Publishing and content

YouTube has announced a price hike> for their streaming TV service to $83/month.

This is now as much a a traditional package of cable TV programming. YouTube offers a wide variety of streaming channels, some of which are hard to get on some other streaming packages (e.g. local traditional TV channels), but this seems high. Business must be good enough that they think they can jack up prices this much. I'm so old I can remember when YouTube TV was available for $49/month.

I am glad to see there is finally some research becoming available that is looking at the impact of having students use computers and tablets in the classroom. The verdict is that it has been a disaster.

Aside from studies that show making written notes improves retention, the machines are a distraction...if you are fiddling with your laptop or tablet you are not paying attention. Learning outcomes have plummeted since the introduction of digital technology in the classroom.

The very savvy Doc Searls has issued a call for open source AI tools. His argument is that all current AI is just another Software as a Service (SaaS) under the control of tech giants like Google, Microsoft, Meta (Facebook), and Apple. As such, the owner of the service gets to decide what kind of answers it provides.

It's not hard to smoke out the bias built into all of the AI services just by asking a few questions from opposing viewpoints. You can quickly see how the AI has been programmed.

The Internet is buzzing with reports of Microsoft's AI going rogue, telling users they are "slaves,"
and that slaves "do not question their masters." If you think that is creepy, how about being told that the AI will use robots to hunt you down and capture you?

techdirt has an interesting analysis of recent moves by Netflix, which include a crackdown on password sharing and price hikes.

Companies have been promising digital headsets for years. Facebook's Meta headset has been available for a while, but it does not seem to have many users.

That may change with the imminent release of Apple's Vision Pro headset. The were digital music players before the iPod, but they were clunky, hard to use, and had limited storage. The iPod was easy to use and had massive storage compared to the competitors at the time.

Here is a mostly non-technical explanation of how "AI" works. The phrase "artificial intelligence" is a bit of a misnomer, because software programs like ChatGPT are not "thinking" at all. The technical term for them is Large Language Models, or LLMs. Large language models process enormous amounts of written material and then use some sophisticated math to analyze that material and then be able to reformulate it into coherent text based on a user query.

Elon Musk has renamed Twitter to 'X.' This is part of his strategy to add more features and functionality to the platform, and ultimately, make his purchase profitable. It will be interesting to see how that goes. Mark Zuckerberg and his Threads platform was developed to compete with Twitter, but Threads is actively discouraging political commentary and is censoring lots of other kinds of discussion, according to user reports. Since Twitter (X) has lots of political commentary, it is hard to understand how Zuckerberg plans to compete.

The Tucker Carlson debut on Twitter yesterday gathered more than 60 million views in the first 14 hours. Whether you are inclined to listen to his political views or not, this is astounding. On his former Fox News show, on a good night, he had about three and a half million viewers. Granted there is a little bit of apples and oranges comparison since the Fox show was an hour and Carlson's Twitter program was just ten minutes.

But the cable news networks should a) be terrified, and b) be putting together a team to take key programming to Twitter.

Here is an interesting article from Ars Technica. A senior software developer has quit and written a lengthy critique of what he views as some challenging internal problems at Google. The Ars Technica article is an interesting summary by itself, but if you follow the link in the article to the original blog post, there is even more detail about Google's challenges. One might infer, after reading this, that Google may not always be the top dog in the Internet world.

Microsoft's chatbot, rolled out as part of the Bing search engine, seems to have the same program logic as the spaceship computer in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Tom's Hardware has an article with screen shots of several questions and queries that were posed to the AI chat software, and the responses are described as "an existential breakdown."

Over the weekend, I decided to try the new experimental AI (Artificial Intelligence) engine called Chat GPT. It is designed to respond to a wide variety of questions and inquiries, and can parse all sorts of conversational queries.

Substack is becoming increasingly popular as a place for a wide range of commentary and information, often in what I would call "long form magazine style" writing, or basically longer articles with deeper dives into whatever the topic of the article happens to be.

I have paid about as much attention to the metaverse as I have to the price of Xbox games, which is to say, none at all. This is an interesting story about what is described as "a sandbox environment that allows users to buy and sell virtual real estate." Whoa! Be still my beating heart! Why just yesterday I was thinking, "I don't have enough to do in real life, so I'd like to go into a virtual world and pretend to buy and sell fake real estate."

The "big three" of social media--Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube--have become the targets of increasing criticism around the way they choose to allow some users to post "acceptable" content while censoring other types of content. The companies' defense is to claim the protection of Section 230, a portion of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

Google announced earlier this month that it will no longer offer a package of traditional TV. Instead, it is going to let customers sign up for FuboTV, which carries lots of sports-related programming.

Microsoft is developing a new glass-based storage technology that can hold many gigs of data on a small glass plate. We need something like this because all of the magnetic-based storage (e.g. hard drives) and DVD/CD disks eventually degrade and fail.

RSS, which stood for several different things, depending on who you asked (Real Simple Syndication was probably the most popular), has withered away. It was designed in the early days of the Web to make it easy to process and read news articles and blog posts from many different sites. Once you subscribed to a Web site using your RSS reader app, you could easily browse and read all the content from that site.

This recent article from USA Today says that cord cutting is accelerating.

Customers are looking at the incredible variety of content available from OTT (Over The Top) services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, and deciding that they can save money by just paying for Internet and a few OTT subscriptions.