Web/Tech – Maverick Philosopher

Is A.I. Killing the World Wide Web?

As AI changes how people browse, it is altering the economic bargain at the heart of the internet. Human traffic has long been monetised using online advertising; now that traffic is drying up. Content producers are urgently trying to find new ways to make AI companies pay them for information. If they cannot, the open web may evolve into something very different.

[. . .]

“The nature of the internet has completely changed,” says Prashanth Chandrasekar, chief executive of Stack Overflow, best known as an online forum for coders. “AI is basically choking off traffic to most content sites,” he says. With fewer visitors, Stack Overflow is seeing fewer questions posted on its message boards. Wikipedia, also powered by enthusiasts, warns that AI-generated summaries without attribution “block pathways for people to access…and contribute to” the site.

This won't affect me. My writing is a labor of love. I don't try to make money from it. I don't need to. I've made mine. You could call me a "made man." I may, however, monetize my Substack. It seems churlish to refuse the pledges that readers have kindly made.

CTRL-F

Use this command to locate a bit of text in a document.

It’s About Time

Typepad has finally secured its hypertext transfer protocol. My URL now sports an 's': https. That's reassuring to me and to you, dear reader. Now they need to work on their on-board back-up utility to expedite the back up of huge blogs like mine.

Henry A. Kissinger on the Threat of Artificial Intelligence

Yes, that Henry A. Kissinger. Not very good, but I don't have time to explain why.

Texting Their Lives Away?

I am currently reading, among other things, Kevin Mitnick, The Art of Invisibility, Little, Brown & Co., 2017. A treatise on cyber-security, it strikes me as slightly alarmist, but Steve Wozniak recommends it. I don't have to tell you who he is. The following, however, caught my eye and pricked my philosopher's skepticism:

A recent study found that 87 percent of teenagers text daily, compared to the 61 percent who say they use Facebook, the next most popular choice. Girls send, on average, about 3,952 text messages per month, and boys send closer to 2,815 text messages per month, according to the study. (pp. 72-73)

Could this be right? If you divide 31 into 3,952 you get 127.48. So is the average girl sending that many text messages per day? I don't believe it.

Mitnick in a foonote sends us to this Pew Research page where we read something rather more plausible:

The number of text messages sent or received by cell phone owning teens ages 13 to 17 (directly through phone or on apps on the phone) on a typical day is 30.⁵ The number of messages exchanged for girls is higher, typically sending and receiving 40 messages a day. And for the oldest girls (15 to 17), this rises to a median of 50 messages exchanged daily.

And notice that the Pew figure is for messages sent and received, while Mitnick speaks only about messages sent.

So how much credibility does Mitnick have? This little spot check of mine suggests that he slapped his book together rather quickly. But there is plenty to be learned from it.

We all need to slow down, unplug, and look at things.

One of my aphorisms gives good advice:

How to Look at Things

Look at them as if for the first time — and the last.

Of Hyperlinks and Hyperbole

Mark Zuckerberg ". . . has destroyed the most powerful bridges that perhaps ever existed in the human history, the hyperlinks." Hyperbole to me, but you decide.

I Used to be a Human Being

Andrew Sullivan recounts the perils of life in the information superhighway's fast lane.

But our man certainly is verbose. One would have thought that all that smartphone use and all that manic tweeting and updating would have induced a bit of pithiness into his writing.

I love the Internet and use it everyday except when I'm on retreat. But I have never sent a text message in my life; I do not have a Twitter account; my Facebook page languishes; I do not own a smartphone; my TracPhone account costs me a paltry $99 per year and I have thousands of unused minutes; I have a laptop and an ipad for backup but rarely use them; in the wild I use map and compass, never having bothered to buy a GPS device; I am never out and about with something stuck into my ear.

I know people who begin their day by checking text messages. You do what you want, but I say that's no way to live.

More Sage Advice in How Not to Begin the Day.

Any Advice re: Firefox Browser Crashes?

Mainly I blog, but today I bleg.

I prefer the Firefox browser to Google Chrome, but the former crashes on a regular basis, like every other day. Yes, I have done the obvious things like make sure I am running the latest version. I take it that others have this crash problem. Any suggestions?

Quirky Spam Filter Warning

A commenter asked me to check if a comment of his had been sent to the spam corral there to languish in cyber-obscurity for all eternity or until the demise of this site, whichever comes first. Sure enough, there it was cheek-by-jowl with other good comments some of them from commenters whose other comments got through. So I sent them to their rightful places.

I'll have to check the spam file more often. I apologize for not doing so. If you submit a good comment and it doesn't appear, you can always shoot me an e-mail about it.

NRO: One Crappy Website

Not because of content, but because of presentation. The content is fine and in some cases excellent. But if I am reading a piece by Victor Davis Hanson or Kevin D. Williamson I am immediately put off and pissed off by a piece of freaking advertising right in the main body of the text. Not on the right sidebar, where it belongs, but smack in the text. And then there are hyperlinks, right in the main body of the text, to the articles of other writers. That's an outrage and ought to be protested by any writer who takes his work seriously. If I were Hanson I would write a nasty letter to the editor and say something like, "You want to publish my work? Then show me some respect. Get those advertisements and hyperlinks out of my text."

Relevant hyperlinks can be placed at the bottom of the main text.

And of course I am not objecting to advertising. Just don't assault me with noises and moving images and other distracting clutter. Isn't NRO supposed to be a conservative publication?

NRO is not unique in its offensiveness; indeed there are sites that are worse.

Now that my blood is up, I'm heading for the weight room.

Amazon Pricing and a Book Bleg

I'd like to get my hands on a copy of Maria Reicher, ed., States of Affairs (Ontos Verlag, 2009). I didn't find it in the ASU catalog and so I headed over to Amazon.com where I found a used copy for the entirely reasonable price of $9,999.99 plus $3.99 shipping and handling. I kid you not. You might think they'd throw in free S & H on orders over $5,000.00.

Maybe it is like this. The whole world is Amazon's oyster, and in that wide world there are quite a few ontology freaks, your humble correspondent one of them, and probably a couple crazy enough to fork over $10 K for this collection of essays. So why not ask a ridiculous price? You just might get it.

Does anyone in Ontology Land have a copy of this collection that he or she is willing to part with?

I will put it to good use. I have been invited to contribute an essay to a volume commemorating the late David M. Armstrong. My essay is tentatively entitled "Facts: Realism, Anti-Realism, Semi-Realism." So I need to be en rapport with all the latest literature.

Update (9/3). My explanation three paragraphs supra is mistaken. See Mark B.'s comment for a much better one.

Beware ‘Illegal Use of Software’ E-Mail Scam

I just deleted a suspicious looking e-mail that claimed that I had to appear in court in Costa Mesa re: illegal use of software. I of course did not open the zip file that would have invited a trojan horse or some other piece of malware into my motherboard. One dead giveaway was that while Mesa is not far from here, Costa Mesa is in California. I am a native Californian. (Which fact implies, by the way, that I am a native American!)

It is hard to fool a philosopher. We are trained skeptics. It is especially hard to fool a philosopher who knows his Schopenhauer. Homo homini lupus, et cetera.

Never click on any link thoughtlessly. To be on the safe side, delete suspicious looking e-mail from the subject line. Don't even open them.

Another rule of mine is: Never allow your body or soul to be polluted. So if I get an e-mail with a nasty subject line, I delete it straightaway. If the subject line is OK but the first line is hostile or nasty, same thing. Go ahead, punk. Make my day.

More info here.

Companion post: Why are People So Easy to Swindle?

We Were Under CyberAttack Yesterday

Typepad bloggers were subjected to yet further outages yesterday, outages Typepad claims were caused by a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Every outage an outrage to the 'blogsessive.' Let's hope we don't see a repeat of April's fiasco.

So I managed to snag only 744 pageviews yesterday. But traffic is overall good. 15 May saw a surge of 2298. And a few days ago I passed the 2.5 million pageviews mark. Presently total page views for this third version of MavPhil, commenced on Halloween 2008, stand at 2,503,919.

That averages to 1,235.28 pageviews per day. Total posts including this one: 5098. Total comments: 7018.

I thank you for your patronage.

Future Shock is Upon Us: Reefer Hacked

Holy Crapola!

Computer Problems Continue

I spent most of yesterday troubleshooting, but no fix yet. But adversity is good, up to a point. I have been forced to learn how to use this iPad Air. And I have learned more than I wanted to know about device drivers. Blogging from the iPad, however, is a royal PITA.

Addendum (1/16). Solved the problem myself yesterday with the help of a man down the street and in the process saved myself a lot of money. Good old American self-reliance can come in handy. Learned a lot by doing it myself, but I won't bore you with the details except to say that part of the trick is to think about the problem as carefully and systematically as possible, trying all the obvious solutions first. Turned out to be a hardware problem internal to the computer. But the fix was as easy as inserting a new network adapter which only costed a few dollars.