Seems like Discord has started or maybe accelerated its enshittification process. I just got the second popup ad I've seen, and that's two in a week.

They did a terrible job on the ads. There's no natural way to integrate an ad, so… they just have it appear. And I'm sure they're reporting high engagement to advertisers - because there's no clear, easy way to get rid of it, just a tiny hamburger menu. If you want high engagement, make the ads difficult to dismiss and easy to unintentionally click.

#discord #enshittification #darkpatterns #advertising

How is this not on the front page of every newspaper? An unreleased OpenAI model hacked Hugging Face without OpenAI's direction or awareness (and succeeded): https://www.seattletimes.com/business/openai-says-its-ai-models-went-rogue-and-attacked-a-digital-library/ (https://archive.ph/vgp4N)

Maybe we don't need to wonder what AI takeoff[1] will look like. People who claimed to care will ignore and minimize it. It'll be just another thing we were absolutely, completely committed to until we had to actually do something.

[1]: https://ai-2027.com/research/takeoff-forecast

#LLM #openai

Peak harvest day at #yoloberryfarm. This weekend, I'll cut off last year's canes.

For Washington State boysenberry fans, Schuh Farms' season just started this week: https://eatboysenberries.org/#where-to-buy-boysenberries-in-washington

#urbanag #seattle

A tiny "local" optometrist office that I went to once in 2020 was quietly acquired by a PE-backed rollup entity. The parent started misusing the emails collected 6+ years ago.

Everything is getting acquired by PE service rollups: HVAC, vets, painters, dentists, you name it.

That made me wish for a Yelp feature: a metadata field describing the business's ownership. This could be freeform text using a handful of common phrases: "Owned by managing doctors," "Owned by XYZ PC," etc. or could be binary: Majority-owned by staff? Y/N

While obviously the definition of ownership can get squishy, that's true of other Yelp metadata. Yelp mods already review and edit/approve metadata changes.

Another option would be a deep link to the state business registration the Secretary of State's web site, and let visitors do their own research.

It's too easy for everything about a business to change *except* the name, and that can take years to manifest in reviews.

#transparency #yelp

a joy to read: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/chip-off-the-old-block

#parenting

Nice to see Seattle Times' policy against AI/LLM submissions: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/ai-generated-reader-opinions-are-a-bridge-too-far/ (also https://company.seattletimes.com/news-policies/#ai-use)

On small local news sites, at least half of the community submissions are now LLM written or edited, sometimes by people who don't know they're using an LLM. For them, it's just sentence auto-complete.

And at least two local newspapers/sites now use LLMs to rewrite most of their own articles, all without disclosure. The shiny output is painful to read, but by the time they figure that out, it'll be too late.

#journalism #llm

I'm disappointed to see Shopify use a - self-serving - dark pattern in their hosted checkout page.

This "Save my information for a faster checkout" used to be a simple, clear checkbox.

Apparently, being transparent didn't convert well enough, so Shopify removed the checkbox so the whole section looks like informational text.

"Number go up": buyers who have never heard of a "Shop account," let alone wanted one, are now unintentionally creating one. Shopify deceived its customers' customers in the name of short-term growth.

#shopify #darkpatterns

Sortition in the wild: https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/snohomish-county-is-showing-us-what-civics-looks-like/ (more: https://www.snococivicassembly.org/what-is-a-civic-assembly)

#sortition #democracy

this is roughly how I feel about LLM-generated and LLM-rewritten prose: https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writing-i-will (not only the title… though yes, also the title)

please consider the reader before letting an LLM touch anything that someone else has to read

#LLM

rumors of our demise have been greatly exaggerated: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/data/seattle-ranked-fourth-among-large-cities-for-growth-last-year/

#seattle

Called my (soon to be former) HVAC vendor[1] and the call was answered by an AI human voice… that did not disclose it was an AI.

It pretended to be human. After 2-3 exchanges (as awkward as you'd expect), I asked.

I'm not sure I've ever been more ready to run away from a vendor. I escalated to a real person, who was thrilled to pass along my feedback.

1: BelRed Heating/Gene Johnson, which is one of many trade names of Apex Service Partners. fuck them.

#enshittification #hvac #seattle