Variety all agreed that the best defense is to avoid provoking fandoms in the first place. In addition to standard focus group testing, studios will assemble a specialized cluster of superfans to assess possible marketing materials for a major franchise project.

“They’re very vocal,” says the studio exec. “They will just tell us, ‘If you do that, fans are going to retaliate.’” These groups have even led studios to alter the projects: “If it’s early enough and the movie isn’t finished yet, we can make those kinds of changes.”

Several studio insiders say they often put their talent through a social media boot camp; in some cases, when a character is intentionally challenging a franchise’s status quo, studios will, with the actor’s permission, take over their social media accounts entirely. When things get really bad — especially involving threats of violence — security firms will scrub talent information from the internet to protect them from doxxing.

In some particularly egregious cases, a direct response has been necessary. In 2022, after “Obi-Wan Kenobi” actor Moses Ingram denounced the “hundreds” of racist messages sent to her about her role — “There’s nothing anybody can do about this. There’s nothing anybody can do to stop this hate,” she said — Lucasfilm posted a statement to its Star Wars social media accounts that read, in part, “There are more than 20 million sentient species in the Star Wars galaxy, don’t choose to be a racist.” The Star Wars accounts also shared a video of “Obi-Wan” star Ewan McGregor saying the abuse made him “sick to my stomach” and that “if you’re sending her bullying messages, you’re no ‘Star Wars’ fan in my mind.”

Later that year, the cast of “The Rings of Power” condemned “the relentless racism, threats, harassment, and abuse some of our castmates of color are being subjected to on a daily basis,” and actors from the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy posted photos of themselves wearing clothing featuring the ears of Middle-earth creatures in multiple skin tones underneath the message “you are all welcome here” written in Elvish. Those efforts may have had an effect. In an August interview with Amazon MGM Studios TV chief Vernon Sanders about “The Rings of Power,” the executive said the show hadn’t experienced the same racist hostility in advance of Season 2 that had greeted its 2022 debut. “People have had a chance to actually engage with the show,” he said. “Overwhelmingly, what we’ve seen is that folks who came with an open mind can discuss and debate their favorite things — which takes you out of the place of that ugly conversation that happened with some folks who may have been infused with an agenda that’s separate from the show itself.”

There is one other way to handle toxic fans on the internet: Stay off it. “I’m not online, so I’m protected,” says frequent Marvel star Elizabeth Olsen (“WandaVision”). “Generally, it’s a lot of positive experiences of making kids happy. I ignore the other stuff.”

Pungent Sobriquets is the name of my upcoming book of poetry.

“Particularly when it’s a negative, toxic conversation, we don’t even engage,” says a TV marketing executive. “Like with toxic people, you try to not give it too much oxygen.”

Smart. That approach has served me well on social media. Block/ignore and move on.

Prederick wrote:

Someone Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers

A pair of students at Harvard have built what big tech companies refused to release publicly due to the overwhelming risks and danger involved: smart glasses with facial recognition technology that automatically looks up someone’s face and identifies them. The students have gone a step further too. Their customized glasses also pull other information about their subject from around the web, including their home address, phone number, and family members.

The project is designed to raise awareness of what is possible with this technology, and the pair are not releasing their code, AnhPhu Nguyen, one of the creators, told 404 Media. But the experiment, tested in some cases on unsuspecting people in the real world according to a demo video, still shows the razor thin line between a world in which people can move around with relative anonymity, to one where your identity and personal information can be pulled up in an instant by strangers.

Nguyen and co-creator Caine Ardayfio call the project I-XRAY. It uses a pair of Meta’s commercially available Ray Ban smart glasses, and allows a user to “just go from face to name,” Nguyen said.

Anon.

BadKen wrote:

Pungent Sobriquets is the name of my upcoming book of poetry.

“Particularly when it’s a negative, toxic conversation, we don’t even engage,” says a TV marketing executive. “Like with toxic people, you try to not give it too much oxygen.”

Smart. That approach has served me well on social media. Block/ignore and move on.

Part of this, I think, is just the direct result of twitter still dominating (by volume) the public square. In a post-twitter world, more of these conversations would be happening in places where blocking was meaningful, and the problem would be less pronounced. I mean the toxic fans could stay vocal on gab or r/racism or something, but the fact that it happens in dusty corners would itself deligitimize it.

To be fair, a lot of this stuff is also happening on YouTube. If like, 10 or 15 YT channels got nuked, it'd have a significant impact on the harassment, because there are multiple YouTubers who have built large followings on "yelling about Disney wokeness."

I've said it before, but, assuming Kamala wins (which is a big if, I know), someone's going to have to do something to address the millions in gov't contracts being handed to a man who is currently lying his ass off and spreading misinformation about hurricane relief on Twitter right now.