An hour of AI “comedy” (that sucks)
Read to the end for a good review of the smoking area of Belfast International Airport
Welcome to Garbage Weekend. It’s the internet garbage you know and love, but in a format that’s easier to read while you migrate your newsletter.
PLATFORMS
We’re getting a bit more clarity on how Threads will federate. The post I linked to is very long, but it’s worth even just skimming. Especially the roadmap section, which reveals Meta was imagining an initial blended Mastodon/Threads hybrid experience. The post also brings up some important concerns about Meta colonizing the fediverse, possibly in an attempt to snuff it out.
Users already figured out how to hack TikTok’s new e-commerce features. You make a store on TikTok. List a product, doesn’t matter what it is. Tag the product in a video. Go super viral. Stanley cups are only the beginning. There’s going to be so much viral e-commerce junk emerging over the next couple months.
X appears to be readying a new mid-video paywall feature. The way it would work is that certain videos will only play a snippet unless you’re a paying subscriber. This is actually so idiotic that I’m having trouble fully articulating why. Depending on how this is done, it will result in either two things: Users making super short videos to skirt the paywall or just a completely drop in engagement on the app. There is, frankly, no video content exclusive to X that I could imagining anyone paying for — including the porn.
Right-wing video platform Rumble is being investigated by the SEC. Fascinating how every right-wing social platform eventually devolves into a rats nest of financial crimes. I wonder why that keeps happening!
WEB3 AND THE METAVERSE
Fox News is reportedly exploring blockchain-solutions for dealing with AI scraping. This is a real “let them fight” situation. According to Axios, the Verify blockchain protocol would be used to track content that’s going into AI databases as a way to negotiate licensing deals. Honestly, internet publishers turning into NFTs to broker better deals with massive AI companies is just whacky enough that I’m kind of into it.
The SEC was hacked because they didn’t have two-factor authentification on. The hack resulted in a tweet with false information about the very real decision this week to approve Bitcoin ETFs.
I, respectfully, do not agree with this take from Om Malik that Apple’s Vision Pro is a TV killer. Malik argues that a good use case for the Vision Pro is a replacement for a home theater, which it could be, sure. In most cases except for the one I would say is the most important. You still can’t share anything you do inside of a headset with others. Which I think is a real dealbreaker still for most people. Even as we spend all of our time inside of little smartphone-powered filter bubbles, we can still physically lean over to one another and go, “look at this.” You can’t do that with a headset. lol and while I’m being respectfully contrarian, I also don’t agree with podcaster Peter Kafka’s complaint that the Vision Pro will basically just be “goggles to use the same apps that are on your phone or Mac.” That’s exactly what it should do. It’s 2024, there should be, in my opinion, literally not functional difference between the screens we use and wear. Which leads me to…
OUR ROBOT OVERLORDS
The question everyone keeps asking, where is Apple’s AI product? This is coming around again due to the mega-hyped announcement of Rabbit’s new AI “pocket companion”. Which, to completely contradict what I said above, I do think is neat. Anyways, it’s actually beginning to feel weird that Siri is still so bad.
The AI George Carlin stuff is a mess. Former Mad TV comedian Will Sasso has a podcast (that sucks) called Dudesy and I guess the gimmick is that it’s sorta-kinda produced by AI? I am unclear how and, honestly, I don’t care. As part of their AI gimmick they produced an hour of AI “comedy” (that sucks) done in the style of George Carlin. I saw some folks on X saying, “please don’t watch it to give them attention/views.” But actually, I think you should, just to fully understand how absolutely fucking terrible it is. Also, the voice model they used for Carlin sounds like Joe Biden. Here’s a link. And, just to be clear, all the stuff they’re claiming is being run by an AI or whatever in their show is almost definitely not an AI and is almost certainly faked.
Are AI girlfriends becoming an actual problem? I am skeptical of this. Not skeptical in the sense that I don’t think it’s real, I just think “AI girlfriends” might be replacing like anime body pillows or other kinds of pre-existing niche sexual behavior. I mean, the Cult of the Radiant Gadget was 14 years ago at this point and there have been guys marrying video game characters and holograms since forever. So I’m not totally ready to accept just yet that AI is somehow making this more prevalent.
FANDOMS
The Internet Archive has the entire DatPiff mixtape catalog now. This was sent to me by a reader named Milos. There are over 350,000 songs in the collection.
A YouTuber made a “Nintendo Playstation”. Every single minute of this video was, frankly, terrifying. I completely expected it to explode several times. Great content.
STREAMERS
We’ve reached peak YouTuber burn out. A handful of big creators are walking away from regular YouTube schedules to some degree. This does happen fairly often and tends to be generational. Every five years or so, a whole cohort of creators decide it’s time to leave the internet (couldn’t be me). But I do think there’s a big shift in terms of what YouTube, as a platform, wants from its creators: Consistent output that can be watched on televisions. And I could see that being especially oppressive to the 2010s creators who were able to get big from making algorithmic content that didn’t fit in traditional formats.
YouTube is beefing up their podcast tools. Honestly, I think this is a huge idea. Not sure civilians, as it were, are aware of how annoying it still is to get a podcast up on the internet. Even the easiest services, like Anchor, are terrible once you start having more than a couple episodes online. YouTube has a lot of issues still, but you can’t deny that their CMS is really, really good.
MEMES AND TRENDS
Food TikToker Lynn Yamada Davis died. This is really sad! I loved her videos. They were a really special thing and I’m really happy she and her family got to have fun online making them for as long they did.
A redditor has two very rare goldfishes. Their names are Chicken Nugget and Tater Tot.
Here comes the weird internet again (maybe). Glitch CEO Anil Dash argued in Rolling Stone that the current internet landscape is beginning to resemble the digital wilderness of the late 2000s. I definitely see the similarities, but I also try and stop myself from sliding too comfortably into nostalgia glasses for the web. (I’m not always successful.) I think the internet is cyclical and things do come back around again, but they tend not to really ever be exactly the same. Much of the 2000s internet was defined by connection speeds. So maybe another way to think about the return of Weird Internet is that the web of the 2020s is what the web of the 2000s would have been like if we all had 5G.
DRAMA
The Proud Boys are dwindling down to nothing. Look at that. All it took was law enforcement sleepwalking through the better part of a decade, allowing them to organize an insurrection, and a few dozen indictments.
Is The New York Times just Facebook? It’s another argument made by Glitch CEO Anil Dash recently. (His second mention in this week’s issue.) This I totally agree with.
AROUND THE WORLD
Inflation in Argentina hit 200%. I’ve seen a lot of leftists making jokes about this, but what the country’s new president, Javier Milei, is doing is madness and a lot of people are going to get hurt. Possibly even Milei if the majority of the country starts getting paid in milk and Bitcoin.
British internet is having a big moment over jungle (the EDM genre (sorry British readers, need to explain this a bit for Americans)). Here’s another good remix.
Controversial streamer Johnny Somali is being deported from Japan. He was in jail for weeks and has to pay a fee and most likely won’t be ever allowed back in the country. Based on everything I’ve ever heard about the Japanese legal system, he is very lucky that’s all that happened here.
SOME FUN STUFF
P.S. here’s a good review of the smoking area of Belfast International Airport.
***Any typos in this email are purpose actually, but with more of carefree weekend vibe***
All due to respect to Anil, but I think his point about "New York Times = Facebook" is a perspective of someone who doesn't use either of them, but only sees viral snippets of both. He gives it away with point three, "so ubiquitous as to be unavoidable even by those who see how broken it is."
The online left is absolutely obsessed with the NY Times and seems convinced that its headlines drive policy and swing elections, but there's absolutely no evidence that they have that kind of influence in the 2020s. They're ascribing Claudine Gay's firing to Times coverage, but this is conjecture. (Maybe the donors withholding millions of dollars of donations had something to do with it.)
And people who aren't on Facebook are obsessed with Facebook because they think the News Feed algorithm is massively influential, but again the evidence on this is extremely weak, and Facebook has changed a lot since the mid-'10s.
That smoking area review is 10000% why i will keep reading this no matter where ya go. As for the cycles of internet- history doesn’t repeat itself but it sure as shit rhymes