Well, there is also this news https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/netflix-subscribers-up-q2-earnings-1235673960/ showing that apparently many people just pay up to keep their access.

I don’t understand why any journalism site will advertise that they are using AI. It just says they don’t care about facts, research or quality in writing. Journalism is not simply spewing out a handful of paragraphs of text about a random subject. It is research that can take weeks or months, double checking facts, verifying sources and putting it all together into a well written article. AI texts have none of that. Quite the opposite.

His Night’s Dawn Trilogy got me into reading science fiction, so his books will always feel nostalgic to me. However I haven’t read him in years. It was just more of the same and my taste grew elsewhere. Especially towards shorter works and his books are doorstoppers.

I have been using https://getvau.lt for years. It is really just a very small JS lib. No need for paying for complicated services in my opinion.

I have been experimenting with this week and while I like it, I am still not sure I like it enough to find it worth paying. It is still mostly using Google and Bing as a search provider, so I haven’t so far found drastically different results than what I get from DuckDuckGo. Having a limit on searches also makes me a bit anxious when you are used to just searching for all kinds of stuff simply because I am lazy and don’t want to type in full URLs or go to my bookmarks. Lots of muscle memory that needs to be revamped. I do see the potential in how it can be customized with personalized lenses and lowering/raising specific domains. And the people behind it seem really nice on Discord, so I expect to see a lot of innovation in search that we haven’t seen from Google in years.

Totally agree on the news and journalism part. I subscribe to three different publications, which gets expensive, but it is worth it. Many newssites have also started to hide their articles behind paywalls, which is understandable, but also make sharing and discussing news with others on social media harder. And since most people can’t afford to subscribe to several news outlets, they will be limited in their exposure to different viewpoints - unless that particular newspaper is really good at challenging its readers and not just giving them what they think they want.

I think it is more like the protoweb. How this works is more similar to BBSes, Usenet, IRC networks and the like from 30 years ago. Truly distributed networks with no central controlling mechanism and the systems communicate by simply agreeing on the technical protocol. That was what the internet was designed for i the first place. The last couple of decades where everything has been centralized to a few big megacorps is an abomination.

George RR Martin was a fantastic short story writer in the 70s and 80s. Another benefit of short stories - writers usually finish those :D

Another recommendation of mine would be John Varley who was already popular in that time period and wrote some great progressive (for the time at least) stories.

I think that will turn out to be really important in the long run. The gamification aspect of karma score let to posts and comments leaning more to the quick and funny, and less to long and thoughtful. Especially in bigger subreddits. And then bots started to just repost and reuse previous highly upvoted stuff to boost their numbers even further.

It would not crash and burn but rather be messy and decrease in quality gradually over time. Sort of like Twitter.