In the past two weeks, a Project Sail publicity brochure has begun appearing in mailboxes. Featuring images of families in clothing emblazoned with the American flag, the mailing appeared to be an attempt to appeal to the conservative-leaning county’s sense of patriotism.

That’s so blatant.

Probably the only reason it isn’t working is that the company behind it is based in Silicon Valley.

They’re going to have to find someone “from around here”. (And go behind their backs to pay off city leadership.)

Those two should not be counted in the same category.

“If implemented correctly” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement.

Affects is such a strange way to put it. Like, “they caught a case of child labor.”

Can it hurry up and ruin the AI hype, too?

Waiting for the next headline where we find out the AI has been taking bribes.

The raid drew criticism as footage showed the workers shackled at their wrists, ankles and waist.

It has now emerged that Trump asked his officials to “encourage” the detained South Korean workers to extend their stay in the country and train American employees, foreign ministry officials in Seoul said at a briefing.

WTF.

Came looking for this comment and was not disappointed.

Leeds told Ars that the RSL standard doesn’t just benefit publishers, though. It also solves a problem for AI companies, which have complained in litigation over AI scraping that there is no effective way to license content across the web.

"If they’re using it, they pay for it, and if they’re not using it, they don’t pay for it.

…

But AI companies know that they need a constant stream of fresh content to keep their tools relevant and to continually innovate, Leeds suggested. In that way, the RSL standard “supports what supports them,” Leeds said, “and it creates the appropriate incentive system” to create sustainable royalty streams for creators and ensure that human creativity doesn’t wane as AI evolves.

This article tries to slip in the idea that creators will benefit from this arrangement. Just like with Spotify and Getty Images, it’s the publisher that’s getting paid.

Then they decide how much they’ll let trickle down to creators.

Sincere question: Why was there a separate mobile domain in the first place?

“I pay for access to music I get access to music.” And with ChatGPT, you pay for access to an LLM, and you get access to an LLM.

Just because you personally don’t value that as a service doesn’t inherently invalidate it as a business model, now or in the future.

Netflix lost subscribers in 2011 and 2022, that didn’t kill the company. Uber stock tumbled during the pandemic and again in 2022. In 2023, Wired was writing about how “despite its popularity… [Spotify] has long struggled to turn consistent profits.”

This is a whole wave of companies where the survivors seem financially stable now, but had a long history of being propped up by venture capital and having an unclear path to profitability.

The only thing you’ve successfully shown is different so far is that you don’t think it’s a real service.

I generally agree, but I still don’t see anything that differentiates its trajectory from the Spotifys, Ubers, and Netflixes of the world.

What are you talking about? ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. all have “subscription fees generating recurring revenue” and are famously “exploiting a gap in regulations to undercut an existing market.”

Uber took 15 years to become profitable, and Spotify took 18 years.

Again, I’m not defending any of them (they all exploit the people who make their service work), but so far AI seems to be going down the same road.

Isn’t that the case with a lot of modern tech?

I vaguely recall Spotify and Uber being criticized relying on the “get big first and figure out how to monetize later” model.

(Not defending them, just wondering what’s different about AI.)

WKUK: It’s Illegal To Say

13.5%, slipping to about 12%

I know that 1.5% could mean hundreds of businesses, but this still seems like such a nothing burger.

Technically, nothing.

In practice, who do you know that’s using it and doesn’t run Arch, by the way?

My point isn’t that IRC/XMPP aren’t technically capable.

It’s that they’re not designed for non-technical users.

I want corporate social media to die. Mastodon and Piefed are far from killing the beast, but they’ve made the more progress than most projects have seen in a long time.

I want corporate messaging to die. Matrix is far from killing the beast, but for a little while, at least it was trying.

I wouldn’t mind going back to IRC roots if it could be made more user friendly and integrate voice and video chat.

Good UX/UI goes a long way to make it so non-technical people can join and strengthen the network.

Seems untenable.

If I live in Europe and run a mastodon instance open to anyone, it’s not like I or my server fall under a Mississippi law.

What are they going to do, sue my Serbian ass? Serve a restraining order to my Norwegian server?

Damn. That sucks. (Edit: Referring to the comments saying Matrix is dead and dying.)

I get that IRC and XMPP are more stable and built around federation from the ground up, but… they’re not Discord replacements.

That was IMHO, the point of Matrix/Element.

Tell me if I’m wrong, but a significant part of a network’s resilience is the number of nodes and users.

Without a glowup or some kind of repackaging, IRC/XMPP are doomed to stay niche.

I smell survivorship bias.

I have a 20% hit rate on this (literally 1 out of 5). It was okay; we caught up, chatted for a couple of weeks and then realized there wasn’t much left to go on.

If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t.