Category: ranting

I started drafting this post back in early March. I never finished it in part because that draft became a trip down memory lane. I spent way too much time recalling the various incarnations of The Internet I have used over the years. But, it’s also because I had a hard time putting into words how exactly I see AI as threatening the Web.

My original opening was about Google’s announcement of AI summaries. I said:

I think the marriage of Gen AI with search is the end of this incarnation of the Internet. The Internet, as it is in my head. That version of the internet has been fading for a while but it’s what I think of as “The Internet”. Though I don’ think it’s the best version of The Internet.

And then blah blah blah about the text based pre-web Internet, Mosaic and Netscape, AOL, IRC, blogs, and so on and so forth. So, this post sat unfinished for months. Then, this week I read this article in The Economist: To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]. Maybe because they are focused on the economics of it, maybe because they are professional journalist, they have managed summarize the issue in a way that got me back to this post. Here is how they describe the threat:

As AI-powered search engines remove the need for people to trawl the web looking for sites with answers, they are stopping the flow of traffic to those pages. Those lost visitors mean lost money. The danger is that, as answer-engines take readers away, they are removing the incentive for content to be created. The technology that is opening up the web also threatens to kill it.

[…]

Human traffic—monetised with ads—is the economic fuel of much of the internet. A steady flow of traffic is also needed to build online communities. Wikipedia, whose visitor numbers have fallen by 8% in the past year by one measure, warns that AI summaries without attribution could deter people from contributing. Stack Overflow, a coding community whose traffic has more than halved, reports that fewer questions are being asked on its chat boards. Reddit, another giant forum, saw its share price fall by half earlier this year over concerns about bumpy search referrals.

The Economist, in To survive the AI age, the web needs a new business model [economist.com]

I’m not sure the death of the ad supported internet is a bad thing. In fact, I would not shed a tear over the end of the ‘everything is free! But just look at this ad real quick. And this ad. And these ones here…’ model. I remember how newspapers and magazines became more and more ads and less and less content as their business model died. Now it seems every site one The Internet is doing the same. Remember kids; if you aren’t paying for it, you are not the customer…).

On the other hand, I’m not sure an everything is paywalled because capitalism is a beast which cannot be satisfied Internet would be a very nice place either.

As the old model buckles, the web is changing. It is becoming less open, as formerly ad-funded content is hidden from bots, behind paywalls. Content firms are reaching people through channels other than search, from email newsletters to social media and in-person events. They are pushing into audio and video, which are harder for AI to summarise than text. Big brands are striking content-licensing deals with AI companies. Plenty of other transactions and lawsuits are going on. … Hundreds of millions of small sites—the internet’s collectively invaluable long tail—lack the clout to do this.

That paragraph sums up what I took like ten paragraphs to say while rambling about other versions of The Internet already lost. The multi-trillion dollar companies have already choked off most of the open, individual Internet. As AI drives the few remaining small-time creators off the open internet onto closed platforms and the everything else behind paywalls it’s going to be lonely place.

I still prefer the longer form of blogs to the short form videos of Instagram or Tik Tok, to the limited length text of X or Threads. But, most of the blogs I have followed over the past two decades have long been abandoned. Most are gone, 404’ed or domain squatted into un-being. Only accessible via the Wayback Machine. Some are still online but frozen in time. A few are still going, screening into the void.

I plan to continue. I’m just short of 25 years squatting here on Confusion.cc, navel gazing and ranting. I started this blog to keep in touch with people I knew in college while I, and other friends, were studying and traveling overseas. I not in contact with any of those people anymore. I doubt any of them ever read these posts, very few people do or ever have. I do post these to various social media sites (or apps these days), as that’s how most people consume the internet and maybe a few will read my rants. I don’t style myself a ‘content creator’ this is all just me sharing my thoughts and photography, and documenting my own journey: no ads included.

This week I dropped my oldest daughter off in Melbourne to start her adventures in higher education. She’s just about to turn 17, and she is starting a Foundation Year program. An intensive year that replaces the final couple of years of high school or A-Levels or whatever your local final pre-college schooling is. Assuming she passes, she will go straight into the University next year.

I hope she has a great time. I believe, and have always told my daughters, that they should “get away from home” for college. Because, I saw what a difference distance made to the experience. When I was at George Mason I had a couple of friends who were local, in the sense that their family was a commute away not a trip away. They could go home any night for dinner, laundry or to fix their parent’s computer issues. And they did.

This created a situation where they never really left home. Parent want to see their kids, and free laundry (done for you!) and home cooking are a powerful sirens call for college kids. But, in the end, this created a situation where people struggled to cut the umbilical cord, where it was easy to put off adulting a little longer. In the end this was suffocating. I had one friend that realised this, and he transferred to another school several hours away. It made a world of difference for him. So we all came the conclusion that if you are going to go to college, go. Go far. Go far enough that you can’t run home on a whim or in an emergency, you can’t stop by for dinner or spend the weekend in your bedroom at home. You have to grow up and deal with it all yourself.

Now, I’m watching my daughter put into practice this oft repeated pearl of parental wisdom, and it’s hard. In addition to being my daughter, for the past few years she has been a great friend. Countless morning sitting at our local Starbucks during Covid lockdowns. Sitting at home and watching so many movies: sharing the classics —Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Thing, Alien, even 2001: A Space Odyssey— and discovering new classics. Hours of playing BotW and TotK, and Hollow Knight.

Being able to be a parent and also being a friend has been amazing.

So it’s with a little sadness —and a few tears— and a whole lot of excitement and joy that I said “bye for now” to her today. I wish her good luck, the best of luck. I hope she has a wonderful adventure, makes lifelong friends and some new core memories. But I can’t wait until she comes home on breaks to visit and we can sit at Starbucks or watch a new movie. I’m counting the days till her first break.

If you listen real close, you can hear them
whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen, you hear it? – Carpe – hear it? – Carpe, Carpe Diem, seize the day [Tori],
make your [life] extraordinary.

John Keating, in Dead Poets Society

Saw this guy along the canal the other day.

I usually use Adobe’s Lightroom Mobile to take photos, but it has some issues. This photo was taken in the native iPhone camera app. The biggest issue with Lightroom is Adobe does not seem to be able to keep up with the iPhone hardware. I have a iPhone 16 Pro Max and it has 4 zoom setting, one for each of the three lenses it has plus an extra 5x zoom.

While Lightroom has, for a long time now, had three options: ultra wide corresponding to .5, Telephoto for 2 and Wide for 1. But, it’s been months now and no update to add the 5x option.

Adobe has been slacking for a while now. It took almost a year to release the iPad upgrade for Express, which broke my workflow. And now they are slacking on basic hardware features in Lightroom Mobile. What are they doing? They seem some obsessed with AI these days that they can’t push out basic app updates. Get your shit together Adobe, its a fucking subscription service, there should be updates every month or quarter at least.

The Trump administration is apparently looking to introduce a “baby bonus” —a cash payment to people who have babies— in an attempt to reverse the decline in the US fertility rate. The total fertility rate in the US is very low, 1.62 children per woman in 2023. And it’s been falling most of this century:

Higher than a lot of developed countries but well below the replacement rate for about 2.1 children per woman. I always thought the religious people in the US were breeding enough to make up for the others? Harvey Danger lied to me [youtube.com].

This sort of paying for babies has been tried a few times. Wikipedia has a page on baby bonuses that lists, some 11 counties. Most are piddling amounts but let’s look at two places where a similar sort of bonus as the US is discussion were introduced: Australia and Singapore.

Australia

Introduced a baby bonus in early 2000’s. $3,000 in 2004, raising to as much as $5437 in 2012. Slashed to around $2,000 in 2014. Did it affect the fertility rate?

Maybe? The fertility rate rose, a bit, from 1.76 in 2002 to 2.02 in 2008. But then it fell steadily from 2008 and was sitting at 1.64 in 2023. 

Singapore

Singapore has a more complex system including cash gift, matching savings, tax credits and so on. The initial scheme was introduced in 2001, I don’t know the amounts at introduction but it has risen. In 2008 and 2012, when my kids were born, it was around a $6,000 cash gift, for first and second child (it goes up after that). Today the cash gift is $11,000 for first and second child. Has there been any change in fertility rate?

Hahaha! Singapore’s fertility rate in 2000 was 1.34. Today it’s .94. In a few generations there will be no Singaporeans.

China

As a bonus let’s look at China, because this week the Economist has an article on China’s attempts to pay for babies. Some local in China has offered up to $38,000 all-in (including things other than cash, like paid leave.) But, it’s unclear if it is helping any. One province saw a 17% increase in births in 2024 but a lot of that can be attributed to 2024 coinciding with the Chinese Zodiac’s year of the dragon, traditionally the most auspicious year to have a kid. 

The best quote in the article is this one talking about our a particular local, Hothot’s, offering:

Wang Feng of the University of California, Irvine, thinks Hohhot’s policy will not “make a dent” in the city’s population decline. “Babies cannot be bought,” he says. “The cost is lifelong and it’s not just monetary.”

The Economist, China’s $38,000 baby formula [economist.com]

China, Singapore and Japan are bad, but Korea is leading the race to the bottom:

This is from GapMinder, you can play with it here [gapminder.org].

So, yea. This is a problem for a lot of counties. But how fucked is everyone? Seriously fucked. In fact, South Korea is so bad, it’s doomed, past the point of now return. At least according to this Kurzgesagt video:

So, this is an existential crisis, if you want your culture and/or country to live on, you need to find ways of encouraging people to have more babies. A lot more. Quickly. But really, most of the “first world” is doomed at this point.

One last thing, a lot of discussion around this the Trump Administration’s discussion of a Baby Bonus includes an unhealthy dose of modern dysfunctional politics. It’s sad that we have to talk about racism and the return of Nazi ideology, but here we are. The nasty, racist, christo-fascist streak in MAGA must be worried sick about the end of (white) America because empowered, woke, women aren’t having enough babies! Er mah gawd.

The Hill quotes Art Caplan, a professor of medical ethics at the New York University School of Medicine:

“If you’re really interested in babies, there are plenty of immigrants here whose kids are being deported,” Caplan said. “If you’re interested in babies, there are plenty of people who would come here and become citizens and bring their babies.”

Caplan argued that what the Trump administration wants is the “right kind of babies.” He called the notion “morally offensive.”

Jeff Arnold, Would $5K ‘baby bonus’ be enough to boost US birth rate? [thehill.com] published by The Hill

At least bribing people to have babies is better than the Handmaiden-esque alternative.

For years people have warned that mobile phones are marking every teenager depressed… but new research suggests older people who use smartphones experience less cognitive decline [theguardian.com].

Well, at least future old people will all be aware of how depressed they are and remember why they are so angry…