@ricmac@mastodon.social
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

ricmac

@ricmac@mastodon.social

Tech journalist at The New Stack | Founder of ReadWriteWeb (2003-12) | Available now: BUBBLE BLOG, my Web 2.0 memoir at https://cybercultural.com #InternetHistory

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

@stevenlevy has written his “This Changes Everything” for AI (referencing his Dec 1995 article about the Internet). Certainly the power of AI now is gob-smacking…and frightening. I have found AI very useful in various ways, from helping me debug stuff in my 11ty website to assisting me with research tasks. But over the past 6 months or so, I’ve also come to realize that the human parts of the web — and it’s inherent openness — are worth fighting for, and saving. https://www.wired.com/story/its-time-to-believe-the-ai-hype/

ricmac,
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

@KevinMarks @stevenlevy Good point, those OpenAI demos were dubious. Still, even the current range of AI tools available for people to use are impressive.

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Good suggestions in the comments. https://indieweb.social/@jaredwhite/112453177663648794

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

A media podcast I listened to today said that “the web is old-fashioned”, as part of their analysis of the OpenAI and Google news this week. As if the web will turn into The Well, or something. But I am seeing the fediverse, standards-based web builders like Eleventy, and open newsletter platforms like Ghost and Buttondown (that both support the web), and I just don’t agree that the web is old-fashioned. Quite the opposite, it’s only just getting started (again)!

ricmac,
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

@claudius Yes and I’ve had similar conversations with youngsters. But for your students, when they use their laptops and open a browser, are they aware that is the web? Do they see the browser as an app? (because of course it is) #JustCurious

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Whenever I scan X these days, I can’t help but picture the WALL-E humans… e.g. here are highlights from a riveting discussion on X about the OpenAI desktop client. Apparently they are waiting for the “ask and get” era to arrive, including from their overlord’s Neuralink.

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

It's May 2008 and I have a meeting at Ziff Davis Enterprise headquarters, at Lexington and 28th. I bet The Velvet Underground never wrote a song about accounting terms. (part 032 of my Web 2.0 memoir) https://cybercultural.com/p/032-zde-discussions-ebitda/

ricmac, (edited )
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

btw I did some re-design work on the header of Cybercultural.com, so that the header is more visually consistent across the site (and also to make it a bit more like RWW back in the day!).

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Another hint that web creators (bloggers / journos / youtubers / whatever...) should be furious about our data being used without compensation. It occurs to me this is the current era's version of Big Tech building empires off UGC ("user generated content"). Back then, in Web 2.0, it was all about harvesting real-time user data. But now, the new tech empires are being built off our archives, both social (Reddit, et al) and the long-form content we've all created.
https://mas.to/@vrandecic/112443383937971766

ricmac,
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

As an Internet Historian (in my spare time), this is a profoundly disturbing realization. Knowing that my internet history work over the coming years is unlikely to make any money or even help in my career, but it will be incredibly valuable to the LLM companies, as part of the aggregate of web data they will hoover up and then spit out as Search Results sans referral traffic...well, that sucks, tbh.

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

"And now that LLMs promise to let users understand all that the web contains in real time, Google at last has what it needs to finish the job: replacing the web, in so many of the ways that matter, with itself." @caseynewton says it so much more eloquently than my own clumsy post about Google I/O (as a snooker player might say when he/she loses a game, I didn't quite get the angle right in my post!). https://www.platformer.news/google-io-ai-search-sundar-pichai/

ricmac, (edited ) to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Today’s Google I/O developer conference was heavily focused on AI. However, web ecosystem concerns about AI and Google Search went unanswered. https://thenewstack.io/devs-get-ai-pixie-dust-at-google-i-o-but-no-search-updates/

ricmac,
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

@Ciantic Yes, my bad, I meant they didn’t mention it in dev context. I tweaked the post to clarify.

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

This is a good use case for AI…revealing how incredibly complex the human brain is! “The one cubic millimeter tissue sample contained about 50,000 cells and about 150 million synapses.” https://blog.google/technology/research/google-ai-research-new-images-human-brain/

ricmac, to webdev
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Eleventy is an act of rebellion against the dark forces driving today’s internet, said its creator @zachleat at . Also at the lively event, we discovered that @eleventy does scale! https://thenewstack.io/static-sites-do-scale-eleventy-vs-next-js-at-11ty-event/

ricmac,
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Not sure how many people read to the end of articles these days, but I have to say I was quite pleased with my final paragraph ;)

"Perhaps it’s that feeling of being subversive — kicking against the platform pricks — and going back to our roots as a web developer community that has led to the Eleventy Renaissance. All I can say is: vive la résistance!"

jmduke, to random
@jmduke@hachyderm.io avatar

Life update: having a kid in October. 🥰

(Let the record reflect that including Telemachus in this photo was not my idea, but he's quite excited too.)

ricmac,
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

@jmduke Congrats Justin, and all the best!

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

These “non-answers” from bigcos drive me nuts as a tech journalist. I was in a Google press briefing the other day and there was a lot of it. I get it, execs don’t want to put themselves in the firing line (literally, these days), but I miss the days when we got imaginative “what if” answers and forward-thinking responses about their goals. Although, admittedly that did get the whole web ecosystem in trouble post-Web 2.0! Still, imagination > bland answers any day. https://social.coop/@J12t/112419949747609108

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

I've given search engines a hard time today, but I have to say a recent blog post of mine is now on page 1 of results in Google search for the name of a certain scummy company :) So even though I didn't "go viral" or anything with that post, if people actually search for the name of that company, they might be interested in the background I provide! https://ricmac.org/2024/04/29/why-clickout-media-a-gambling-pr-company-bought-readwrite/

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

From a recent Stanford University study of citations in "generative search engines"; hat-tip @edsu -> "We find that responses from existing generative search engines are fluent and appear informative, but frequently contain unsupported statements and inaccurate citations: on average, a mere 51.5% of generated sentences are fully supported by citations and only 74.5% of citations support their associated sentence." https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.09848

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

So OpenAI might launch SearchGPT on Monday. If it does, I'll be most interested to see if/how it does citations (a la Perplexity and Google SGE, with the latter in limited beta). As an indie publisher and a journo who works for a bigger publisher, linking to the source has always been a CRUCIAL part of search engines. If OpenAI makes those citations prominent — and Perplexity has done fairly good job with that — then Google will be forced to match. https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-plans-announce-google-search-competitor-monday-sources-say-2024-05-09/

ricmac,
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Such a key time for search on the web, for the survival of indie and small-medium publishers. I'd like to see OpenAI put the squeeze on Google with citations...although I have no confidence that's what they'll do, because if anything OpenAI has proved itself even more rapacious than Google.

ricmac,
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

To show what I mean, here's the same question I asked both ChatGPT and Perplexity. ChatGPT answers without citing its sources, but Perplexity cites 5 sources — including my own indie website WebDevelopmentHistory.com (it's the #1 listed source). I would love it if SearchGPT is more like Perplexity, in regards to citations.

ricmac,
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Of course, Perplexity has not sent much traffic my way for answers like this Perl one. So we'll see if even SearchGPT can send decent traffic...again, I'm rather pessimistic about that.

ricmac, to random
@ricmac@mastodon.social avatar

Catching up with the this morning, UK time (time zone and family responsibilities meant I didn't attend live). Looks like it was a large and active audience, judging by the chat on YouTube. I thought I'd add my 2 cents to the 'how did you get to 11ty' topic. For me it was:

HTML > Geocities-like apps (can't recall which ones) > Radio Userland > Movable Type > WordPress > Hugo > Eleventy

(not counting code tools like Dreamweaver, FrontPage, VSCode, etc)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLxJ6PtuF9M

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • anitta
  • khanakhh
  • mdbf
  • InstantRegret
  • Durango
  • Youngstown
  • rosin
  • slotface
  • thenastyranch
  • osvaldo12
  • ngwrru68w68
  • kavyap
  • cisconetworking
  • DreamBathrooms
  • megavids
  • magazineikmin
  • cubers
  • vwfavf
  • modclub
  • everett
  • ethstaker
  • normalnudes
  • tacticalgear
  • tester
  • provamag3
  • GTA5RPClips
  • Leos
  • JUstTest
  • All magazines
    •