Numeric Citizen

So, apparently, just like Twitter, Reddit is entering into a “kill-third-party-apps” by charging an enormous amount of money to use their APIs. It looks like it. Apollo isn’t happy, and for good reasons. Unless there was a calculation error from the makers of Apollo, it just makes no sense for them to continue. Maybe Reddit made some calculation errors, too. Perhaps they fail to read the room’s temperature. But maybe they are entitled, to some degree, I guess, to charge for their APIs, right?

I’m tempted to make a parallel with Apple’s dreaded 15%-30% App Store commission. Is Apple’s stance on its App Store different from Reddit’s stance on its APIs? Is charging a commission to be on the App Store and take advantage of all Apple’s technology to get a chance to be distributed on hundreds of millions of iPhones similar to consuming a platform APIs? If not, what is different, actually? Is free API usage a dead end in today’s world? There are whole business models built around APIs these days. API speaks intellectual property in my book. Only companies with business models supported by massive ad distribution or expansive paid subscriptions can think of thriving by giving away their API access. It will be interesting to see how Reddit is reacting to third-party developers' pushback.

Oh, and if they actually kill the third-party Reddit client ecosystem, unlike Twitter, Reddit platform alternatives are not obvious to me.

I guess it’s time to remember: there is no such thing as a free lunch.

To follow the trend started with Manton from Micro.blog, here’s my list of countries I visited.

• 🇺🇸 United States
• 🇲🇽 Mexico
• 🇨🇺 Cuba
• 🇩🇴 Republic Dominica
• 🇯🇲 Jamaica
• 🇦🇷 Argentina
• 🇧🇷 Brazil
• 🇺🇾 Uruguay
• 🇫🇷 France
• 🇪🇸 Spain
• 🇵🇹 Portugal
• 🇦🇹 Austria
• 🇨🇿 Czechia
• 🇳🇱 Netherland
• 🇬🇧 England
• 🇮🇸 Iceland
• 🇦🇪 UAE
• 🇮🇹 Italy
• 🇧🇪 Belgium
• 🇸🇪 Sweden
• 🇩🇪 Germany
• 🇨🇭 Switzerland
• 🇬🇷 Greece
• soon 🇲🇦 Morocco

What an intense morning.

I learned about the existence of iTelescope, thanks to this blog post from Christopher Curtis, a service where you can rent astronomical observation time from the comfort of your home.

I read about the Eternal Recurrence, thanks to a post from Gr36. I would be ok with the idea of reliving my life as is. Over and over again.

Thanks to this superb article about Fediverse from Glenn Fleishman for Tidbits, I learned that we could follow anyone on Mastodon using an RSS feed, which we could do with Twitter. I’ll be able to re-add accounts to Inoreader to get news in one place, just as I was doing when I was on Twitter. Cool.

All this because I was searching for ideas to write a few linkposts. I wrote none except this post, but I learned quite a lot. I updated my Digital Garden accordingly.

As reported by Om Malik, automation is the next evolution step for fast food chains. Should I care?

Am I missing anything? I think so, and this is where Rewind could help me a lot.

What about your morning?

Should I care if my content is used to train AI models? How is it different than someone who uses part of my content in a citation to write a linkpost, for example? Is it ok for a portion of my content to be used elsewhere as opposed to the full content? Should I be able to opt out of any AI training, just like we can opt out of search engines when posting content online?

I had a discussion about AI yesterday with my wife. She came back from a two-day conference in Toronto. One of the sessions was about the place of AI in society and how it is time to engage in promoting and organizing some AI regulations.

The more I read and learn about AI capabilities as exposed in tools like ChatGPT, the more I think we will eventually need some regulation. For example, one thing we discussed (and on which we couldn’t agree) is the introduction of a delay in AI training. What I’d like to see is that AI companies are imposed a 2 or 3 years delay for their model training. And why would this be necessary? How would it change the game?

Remember that current training is lagging simply because we lack the processing power to digest all the digital information produced daily. But, eventually, it will come, just like Google replaced Yahoo when index content was initially entered manually by a group of people and then by a community. Sooner or later, ChatGPT or similar tools will digest the web in near real-time. And this is where this is going to be even more scary and could really get out of control.

Imposing delay on models training would help public knowledge and content to settle down and let consensus emerge in any research field, for example. Short-term noise would be reduced. In my opinion, it would be more challenging for ChatGPT to be infected by bad actors who will eventually try to influence results with toxic data.

My wife and I couldn’t agree on the effectiveness of this simple measure. She thinks that it would make ChatGPT useless or less relevant. My take goes the opposite side where, like in real life, things like encyclopedias are still helpful even though they were written and got frozen as soon as they were printed. So there is a need for them, like there is a need for more dynamic knowledge content like Wikipedia.

More than ever, we need to define what makes us unique, how we protect how uniqueness and consider slowing things down a bit, so we can have more time to understand what is going on and where things could go if we let things go without proper framing.

My goal when I started doing YouTube videos about Craft (and now Micro.blog) was to reach a thousand subscribers during the first year. At the current rate, I won’t make it. Am I sad about this? No. Is it nagging me? Yes. Why?

I think there are a lot of Craft users out there, and I think they could benefit from watching a few of my videos. That’s the whole purpose and “raison d’être” for my YouTube channel which was (and still is) to help users get better at using Craft or learning about Craft if they are not currently using it. Is my absence from Twitter to promote my content making any difference? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows.

I still have some time left before June 6th, but I’m being realistic here.