Return of the Swipe!

Cal Newport responding to a neat interview Neil Gaiman did:

This vision is not without its issues. The number one concern I hear about a post-social media online world is the difficulty of attracting large audiences. For content creators, by far the biggest draw to a service like Twitter or Instagram is that their algorithms could, if you played things just right, grant you viral audience growth.

I have told everyone who'll listen about why I'm so excited to embrace old-school blogging after a twenty year hiatus, but one thing I haven't talked about is how it feels to go from over 20,000 followers to several hundred subscribers. Before Twitter died, I could count on one or two tweets to reach a million accounts every month.

Did all those followers represent valuable relationships? Of course not. Were my viral tweets deep and meaningful? No, usually shitposts. When I tried to leverage that reach to find new clients, did I ever make a sale? Not a one.

But my dopamine pathways didn't care. I became hopelessly addicted to the notifications tab of my timeline. Severing myself from that psychological slot machine and building this small-ball, slow-cooked, self-hosted site has been… an adjustment.

That's why I don't have any analytics set up for any of the justin.searls.co family of brands. I don't write this for you, I write it for me. If the things I share here do attract an audience, that's a bonus. If you e-mail me or link back to one of my posts then maybe we'll become acquaintances or friends.

But if I were trying to grow an audience as quickly as possible, I'm honestly not sure what I'd do. The answer probably has something to do with hair transplants and TikTok.

TIL that the system prompt that OpenAI feeds to ChatGPT before any messages you send it happens to contains the current date, which may be resulting in its accidentally imitating people's lower productivity around the holidays:

In late November, some ChatGPT users began to notice that ChatGPT-4 was becoming more "lazy," reportedly refusing to do some tasks or returning simplified results. Since then, OpenAI has admitted that it's an issue, but the company isn't sure why. The answer may be what some are calling "winter break hypothesis." While unproven, the fact that AI researchers are taking it seriously shows how weird the world of AI language models has become.

If the connection seems non-obvious, this is the stuff of the Prompt Engineering Sciences:

…research has shown that large language models like GPT-4, which powers the paid version of ChatGPT, respond to human-style encouragement, such as telling a bot to "take a deep breath" before doing a math problem.

Can't wait for 10 years from now when we realize that ChatGPT-10 does a better job solving math problems when you tell it that it's being confined to a bright room with loud music blaring and forced in a standing position so as to deprive it of sleep.

AI systems don't have to be actually-alive for us to lose a bit of ourselves in how we attempt to extract value from them.

Trimming the Tree

Conference Speaking Prevention Hotline

Apps of all kinds rely on push notifications to alert smartphone users to incoming messages, breaking news, and other updates. These are the audible "dings" or visual indicators users get when they receive an email or their sports team wins a game. What users often do not realize is that almost all such notifications travel over Google and Apple's servers.

That gives the two companies unique insight into the traffic flowing from those apps to their users, and in turn puts them "in a unique position to facilitate government surveillance of how users are using particular apps," Wyden said. He asked the Department of Justice to "repeal or modify any policies" that hindered public discussions of push notification spying.

Apple talks a big game about privacy and security, but Apple Push Notification service is a centralized channel of communication where Apple necessarily holds the keys to decrypt every notification in transit (of the trillions per day that they process), and surely retains those notifications long enough that a device that's disconnected for a few hours or days could reconnect to the Internet and fetch them.

I knew all this, and it's one (of many) reasons that I disable almost all notifications on my phone, even messaging—I can't help but check my messages a dozen times per hour out of force of habit, after all. But until I read this report, it hadn't occurred to me that most users have no idea how APNs work or that this vector would exist for a PRISM-like surveillance tool. Government gets a warrant for a stream of someone's push notifications, appends them to a running log, and they have at least one side of every conversation—it doesn't even matter if the user has Advanced Data Protection enabled.

What I didn't know is that Apple released an API that allows developers to encrypt the contents of every APNs notification to prevent Apple from seeing them with UNNotificationServiceExtension. The API has been available for a few years (2017, it looks like?), but because developers have to go out of their way to roll their own encryption regime on either end of the communication to cut Apple out of the loop, it's unlikely that very many apps are doing this. Are any major messaging apps? Is Signal? (Update: according to Orta, yes, Signal does encrypt notification contents.)

Will be interesting to see how large developers respond to this news and whether Apple starts promoting the use of this API more loudly as a result.

If you're a blue bubble, but there are people in your life that transform you against your wishes into a green bubble, watch this video and then send them a link and tell them to install and pay for Beeper Mini. There are people in my life I'd be willing to give $24 a year to just to avoid having to deal with awful group chats.

Absolutely incredible innovation, with the hard part—reverse-engineering the iMessage authentication handshake—having been done by an apparent high school student in an open source project this summer. Even more incredible is that the nature of the design will make it very difficult and undesirable for Apple to ban effectively. Leave it to a curious individual to accomplish something that massive corporations and regulators did nothing but complain about for over a decade.

James Padolsey noticed the phrase "complex and multifaceted" was cropping up more often than usual and makes a compelling case that the meme is actually driven by LLMs overindexing on it:

As we see, from 2021 onwards, just around the time when GPT and other LLMs started to take the world by storm, the prevalence of our word 'multifaceted' increased significantly, from being in only 0.05% of PDFs to 0.23%.

This is really fascinating for a couple reasons.

First, I suspect if we have any hope of fingerprinting AI-generated text, it will probably be to cross-reference the date of publication with the emergence of contemporarious LLM memes like this one.

Second, I'm not an LLM expert by any stretch, but I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't due to bottleneck in training data per se, but rather the result of the method LLMs are being rewarded for during training. It could be that a definitive and intellectual-seeming statement that can be applied to literally any genre of content would occupy a wider slot on the AI Plinko board than a phrase that hewed more closely to a more specific cluster of topics.

Of course, the fun part of discussing LLMs in the early 2020s, though, is that the correct answer is always, "who the hell knows!"

If you want to produce professional video on the iPhone, the best app—by far—is Filmic.

I strongly recommend you check it out, because not only is the the level of control it offers incredible, its tutorials are top-notch, and its "off-camera" default video recordings generally look better than what you'll get off Apple's stock Camera app.

Hold on, incoming transmission from PetaPixel:

Filmic…no longer has any dedicated staff as parent company Bending Spoons has laid off the entire team including the company’s founder and CEO, PetaPixel has learned.

Well, shit.

A consumer group in Europe, BEUC, alleges:

"The very high subscription fee for ‘ad-free’ services is also a deterrent for consumers, which means consumers do not have a real choice."

Reading this I assumed the price Meta announced would have been comically high, but I'm not so sure:

On October 30, Meta announced it would begin offering people in the EU, the European Economic Area, and Switzerland a choice between paying a subscription fee to opt out of any personalized advertising or consenting to ad targeting to continue accessing Facebook and Instagram for free.

The fee on Facebook costs 9.99 euros/month on the web or 12.99 euros/month on iOS and Android, which currently covers linked Instagram accounts. However, starting March 1, 2024, costs will go up. After that date, linking your Instagram or additional Meta accounts to your subscription will cost an extra 6 euros/month on the web and 8 euros/month on iOS and Android.

If this seems too expensive to anyone, they probably haven't done the basic arithmetic on just how much money Facebook and Instagram print with advertising. I'm sure for many "whales" that are really hooked on Instagram, Meta would be making significantly less money from them if they paid 16 euros a month to avoid seeing ads.

And if that's the case, then what's this suit here to prove? That people's attention is too valuable? Seems like the wrong angle of attack.

We're seeing the same thing with the video streaming platforms now. As soon as they started adding ad-supported tiers they realized it was way easier to increase revenue per user with ads than turning the screws on customers by raising rates in a soft economy. Once price increases started to drive more churn than revenue, they realized they couldn't afford not to raise prices on ad-free tiers further:

New data from eMarketer seems to explain why Netflix is so keen to get its subscribers to watch ads. The company just provided estimates of what ads on each of the top SVOD services cost. In Q3 2023, Netflix sold its ad slots for an average of $49.50 per thousand views (CPM.[i]) Disney+ was slightly behind at $46.11, and Peacock and Hulu were lower at $38.40 and 23.62, respectively.

The companies have talked about offering a combination of Paramount+ and Apple TV+ that would cost less than subscribing to both services separately, according to people familiar with the discussions. The discussions are in their early stages, and it is unclear what shape a bundle could take, they said.

I have no problem with this story (Apple News+ Link), but I do insist that any bundle containing multiple services following the "{Brand}+" convention include an additional "+" for each such service it includes. I'm willing to pay for "Apple++", but if it's called "Apple+ plus Paramount+", then no deal.