The site stats tell me that my about page at /about is consistently one of the most visited pages on this website. That confirms what everyone already knows: people are very curious, sometimes even nosy.
Wouter Groenveld opined on his personal blog (I recommend adding it to your feed collection) that blogs should have About pages. I submit for the record that I wholeheartedly agree (albeit my About pages have a different emphasis).
I've been mulling over this clash between AI and the content it's trained on for some time now. As a frequent user of AI and a regular online publisher, I see both sides of the coin. I'm well aware that the articles I put out there probably end up as fodder for some AI training algorithm. And while I know many writers are upset about their work being used this way without compensation, I personally don't get too riled up about it.
I came across an interesting take on blogging and AI by Greg Morris, an independent blogger. He states that while he sees the issue of AI language models training on internet writing without compenstation or authorization, he is not personally bothered by it. From his perspective, “once I publish something online, I’ve pretty much let it go. It’s out there in the wild, free for anyone to use, maybe even to profit from. And I’m okay with that. It’s a part of the deal you accept when you decide to publish online.”
I concur in part and dissent in part.
I concur with him that there is nothing anyone can do from keeping their writing or media from being used by language models or scraped for other nefarious purposes. There are ways to limit exposure, but once one puts his or her writing online, he or she cannot fully control what happens with it. While I accept this, however, I disagree with Mr. Morris’ take that it is not a problem because “[y]our work s both yours and not yours at the same time.” I think my work is mine unless otherwise explicitly stated. I just accept that we live in an imperfect world and I do not think some of the bad or annoying things on the internet should deter people from building their own digital homes.
A collection of hyperlinks to collections of hyperlinks.
I came across a good post with links to bloggers who share links on Jeremy Keith’s website, adactio.com. I added the adactio links feed along with a few of the link feeds noted in the post to the Links category of my personal feed collection. I may start sharing a few links each day here at The Emu Café Social, but note that I share 21 external links from around the web (with commentary) in each edition of my Saturday New Leaf Journal newsletter, The Newsletter Leaf Journal (note you can subscribe to the newsletter via RSS). In fact, I should organize the hundreds of links I share from my newsletter into a public Git repository before I start any new projects…
Publish a post. About anything! It can be long or short, a photo or a video, maybe a quote or a link to something you found interesting. Don’t sweat it. Just blog. Share something you created, or amplify something you enjoyed. It doesn’t take much. The act of publishing will be a gift for you and me.
I came across a blog post titled Just Blog by Frank Meeuwsen. This post alerted me to an interesting “birthday” project by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. Mr. Mulenwig asked for people to blog for his birthday and link to his post. Ideally, the links should show up as pingbacks on his article. His post said that pingbacks would be closed on January 11 (unfortunately I only read Mr. Meeuwsen’s post on the 13th), but I figured I would try sending one. I like what Mr. Mullenweg is doing and it is making me think of some interesting ideas in the blogroll/webring sphere. If this pingback happens to work — this site is for my short-form writing. My long-form writing is available at The New Leaf Journal. Both sites are powered by WordPress and hosted on a Hetzner VPS server.
From Mr. Heinrik Karlsson’s “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”
Having idiosyncratic interests that grow in complexity means that if you pursue them too far you will end up obsessed with things that no one else around you cares about.
I feel under attack. I will have people know that some articles in my series on interpreting hair color in Japanese anime, manga, and visual novels have actually done alright. The better example of people not caring about my idiosyncratic interests is actually my al|together visual novel review project, but I think that endeavor is genuinely worthwhile.
