From what I remember of the original announcement, there were a couple of other topics that Apple also found it annoying that Stewart might cover, and one of them was the things companies are calling AI. NYT source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/19/business/media/jon-stewart-the-problem-ends.html

To people asking why Stewart would make a show for Apple in the first place, in some circles Apple is seen as a basically ethical company. I won't comment on whether it's valid to see them this way, but they make a lot of comforting noises regarding privacy and green tech. Plus, being what amounts to a broadcaster, one might expect them to keep their hands off shows being made for them.

What I find interesting to think about is, if China is able to apply pressure on Apple concerning shows made for them, what kind of pressure could they have over TikTok?

It remains the only good way to track hundreds of websites at once.

Who even asked them?

Steven Universe (it's accessible to adults on a different level than kids)

Much of the old web is still there. A lot of old sites have gone dark, but there are still some that remain, and some have persisted for surprisingly long.

Usenet and IRC still exist! As public and distributed services, like the Fediverse and the World Wide Web itself, one node can go down but others remain. Things that don't remain? AOL IM; Yahoo Messenger; MSN Messenger; Google Talk (in its original form).

When everyone chased after social media, many people declared the old web dead. They were wrong. When mobile platforms hit it big, a lot of people thought the days of the desktop PC were gone. They were wrong too. The demise of Google Reader was an attempt to kill off RSS, but a lot of sites still have feeds. And a lot of blogs still exist, even if it's getting harder to find them due to Google Search's ongoing decay.

Corporations have big PR budgets, and a lot of tech reporters are uncritical about what they hype. Witness the attempts to get cryptocurrency, NFTs, and now LLMs, to take. But we do not have to buy what they're selling.

We don't need a new internet. The old one survives, for now at least. But we have to remember it exists, and make it easier to find.

Until a couple of weeks ago, in Brunswick GA, sad down and pitiful up through AT&T, along with easy-to-exceed bandwidth caps (for wired internet!) that twice hit us with large overage fees. That was about 80 or 90 before extra fees, although phone service was included too. Now we're going with a regional fiber optic outfit that offers about 500 down and up, for about $50/mo.

The problem with screening by AI is there's going to be false positives, and it's going to be extremely challenging and frustrating to fight them. Last month I got a letter for a speeding infraction that was automated: it was generated by a camera, the plate read in by OCR, the letter I received (from "Seat Pleasant, Maryland," lol) was supposedly signed off by a human police officer, but the image was so blurry that the plate was practically unreadable. Which is what happened: it got one of the letters wrong, and I got a speeding ticket from a town I've never been to, had never even heard of before I got that letter. And the letter was full of helpful ways to pay for and dispense with the ticket, but to challenge it I had to do it it writing, there was no email address anywhere in the letter. I had to go to their website and sift through dozens of pages to find one that had any chance of being able to do something about it, and I made a couple of false steps along the way. THEN, after calling them up and explaining the situation, they apologized and said they'd dismiss the charge--which they failed to do, I got another letter about it just TODAY saying a late fee had now been tacked on.

And this was mere OCR, which has been in use for multiple decades and is fairly stable now. This pleasant process is coming to anything involving AI as a judging mechanism.

@Narrrz There are many possibilities, enough that option paralysis can easily strike. Godot has a lot of buzz around it and is open source.

I am sure that part of it is how discoverability has diminished over time. It seems there are fewer ways to find interesting independent things on the web. But, I'm also sure that some of it is there's fewer cool things to find.

With that said, please enjoy endless.horse, which is one of those cool things the likes of which I wish finding were easier.

Pull up a chair and let me tell you about a little game called Nethack.

I am at the point where I think, Reddit may well bounce back in general, for there are lots of people whose only experience of the web is using huge corpo-sites, but I still won't be there except for the cases where I have to use it for some crazy reason. The Fediverse feels a lot more hopeful and open, like the web was in the early days, and I much prefer that to the monolithic corporate site system. So wherever possible, I will pass on that.

The Fediverse is far from flawless, but maybe it'll fix its issues over time. Let's find out.