Thought of the day: Watch out democrats, Trump and Vance aren’t just weirdos. They are disfigured fascists.

Is today’s world (AI models training, security, etc.), I wonder if site owners are well equipped with robots.txt as the only way to control who’s in and who’s out when it comes to deciding free and massive content consumption on their site.

Today I made a template. Who knows, it might be useful to some big company.

“We will release {insert product or service name here} over the coming months, but not in the EU due to the unpredictable nature of the European regulatory environment,” {insert company name here} said in a statement to {Insert news agency name here}.

You are welcome.

Today’s CrowdStrike update is probably the most expensive update of all time in IT history. Will we really learn from it? Some big players probably will but in general, I doubt it. #crowdstrike

Apparently, a social network like X does not promote posts containing links to external websites. While this policy may be frustrating¹, there are possible responses to this practice to consider. If someone shares a post with a link to X, you could choose not to open the link². Encouraging others to adopt a similar stance can be an effective way to voice your opinion and influence the platform’s practices through your engagement, or lack thereof.³

You can’t make that shit up, right? WTF is wrong with them? 🫣🤮 sorry about this negative post right after a positive one. 🙃

Taboola + Apple News? No thanks

Apple’s decision to strike a deal with Taboola is shocking and off-brand — so much so that I have started to question the company’s long-term commitment to good customer experience, including its commitment to privacy. As it chases more and more revenue to appease Wall Street, it’s clear Apple will become one of those companies that prioritize shareholders over paying customers and their experience.

I hate ads. I hate ads. This is a sad day. That is not cool at all. How can Apple brags about protecting user privacy (see that ad on YouTube?) and al while serving ads through an external ads network? More than ever, Apple is becoming like everyone else and IS profiling its users, for money. I’m starting to hate Tim Cook’s Apple. As soon as I see a change in News, I’ll cancel my subscription to Apple One.

There is something incomplete in how Apple is portraying Safari as a way to stay private when surfing the web. The ad is certainly visually striking, with surveillance cameras flying over people as they browse the web on their non-iPhone devices. It’s a compelling analogy. It reminds me of another Apple ad where a person is in a similar situation, being watched and followed by a group of people who want to know their online whereabouts.

But you know, Apple is mum about its deal with Google as being the default search engine in Safari. The last time I checked, Google isn’t the type of privacy-protection company you might think they are.

Manuel Moreale reflecting on one hundred people who took the time to sign his guestbook (I did):

It’s the number of people who have taken a few minutes out of their busy lives to write something on my guestbook. One hundred doesn’t seem a lot in the grand scheme of things, especially on the web. If you have one hundred followers you might as well have zero. One hundred views on a YouTube video? That’s nothing. You need at least one hundred thousand to be part of the conversation. And yet, I find one hundred signatures in a guestbook to be a lot. Can you imagine having one hundred people in front of you, all saying something to you, one after the other? It would feel overwhelming.

I often think about this. Just like Manuel, I have a blog, a YouTube channel, a podcast (sort of). Globally, my follower counts are very low (even lower than Manuel’s) when looked through the Internet scale lens, but if those people were in front of me, in the same room, that would be quite something else. I find this thought to be comforting.

Great take by Gruber on this week sad but highly predictable events. The US is a sick country. Sidenote: on my last few trips, all Americans that I met told me after presenting themselves as Americans: “I know, we’re one of those stupid Americans…”. I reserve this thought mostly to Trump supporters which I never met personally, thanks god.

People are so quick to say “I don’t want him to win but I also don’t want him to die” as if there’s some prize for not wishing death on someone who does more than wish us dead. If someone in power actively attempts to do unthinkable damage to the world and people around you, just a reminder: you get absolutely nothing in exchange for kindness toward them.

Some food for thoughts.

Observation of the day: because of the trees, we can hear the wind. Travelling has great influence on my spirit.

My next trip to the US is to see a Sting show in New York in October. After that, I’m not planning to visit the US for at least five years. I refuse to visit totalitarian states. Fuck #Trump. Fuck those who supports this buffoon and clown.

Warning: Unsettled thoughts: I think many tech pundits are overestimating Apple Intelligence capabilities and influence potential. If Apple fails to deliver, even slightly, it might trigger a crash like the dot com crash. Some tech pundits are fast at expecting Apple to be the gateway to generative AI legitimacy. In this logic, if Apple fails, AI will fail too. I might be over simplifying things here.

I’m wondering if the way someone elects to use generated content from generative AI models is way more potentially problematic and subject to debate than anything related to models training using content from the open web.

Also: generative AI content used to train generative AI models is also source of concerns to me. I call that process “knowledge desinfection” or “knowledge toxification” or even better “knowledge asphyxiation”. Or should I replace “knowledge” with “intelligence”?

One more thing: the more I think about generative AI training, the less I think it should be considered plagiarism. More on that one soon.

Thinking out loud about generative models training.

In a way, we’ve all been trained ourselves in our life by the books we read, the movies we saw, the music we listened. Some people have been trained on very specific knowledge bodies, in very specific fields. People use this accumulated “training” also forming “culture” to create new things and produce new content. Some people might be trained on a specific music style or dancing style. We’ve been trained by teachers. As “trained” creators, do we ask a permission when writing something new or writing music using our training data? Now because it happens at a large scale by large (and “nasty”?) corporations to create products, we cry foul?! Where is the line to be drawn here? I don’t know.

Comparing generative AI model capacities to a school study level is plain stupid (OpenAI pretends GPT-5 to be PhD level). AI is not about intelligence just like having a PhD. The latter is a mere indicator or proxy, at best.

We are starting to see some cracks in the AI bubble castle… AI stock market will probably go through the same scenario as the tech bubble in the early 2000. You probably read it first here.

Claim of the moment: Perplexity AI ignores robot.txt files and crawls websites even when the site owner says no. https://rknight.me/blog/perplexity-ai-is-lying-about-its-user-agent/

Woah, that is not cool, at all. Even if I don’t care too much for AI bots to crawl and ingest my content, I would expect them to respect those author and site owners who decides otherwise. It’s not the best way to build trust.

Refreshing take also a good reminder:

@stroughtonsmith After seeing WWDC, I’m actually buying a iPad Air M2 next to my mini 6. But I have never seen and expected iPad as anything more than what Jobs used in his introduction. Never replacing my Mac, never replacing my iPhone.