I keep multiple dated backups made using a script shell + crontab, to automate the thing.

As a matter of fact the (small French) host I’m using to host my tiny personal blog is giving me a more than generous data allowance as I’ve yet to have any issue. Or maybe it’s just that my blog is so useless that it’s not even deemed worthy of a bot’s attention?

More seriously, I had not considered that aspect. It sure is not a detail. And that is something I’ll discuss with my host to get his opinion on the question (he must be a lot more informed on that issue). That is another advantage of making business with a local company: there are actual people once can talk to, not AI-powered bots ;)

Edit: & thx for the explanation.

But how many views and Likes did you get? Matters a lot more than how much you enjoyed your meal (mine was great)

Well put.

Thx. It’s always challenging to try to think out loud in English (hence why I try to do it, and why I also try to post on my blog in English too)

Everybody thought I was being a schizo. Fair though.

I did not. I hesitated between two options concerning those posts of yours :

• Either you were making it uselessly difficult for people to understand you because you were losing control over your ‘weapon’ and even maybe even your projected smart tactic. Which is OK, the only persons that never fail are the not that never do anything.
• Or you were just… too serious about it. Against that, there is not much one can do.

But I certainly did not mind your project of creating some… disruption.

Maybe you can see I’m not much of fan of shocking readers. I consider a gift that anyone is kind enough to spend their time reading what I write.

Following that logic, I will much rather invite them, if I manage to, to get a taste of a sometimes different point of view than (try) to slap them in the face, or kick them in the ass. I don’t think violence is a very efficient tool, in most situations.

It’s a bit like a few people silently downvoting my post. I mean, I see them as people trying to say they don’t agree with me (which is OK) but that are also so shy they can’t say in what manner they don’t agree. Which makes them disagreeing rather useless as

1. I really don’t mind people disagreeing with me. It’s even a good sign, at least if we want to live in a free society, to be aware we’re not all sharing the same views and values and we can all express our opinions.
2. If anyone wants help me understand why their think I’m mistaken, or why I need to change my mind on something I said I need to hear actual arguments. I need facts to consider and to discuss. Not applause or booing (is that a word?). I’m not a performer doing his show, I share my ideas and opinions no matter how clumsy or stupid they are, or are not.

The herds (or artificial social cliques) you just defined are literally being aligned.

I will first need to check how it’s defined in the context of the site you linked to. But how I would understand it (as them being instrumentalized and polarized) I think the question we need to ask is two folds: by whom and, much harder to answer, for what purpose?

I would also be tempted to say the only way to try to find an answer to those questions is by comparing with other similar situations. How crowds (notice how they’re almost always angry) are regularly used to silent difficult opponents. How they are used to create distraction from what is really at stake. But like I said, I will need to read your link first.

That’s one of the still living parts of the internet you mentioned, and I’d recommend a visit if you’re still looking

I am, today more than ever.

Thx for sharing the link. I’ll read it.

Everything can be justified. Even the most… miserable actions. Here is one: I let a kid drown, because I was busy saving a couple other kids that were drowning too. It’s a legit choice but it is also not ok, and I would not want to be in the shoes of anyone having to face that situation and to live with the aftermath.

Regarding AI, I don’t think the question should be whether it is justifiable or not. It’s a tool, it needs no justification beside filling a purpose like a hammer or even a gun do.

The question should be to decide if we’re OK a tool (that has been developed using humanity common knowledge) and that will deeply change all our lives and all of humanity future to be owned and controlled by a handful multi-billionaires that are already actively working their worst to make the world unfit to most of us. Or if we want for that tool to be ours and to be able to decide by ourselves what limit we want to put on its usage.

Well, at least that’s what I think.

I have no hate towards AI. No more than I hate a hammer (edit: or a gun) when someone use it to commit a murder. I’m much more critical of the way AI is not developed as a common good… which to me is unacceptable for a tool that only exists because because of our common knowledge.

“You willed me to break it!”

Back then, that would have been so nonsensically smart. Nowadays? It seems to me that has become the normal and expected way of thinking for way too many people. A total lack of accountability accompanied by the exact same control over one’s emotional reaction.

So, not only Watterson was smart, so incredibly gifted, and the ultimate _ sadist_ I mentioned a strip ago. He was also the oracle of our wonderful days and age of peaceful reasoning and nuanced discussions?

Thx, just edited out a few of way too many typos. Sorry for that too.

It seems like having a website open and available on the internet is getting practically impossible to manage,

What are the issues you’re facing?

with bots accounting for more and more traffic.

Can’t you just ignore them?

AI has gotten to a point where it can circumvent just about any form of captcha, sooooo, what?

Not sure I understand that.

Does “the internet just get abandoned in favor of some other, better technology that we hope crops up? Does it fade away? Do the real nerds start their own separate internet, and not let companies in? I donno, food for thought I guess.

Technology will not be the solution to what is partly at least already a technological issue. Or more precisely, no tech can solve the way we poorly handle tech. That needs to change first.

The living Web you mention was a curated Web. Human curation, that is.

People used to share information and to promote sites and content from other sites to their own readers because they considered it worthwhile of their time and attention. That’s good curation. ‘Read this, guys, I think it’s worth it’.

And at times, that was truly amazing. As far as I’m concerned, that was the peak ‘Web’, the one I was the most happy with and the most proud to be part of.

Then, blogging started to become trendy. Blogging was an impressive technological breakthrough, making it instantly simpler for anyone without any expertise to

1. Publish content without any need to master complex tools (I created my first website learning to write HTML and then CSS, there was no PHP or javascript back then)
2. Share content from elsewhere. It was dead simple to share a link, to ping other websites.
3. And, obviously, to post comments everywhere too.

Trendy bloggers started monetizing the hell out of every single bit of content they published, and the crowd of bloggers followed suit. Through ads and partnerships content publication and curation itself, that used to be about caring about our readers, became a bankable practice. That means there quickly was a demand for even more tech to make it even simpler/cheaper to publish (and also to show ads). Next to that there was also SEO growing in importance: more content and more demand required ways to optimize placement in search results so we could sell more ads, right? More tech needed.

And then social networks started appearing.

They were even simpler than blogging. Incredibly much simpler. Quickly, thx to social media, sharing content went ballistic. And then that was all that mattered: poop out as much content as possible. Even more tech was required (tech to automate it, to cross post it, to re-post, to share and to reply, and so on). Even commenting became too much work, that need to be reduced in order to be worth it, it was too slow, we started using a new tech: ‘Likes’. Almost instant. No need to write stupid words anymore, just press a button. Like or Dislike, that was all that was needed, even more so that there was so much endless content that was pushed down reader’s throat they would not possibly have any time left to, you know, write anything.

Gone were the desire to share useful or interesting content with readers, and for readers to contribute back some content through comments. Here comes the time to milk that reader, and their attention.

A reader that had suddenly morphed into a ‘follower’, the 21st century cattle (like with cattle, all that matter on social media is the number of heads/followers one owns and can monetize). The time to abuse the curation mechanism by promoting whatever shit was susceptible to generate revenues. hence the explosion of low quality posts. Quick, let’s make a 15 second video about the war somewhere, or that fact that I hate a tuna sandwich for lunch.

Soon there will not even be that left as everything, every once of content, may well be AI-made without any human involved. Content that will be perfectly and algorithmically tailored to suit every single reader/follower (happy cattle, with it s own unique tag different from all the other cows that are being being milked at the same time they are).

But the ‘living’ Web, that human-curated source of content is still available on the WWW. It survives next to those huge factories constantly pooping content that most people seem so hungry to consume from. It may vanish, rendered illegal by those poop-content factories that don’t want no interferences with their businesses, but it is still a thing today.

I doubt creating a new Internet will change that.

What need to change is… I don’t know… the way they are being educated and encouraged in being lazy as fuck? The way we consider and we use technology as a magical wand to solve all our needs and fears? Something like that.

And sorry for the long rant.

Edit: (too many) typos

I’ve quit posting on reddit myself but I would have liked to post this in the discussion:

On Piefed.social, I like how simple it is to filter out whatever noise one does not want to listen to.

I’m not on piefed for politics, and I could not care less about people’s willingness to promote their own opinions, or to prove other’s wrong. What’s great is that Piefed makes it simple to spare me that.

When I log in I only see content from whatever communities I’m subscribed to and participate in. And when someone still manages to reach me with their noise, or even to specifically troll me, I can quickly filter out whatever keyword I need to mute them, or I can block them entirely as a user.

The other great thing about it is that it’ snot owned by anyone. As a user, I’m assured I’ll never be stuck in a specific community, say having to fight a power-tripping moderator or admin.

Worst case happening, I’m free to create my own community to challenge the existing one and invite users to join me there. I can also change instance (the server-thingy on which said community is hosted) or create my own instance (try create your own Reddit somewhere else and ask Reddit’s CEO what they think about it ;)

But to enjoy Piefed like I do, and I do, one needs to first filter out the noise (if you’re anything like me that means politics and most memes). Something that took me mere minutes, after I created my account.

Is it perfect? Nope. Obviously not. Neither is Reddit (remember the API changes?)

Recently, there was one event that completely took my by surprise. Out of the blue, one day, the piefed logo started being replaced by… various flags that were obviously reflecting political considerations related to oppressed countries and communities and minorities.

It happens I don’t want to be told what or who I should care about. Even less so by people who have not the slightest idea who I am, what my life, who I care for and what political engagements are.

So, you can imagine I was really… not happy about being required to watch some random flag (and its implied political/moralizing discourse) on my screen every time I logged to piefed.social. I was even more frustrated by the lack of a switch to turn of that ‘great feature’.

I discussed it on piefed (which is already nice to be able to do) and in a few hours later, maybe a day, someone shared a snippet of CSS code that allowed anyone to hide that flag thingy, moving back to the piefed logo. And there was no attempt that I know of from mods (or from piefed’s devs) to suppress our discussion or to change the way that flag thing works.

Do I still think it was a dumb move on their part? Absolutely. Political engagement is not about waving flags on a webpage anymore more than, say, having sex is about fapping watching porn a computer screen. That flag thing was… immature, at best.

But I’m glad I was able to discuss it within the community, and that there was a workaround.

Like I’m glad to know that if the next time they have another bright idea like that and they decide one should not be allowed to find a workaround, I would still be free to move away from them, deleting my account, while still being able to participate from some other place.

Piefed/The Fediverse is far from being perfect. Yes, it’s way too kind towards its own political biases (while being excessively hostile towards others political views). Yes, it lacks users. But it has some impressive qualities that make it worth considering.

• The first one being that it is not owned by anyone. We’re not handcuffed at the mercy of any power-abusing mods or admin, dev, or CEO… Or ideology.
• The other reason being that it is open to anyone. Meaning it’s just a matter of more people participating to change the type of content that is being shared and promoted.
• The last one: it’s not a vague idea, some future project. It’s an actual product that anyone can use, right now. What are you waiting for?

That’s what I would write over there. But as a Fediverse/Piefed user among other users I would say we should consider more seriously that kind of recurring remarks about politics.

The political… extremism (edit: oftentimes a very childish one) that is quite prevalent around here is a pain and can be a real incentive to quit using the space for no good reasons. A bit like children shouting in a restaurant or in a train have nothing to do with them being kids (they should be allowed to have fun) nor with their freedom of expression but everything to do with their parents lacking any skill in teaching their kids the basics of living in society : it’s fine to have fun (and not just as kids ;) but that should never be considered a right to ruin it for the persons around. There must be limits. The same with (immature) politics and political opinions.

If I may: don’t you think you’re trying a bit too hard to be right? If one ‘good’ idea happens to not be that good, one should be fine with it being disposed of: (good) ideas are cheap.

If we rewarded people for high value work, and incentivised cranking out garbage, then we would get more high value work.

That is a big ‘if’, one that won’t go away in the system as it is because, like you said:

Right now, the vast vast majority of published academic work is absolute garbage that no one will ever care about.

Whole careers have been and are built upon the system working as it is, and the system itself feeds on that: it needs large volumes of content. Resistance to any change will be… huge, to say the least, and that is even if any real change ever manages to reach a significant level.

My 2 cents, regarding the issue you’re wishing to fix, as an outsider myself (and what follow is just that: an outsider mere opinion, that anyone is welcome to contradict).

The issue lies not much in the quality, or its absence, of the work that is being published than in the work being published to begin with. Allow me to explain.

The low quality of the work, and the sheer volume of it, should be considered symptoms of a much larger issue which is the way the scientific publishing business works and the way scientific careers are being made through publications. Symptoms are not the issue they’re (healthy or useful) warning signs of a real problem.

It is the imperative to produce content that is the issue, here. Not that is bad instead of it maybe, possibly being good.

Also, next to the imperative of publishing, don’t forget the very closely linked second imperative that is so often overlooked: reading it. Researchers are expected to be reading that endlessly and quickly growing volume of work in their respective fields, that is the very purpose of the system make it possible for people to propose content for their peers to read and criticize (and to profit from) it. If nobody can write that much work, nobody can read it either.

There is another issue that I won’t discuss here because I think it becomes a lot more… complex and difficult to peacefully discuss it: the interest some groups of people may have in ‘drowning the fish’ in order to push their own ideologies, whatever they can be: saturate the space with garbage/noise. I would consider this as important as What I just mentioned. Back to it.

Scientific publications have been turned into an industry, of scientific writers and readers.

And like most industries they aim for lowering their production cost while maximizing their margins.

So, they mass produce a type of content that, until very recently and unlike most other industrially produced shit, could not be automated and relied on ‘man-power’, man-made content. Content that was written by actual people and that was read (validated) by other people. But they wanted it fast and in always larger volume which is not compatible with ‘man-made’ quality work, in any field.

That mere ‘expectation’ to be quickly and constantly publishing/reading content, that alone was more than enough to push towards a lessening in the quality of both the writer’s and the reader’s work (and also in a lot of disenchantment from those ‘workers’ but that would deserve a debate in itself). And that was enough to create a vicious circle, making it worse as the system keep feeding on itself: always more volume always less… pertinence. Which leads to our present situation.

That is: us witnessing the process moving away from those human workers towards AI-workers or ‘AI-augmented’ or ‘assisted’ workers, as one prefers, that are much cheaper and are also a lot less capable of producing quality anything but so much more capable of producing in large volumes. And that is all that really matters to that industry and its workers: the amount of work that is being produced, not the quality.

Remove the imperative to produce content for people to be able to make a scientific career (worthy or not that should not matter in a system that does not focus on producing at any cost, as low quality products will simply never matter and never spread) to try to make a career and you may have a chance to solve the issue and to maybe salvage the system. Maybe. But then, by removing that need to produce content that your peers will use to judge the significance of your contributions to the field, you instantly create another issue: who will decide who is worthy (or not worthy) to be considered a scientific and to make a career? There is no simple solution.

I just gleaned that from your blog. Sadly, there was no comments section, so I’ll comment here.

I suggest people use email instead of comments.

Mais à ce propos: Puis-je devenir Canadien, siouplé? Can I become a Canadian, pliiiz?, … impossible de ne pas partager ce lien (et mon admiration) ;)

Not really: French ;)

This is such a tragedy. And not just in the USA :(

https://thefoolwithapen.com

If there are specific must-read posts, please point me that direction.

Not really, it’s a tiny little blog (without ads and without tracking) written either in English or in French, depending my mood and the topic. It’s personal in the strictest sense. My only suggestion would be to trust your guts while browsing through some post titles, and by all means don’t feel bad if you feel like reading none: there will be no hard feelings on my part ;)

how old are you

Nearing my 60s.

and how did you come to be on Lemmy?

Left Reddit because of their bullshit policy changes. Knew what the Fediverse was, tried Lemmy (then moved to Piefed) and decided I may as well stay for a little while ;)

In essence, where – if anywhere – do people interact with people online?

That 90s Web is long gone, as a trend. It is still there, mind you, but it’s mostly through blogs who have themselves evolved from being a trendy space, everybody wanted to have a blog starting in the early 00-05s, to a very niche phenomenon that is barely visible anymore. But that still exists.

Many people like myself, who used to hand code websites in the 90s, are still blogging to this day. The one real change is in readership: very few people can be bothered with visiting blogs (I seldom spontaneously share a link to my blog, but regularly mention it but I’ve only been asked once its address ;).

It’s even more obvious with the younger generations who have not grown used at all to search through the World Wide Web (that is much more akin to a World Narrow Web, for them) for whatever content they might be interested in. And for those that may still read blogs, how many will not be using RSS, or even be aware it exists, making it uselessly harder for them to read said blogs.

They’re not to blame. They need/want said content to be served to them from a few limited sources they all gather around because it’s what they grew with. Hence, most of them only using social media platforms, be they centralized/corporate-owned ones like X, Facebook, TikTok, or even Substack, and so on. Or decentralized ones, like Mastodon, Piefed,… the entire Fediverse.

As far as I’m concerned, even email has almost completely vanished as a meaningful tool of communication. Email! It used to be my main means of communicating with correspondents all over the world since the early 90s and has remained so until around 2010, or maybe 2015 when it has started to dried out, and quickly so. As far as I’m concerned, email is barely a trickle nowadays. Here again people will use ‘messaging apps’, centralized or not it doesn’t change much! they have moved from a fully indendant/personal means of communicating to a non-personal one.

I’m not sure that, collectively, we have gained anything by not using emails anymore: a lot of my pasts interactions lasted much longer (oftentimes it was measured in months if not years worth of back and forth exchanges) whereas I seldom have any long lasting (or even that stimulating) exchanges on those social media platforms, even the non-corporate owned ones. But maybe that’s just me being incompetent and unable to engage in a meaningful way using those tools.

It’s a silly comparison, but I often make a parallel with eating habits.

They are a generation that will happily gather at meal time around some trendy (cheap) places, fast food, snacks or whatever they fancy, without having to worry about preparing their meal. While my own generation learned how to cook and often will prefer cooking (or at least, go to a traditional restaurant, a place where they actually prepare food, not a fast food) because one gets to pick what they eat (fresh products, nothing industrially processed) and can oftentimes eat for a similar price (it’s even cheaper to cook one’s own food) than the industrial junk food that are sold everywhere.

Edit: like I said personal websites, blogs, still exist almost everywhere one makes the effort to search for them. They’re just not searched for, so we get to decide they don’t exist anymore which is not the reality. People expect to get their content served to them in those few limited centralized places called social media… a bit like they expect to meet their partner(s) through dating apps only… Something old-me will never be able to fathom, to be honest.

It would be tailored/devised towards being quotable by other researchers in that field, not as being worthy per se.

Consider an alternative research economy where researchers have to pay to cite prior work.

We’re in a system that encourages publishing at all cost as much works as possible, with your system the system would encourage publishing quotation worthy work at all cost and as often as possible. Not sure to see how this would improve the mess we’re in?

Discussion about anything spiritual.

As an atheist and a Bible-reading dude (as well as a few other ‘spirituality’ books, among many other types of books), the hate towards anything spirituality-related and religious around here was one of those things I almost immediately noticed after joining, it’s even worse regarding anything Christian. The worst for me was not that hate, it is the fact that almost all of it rely on nothing but a desire to do like the others. And very rarely on actual knowledge of what is being hated.

It is one of those things that made me question if I should stay, if the Fediverse was a place one could really expect to have enriching discussions, or merely the exact opposite of those corporate-owned social media platforms that are populated by right-winged haters: collectively-owned social media populated by left-winged haters. Hate is a poor choice. It doesn’t matter what one hates.

The one thing that made stay is that, thx to the tools available, it’s also very easy to filter out most of that hatred and to suddenly realize that, hidden under that now gone noise, there are indeed quite a few persons wanting to have civilized conversations and that are able to not hate on anyone they disagree with. Not a large crowd, but enough to make it worthwhile to stay and from time to time have an interesting discussion.

That option to filter out the hate, even if it’s not perfect, makes the Fediverse quite unique, imho.