As blogging pioneer Dave Winer’s site turns 30, it’s a reminder that good writing and thinking has flourished beyond the reach of social media If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30. Which will mean that every single day for three decades Dave’s blog will have been stirring things up. He’s a truly remarkable figure, a gifted hacker and software developer who embodies the spirit of the early internet. In the 1980s he created ThinkTank, a new kind of software called an “outliner”, which computerised the hierarchical lists we all use when planning an article or a presentation, but which were up to then scribbled on paper. Like Dan Bricklin’s spreadsheet, it was a novel idea at the time, but now you find outliners built into almost every kind of software for writing. There’s even one in Microsoft Word, for God’s sake! Continue reading...

X owner responds by saying people should avoid UK when ‘they’re releasing convicted pedophiles’ Elon Musk has hit back at the UK government after he was not invited to an international investment summit following his controversial social media posts during last month’s riots. Musk said on X on Thursday: “I don’t think anyone should go to the UK when they’re releasing convicted pedophiles in order to imprison people for social media posts.” Continue reading...

Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, I and many others have been looking for alternatives. Who wants to share a platform with the likes of Andrew Tate and Tommy Robinson? I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous. It got more unpleasant after the blue-tick fiasco: identity verification became something you could buy, which destroyed the trust quotient. So I joined the rival platform Mastodon, but fast realised that I would never get 70,000 followers on there like I had on Twitter. It wasn’t that I wanted the attention per se, just that my gang wasn’t varied or noisy enough. There’s something eerie and a bit depressing about a social media feed that doesn’t refresh often enough, like walking into a shopping mall where half the shops have closed down and the rest are all selling the same thing. Continue reading...

My close read of the world’s most powerful posting addict turned up surprising results. Plus, a viral press release about AI, and Nvidia is accused of ‘unjust enrichment’ • Don’t get TechScape delivered to your inbox? Sign up for the full article here “I hope I don’t have to cover Elon Musk again for a while,” I thought last week after I sent TechScape to readers. Then I got a message from the news editor. “Can you keep an eye on Elon Musk’s Twitter feed this week?” I ended up doing a close-reading of the world’s most powerful posting addict, and my brain turned to liquid and trickled out of my ears: His shortest overnight break, on Saturday night, saw him logging off after retweeting a meme comparing London’s Metropolitan police force to the Nazi SS, before bounding back online four and a half hours later to retweet a crypto influencer complaining about jail terms for Britons attending protests. AI poses no existential threat to humanity – new study finds. LLMs have a superficial ability to follow instructions and excel at proficiency in language, however, they have no potential to master new skills without explicit instruction. This means they remain inherently controllable, predictable and safe. Large language models, comprising billions of parameters and pre-trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have been claimed to acquire certain capabilities without having been specifically trained on them … We present a novel theory that explains emergent abilities, taking into account their potential confounding factors, and rigorously substantiate this theory through over 1,000 experiments. Our findings suggest that purported emergent abilities are not truly emergent, but result from a combination of in-context learning, model memory, and linguistic knowledge. Our work is a foundational step in explaining language model performance, providing a template for their efficient use and clarifying the paradox of their ability to excel in some instances while faltering in others. Thus, we demonstrate that their capabilities should not be overestimated. A federal lawsuit alleges that Nvidia, which focuses on designing chips for AI, took YouTube creator David Millette’s videos for its AI-training work. The suit charges Nvidia with “unjust enrichment and unfair competition” and seeks class action status to include other YouTube content creators with similar claims. Nvidia unlawfully ‘scraped’ YouTube videos to train its Cosmos AI software, according to the suit, filed Wednesday in the Northern District of California. Nvidia used software on commercial servers to evade YouTube’s detection to download ‘approximately 80 years’ worth of video content per day’, the lawsuit says, citing an Aug 5 404 media report. [Judge] Orrick found the artists had reasonably argued that the companies violate their rights by illegally storing work and that Stable Diffusion, the AI image generator in question, may have been built ‘to a significant extent on copyrighted works’ and was ‘created to facilitate that infringement by design’. Many site owners say they can’t afford to block Google’s AI from summarising their content. That’s because the Google tool that sifts through web content to come up with its AI answers is the same one that keeps track of web pages for search results, according to publishers. Blocking Alphabet Inc’s Google the way sites have blocked some of its AI competitors would also hamper a site’s ability to be discovered online. Continue reading...

There’s been an exodus of users from X, propelled by Elon Musk’s lurch to the far right, but the alternatives have drawbacks too “Being on @Threads this week has been a bit like sitting on a half-empty train early in the morning while it slowly starts to fill up with people jumping on with horror stories about how bad the service is on the other line,” posted the actor David Harewood on Meta’s Twitter/X rival, which from the volume of new joiners asking “Hey, how does this work?” appeared, in the UK at least, to be having a post far-right riots bounce last week. To which some might ask, what’s taken the Threads newbies so long? To say Elon Musk’s tenure as the owner of the social network formerly known as Twitter and now renamed X has been unconscionable – recent highlights include unbanning numerous far-right and extremist accounts and his one-man misinformation campaign about the UK’s far-right anti-immigrant riots – would be a criminal understatement. Continue reading...

It cannot be right that Musk can sow discord without personal risk. He’s a jetsetter: perhaps fear of unexpected detention will concentrate his mind The way social media is making headlines currently is not without precedent: a fragile narcissist posting relentlessly on a social network he’s made his own. We know well how this has ended in the past; Donald Trump’s furious posts after his election defeat led to the assault on the Capitol on 6 January 2021. The aftermath of that episode saw the then president suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and even, to the dismay of those hoping to mood-board the Mar-a-Lago aesthetic, Pinterest. This time is likely to be different, not least because the person agitating the social media furore, Elon Musk, owns the platform he is using. Continue reading...

The Elon Musk-owned platform remains a vital tool for politicians despite misinformation about disorder in Britain When Keir Starmer was running to be Labour leader in 2020, his aides seriously considered whether they should leave Twitter for good. A number of those who remain close to Starmer as prime minister were then enthusiastic about moving off the platform. The party was still feeling wounded by the brutal election campaign and by the bitterness of the way it had been conducted on social media. Continue reading...