#income from app reviews

[marklikely]

letterboxd app apparently has added video ads bc i tried to view my activity and got hit with a 15 second unskippable ad... and deleted the entire app within 10 seconds of encountering this...

[newbieaffiliatemarketer]

Cash4SMS Review - Make Money With Your Phone Texts

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Humans in the loop” must detect the hardest-to-spot errors, at superhuman speed

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

If AI has a future (a big if), it will have to be economically viable. An industry can't spend 1,700% more on Nvidia chips than it earns indefinitely – not even with Nvidia being a principle investor in its largest customers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39883571

A company that pays 0.36-1 cents/query for electricity and (scarce, fresh) water can't indefinitely give those queries away by the millions to people who are expected to revise those queries dozens of times before eliciting the perfect botshit rendition of "instructions for removing a grilled cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible":

https://www.semianalysis.com/p/the-inference-cost-of-search-disruption

Eventually, the industry will have to uncover some mix of applications that will cover its operating costs, if only to keep the lights on in the face of investor disillusionment (this isn't optional – investor disillusionment is an inevitable part of every bubble).

Now, there are lots of low-stakes applications for AI that can run just fine on the current AI technology, despite its many – and seemingly inescapable - errors ("hallucinations"). People who use AI to generate illustrations of their D&D characters engaged in epic adventures from their previous gaming session don't care about the odd extra finger. If the chatbot powering a tourist's automatic text-to-translation-to-speech phone tool gets a few words wrong, it's still much better than the alternative of speaking slowly and loudly in your own language while making emphatic hand-gestures.

There are lots of these applications, and many of the people who benefit from them would doubtless pay something for them. The problem – from an AI company's perspective – is that these aren't just low-stakes, they're also low-value. Their users would pay something for them, but not very much.

For AI to keep its servers on through the coming trough of disillusionment, it will have to locate high-value applications, too. Economically speaking, the function of low-value applications is to soak up excess capacity and produce value at the margins after the high-value applications pay the bills. Low-value applications are a side-dish, like the coach seats on an airplane whose total operating expenses are paid by the business class passengers up front. Without the principle income from high-value applications, the servers shut down, and the low-value applications disappear:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Now, there are lots of high-value applications the AI industry has identified for its products. Broadly speaking, these high-value applications share the same problem: they are all high-stakes, which means they are very sensitive to errors. Mistakes made by apps that produce code, drive cars, or identify cancerous masses on chest X-rays are extremely consequential.

Some businesses may be insensitive to those consequences. Air Canada replaced its human customer service staff with chatbots that just lied to passengers, stealing hundreds of dollars from them in the process. But the process for getting your money back after you are defrauded by Air Canada's chatbot is so onerous that only one passenger has bothered to go through it, spending ten weeks exhausting all of Air Canada's internal review mechanisms before fighting his case for weeks more at the regulator:

https://bc.ctvnews.ca/air-canada-s-chatbot-gave-a-b-c-man-the-wrong-information-now-the-airline-has-to-pay-for-the-mistake-1.6769454

There's never just one ant. If this guy was defrauded by an AC chatbot, so were hundreds or thousands of other fliers. Air Canada doesn't have to pay them back. Air Canada is tacitly asserting that, as the country's flagship carrier and near-monopolist, it is too big to fail and too big to jail, which means it's too big to care.

Air Canada shows that for some business customers, AI doesn't need to be able to do a worker's job in order to be a smart purchase: a chatbot can replace a worker, fail to their worker's job, and still save the company money on balance.

I can't predict whether the world's sociopathic monopolists are numerous and powerful enough to keep the lights on for AI companies through leases for automation systems that let them commit consequence-free free fraud by replacing workers with chatbots that serve as moral crumple-zones for furious customers:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563219304029

But even stipulating that this is sufficient, it's intrinsically unstable. Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, and the mass replacement of humans with high-speed fraud software seems likely to stoke the already blazing furnace of modern antitrust:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

Of course, the AI companies have their own answer to this conundrum. A high-stakes/high-value customer can still fire workers and replace them with AI – they just need to hire fewer, cheaper workers to supervise the AI and monitor it for "hallucinations." This is called the "human in the loop" solution.

The human in the loop story has some glaring holes. From a worker's perspective, serving as the human in the loop in a scheme that cuts wage bills through AI is a nightmare – the worst possible kind of automation.

Let's pause for a little detour through automation theory here. Automation can augment a worker. We can call this a "centaur" – the worker offloads a repetitive task, or one that requires a high degree of vigilance, or (worst of all) both. They're a human head on a robot body (hence "centaur"). Think of the sensor/vision system in your car that beeps if you activate your turn-signal while a car is in your blind spot. You're in charge, but you're getting a second opinion from the robot.

Likewise, consider an AI tool that double-checks a radiologist's diagnosis of your chest X-ray and suggests a second look when its assessment doesn't match the radiologist's. Again, the human is in charge, but the robot is serving as a backstop and helpmeet, using its inexhaustible robotic vigilance to augment human skill.

That's centaurs. They're the good automation. Then there's the bad automation: the reverse-centaur, when the human is used to augment the robot.

Amazon warehouse pickers stand in one place while robotic shelving units trundle up to them at speed; then, the haptic bracelets shackled around their wrists buzz at them, directing them pick up specific items and move them to a basket, while a third automation system penalizes them for taking toilet breaks or even just walking around and shaking out their limbs to avoid a repetitive strain injury. This is a robotic head using a human body – and destroying it in the process.

An AI-assisted radiologist processes fewer chest X-rays every day, costing their employer more, on top of the cost of the AI. That's not what AI companies are selling. They're offering hospitals the power to create reverse centaurs: radiologist-assisted AIs. That's what "human in the loop" means.

This is a problem for workers, but it's also a problem for their bosses (assuming those bosses actually care about correcting AI hallucinations, rather than providing a figleaf that lets them commit fraud or kill people and shift the blame to an unpunishable AI).

Humans are good at a lot of things, but they're not good at eternal, perfect vigilance. Writing code is hard, but performing code-review (where you check someone else's code for errors) is much harder – and it gets even harder if the code you're reviewing is usually fine, because this requires that you maintain your vigilance for something that only occurs at rare and unpredictable intervals:

https://twitter.com/qntm/status/1773779967521780169

But for a coding shop to make the cost of an AI pencil out, the human in the loop needs to be able to process a lot of AI-generated code. Replacing a human with an AI doesn't produce any savings if you need to hire two more humans to take turns doing close reads of the AI's code.

This is the fatal flaw in robo-taxi schemes. The "human in the loop" who is supposed to keep the murderbot from smashing into other cars, steering into oncoming traffic, or running down pedestrians isn't a driver, they're a driving instructor. This is a much harder job than being a driver, even when the student driver you're monitoring is a human, making human mistakes at human speed. It's even harder when the student driver is a robot, making errors at computer speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/01/human-in-the-loop/#monkey-in-the-middle

This is why the doomed robo-taxi company Cruise had to deploy 1.5 skilled, high-paid human monitors to oversee each of its murderbots, while traditional taxis operate at a fraction of the cost with a single, precaratized, low-paid human driver:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no

The vigilance problem is pretty fatal for the human-in-the-loop gambit, but there's another problem that is, if anything, even more fatal: the kinds of errors that AIs make.

Foundationally, AI is applied statistics. An AI company trains its AI by feeding it a lot of data about the real world. The program processes this data, looking for statistical correlations in that data, and makes a model of the world based on those correlations. A chatbot is a next-word-guessing program, and an AI "art" generator is a next-pixel-guessing program. They're drawing on billions of documents to find the most statistically likely way of finishing a sentence or a line of pixels in a bitmap:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

This means that AI doesn't just make errors – it makes subtle errors, the kinds of errors that are the hardest for a human in the loop to spot, because they are the most statistically probable ways of being wrong. Sure, we notice the gross errors in AI output, like confidently claiming that a living human is dead:

https://www.tomsguide.com/opinion/according-to-chatgpt-im-dead

But the most common errors that AIs make are the ones we don't notice, because they're perfectly camouflaged as the truth. Think of the recurring AI programming error that inserts a call to a nonexistent library called "huggingface-cli," which is what the library would be called if developers reliably followed naming conventions. But due to a human inconsistency, the real library has a slightly different name. The fact that AIs repeatedly inserted references to the nonexistent library opened up a vulnerability – a security researcher created a (inert) malicious library with that name and tricked numerous companies into compiling it into their code because their human reviewers missed the chatbot's (statistically indistinguishable from the the truth) lie:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

For a driving instructor or a code reviewer overseeing a human subject, the majority of errors are comparatively easy to spot, because they're the kinds of errors that lead to inconsistent library naming – places where a human behaved erratically or irregularly. But when reality is irregular or erratic, the AI will make errors by presuming that things are statistically normal.

These are the hardest kinds of errors to spot. They couldn't be harder for a human to detect if they were specifically designed to go undetected. The human in the loop isn't just being asked to spot mistakes – they're being actively deceived. The AI isn't merely wrong, it's constructing a subtle "what's wrong with this picture"-style puzzle. Not just one such puzzle, either: millions of them, at speed, which must be solved by the human in the loop, who must remain perfectly vigilant for things that are, by definition, almost totally unnoticeable.

This is a special new torment for reverse centaurs – and a significant problem for AI companies hoping to accumulate and keep enough high-value, high-stakes customers on their books to weather the coming trough of disillusionment.

This is pretty grim, but it gets grimmer. AI companies have argued that they have a third line of business, a way to make money for their customers beyond automation's gifts to their payrolls: they claim that they can perform difficult scientific tasks at superhuman speed, producing billion-dollar insights (new materials, new drugs, new proteins) at unimaginable speed.

However, these claims – credulously amplified by the non-technical press – keep on shattering when they are tested by experts who understand the esoteric domains in which AI is said to have an unbeatable advantage. For example, Google claimed that its Deepmind AI had discovered "millions of new materials," "equivalent to nearly 800 years’ worth of knowledge," constituting "an order-of-magnitude expansion in stable materials known to humanity":

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/millions-of-new-materials-discovered-with-deep-learning/

It was a hoax. When independent material scientists reviewed representative samples of these "new materials," they concluded that "no new materials have been discovered" and that not one of these materials was "credible, useful and novel":

https://www.404media.co/google-says-it-discovered-millions-of-new-materials-with-ai-human-researchers/

As Brian Merchant writes, AI claims are eerily similar to "smoke and mirrors" – the dazzling reality-distortion field thrown up by 17th century magic lantern technology, which millions of people ascribed wild capabilities to, thanks to the outlandish claims of the technology's promoters:

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-really-is-smoke-and-mirrors

The fact that we have a four-hundred-year-old name for this phenomenon, and yet we're still falling prey to it is frankly a little depressing. And, unlucky for us, it turns out that AI therapybots can't help us with this – rather, they're apt to literally convince us to kill ourselves:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkadgm/man-dies-by-suicide-after-talking-with-ai-chatbot-widow-says

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[financialoptions113]

Atlas-za.net Review | Is Atlas-za.net Legit Or Scam? Be Careful!!

Atlas-za.net Review | Is Atlas-za.net Legit Or Scam? Be Careful!!

Making money online is getting more interesting as new passive income sites comes up with new mind-blowing ideas on how to make money online. A good thing if you ask me, but not every one of these sites are trustworthy. Well, today, I’m going to be talking about a new South African money making site ‘atlas-za.net‘. Many of us may have heard of this platform on social media as it is very popular…

[goblin-social]

A quick example of the current state of Goblin:

I imported my following list from mastodon and started following everyone with my goblin.band account too, so I basically read all my mastodon content from there already. Even if no one but me using the tumblr-like features I'm adding, I already enjoy Goblin more than Mastodon.

Things that I've added since my last post:

Integration with mastodon (and well, any other fediverse platform that use plain text instead of html)

Copy/pasting images in the editor

Sanitized html input when saving & updating posts

Improved the landing page

Cleaned the menus and improved the UI in general

Current "next" to-do list:

Fix posts displaying images twice when you paste an image

Fix RSS feed including the inline files again after the post

Sanitize html inputs on incoming federated posts

fix several style issues around different settings sections (black texts on dark blue background, white text over white background, etc)

Figure out if I can create a tumblr-api app so the posts from goblin can be automatically shared here without having to go through Zappier.

Figure out what kind of server I need to run a, let's say, 500 people server.

Find someone to do some security review of my server (Long story short, I've only a very slim idea of what I'm doing when configuring a server and I'm sure I've left some huge security holes around).

This is happening, folks. I think Goblin is going to be a reality. At least https://goblin.band will be.

[mrs-hatake]

JJK Men Texting You After a Break-up

warning: mentions of violence and stalking. relationships: male x afab!reader a/n: i added yuuta to the list :D also, all images below belong to me‼️

Toji:

The monotonous voice filling the room does not succeed in stealing Y/N’s attention from her phone as it lights up with yet another incoming call.

Toji

Stares back at her, his infamous smirk can almost be seen on the screen as the notification shows his fifth missed call in less than two minutes.

Being stuck in an important meeting on a product the company right after a break-up is the absolute worst. 

Y/N and Toji spent the previous night arguing about something that she cannot remember at the current time. But Toji’s thundering voice rattling her heart in her ribcage rings clear in her ears.

A jab to her side and Y/N is met with a side glare from her colleague who points at her phone with her eyes. Flushing in embarrassment, Y/N hurries to switch off her phone when a text message from her now ex-boyfriend catches her. Scoffing, she sends a quick reply before switching it off.

Satoru:

Binge watching all the feel good chick flicks is the best remedy for Y/N’s broken heart. 

She has shed some tears as the women on the screen cried over a relationship gone sour, has laughed when the female characters enjoyed themselves and has felt empowered when the women got over their heartache and moved on with their lives, becoming the better versions of themselves. 

Which is why when Satoru’s name pops up on her phone, she doesn’t feel the butterflies fluttering about in her tummy like they usually do. Instead, there are tiny spiders crawling in her veins, eating those vermin. 

Pausing the movie, Y/N picks up her phone with disinterest. 

A breathless chuckle, one lacking mirth, rushes past her lips. 

What a ridiculous message her ex has sent her.

Kento:

Going to a bookstore, browsing the shelves for hours and filling the basket to the brim with new books and reading one of them at the coffee shop across the street was Y/N and Kento’s go to date idea.

They will sit at the coffee shop from early afternoon until the sun is just about to set. Having read quite a handful of chapters, they’d review the books they’ve read. Though they don’t read the same genres, they have the maturity to respect the other’s interest and provide honest inputs when asked for. 

But after their break-up just a few days ago, Y/N can’t stand the sight of hers and Kento’s bookshelves in their living room. The only way to shield her from such a sight, the one that taunts her of a lost love, is by retreating to her and Kento’s room. The only solace is that Kento is staying over at a friend’s house until he finds a new apartment to rent. 

Even though she misses Kento, even though she wants him back, Y/N refuses to be the bigger person and takes the first step. 

Which is why when Kento texts her, she doesn’t respond in her usual chipper attitude.

Suguru:

“…So I says to the guy, that’s my ma!”

Y/N shoulders shake as laughter erupts from her. Though the joke itself wasn’t funny, the way her date delivered it with so much enthusiasm is hilarious enough. 

Y/S has been nervous for the past week over the prospect of dating again. She just got out of a break up a little less than a month ago and she isn’t completely ready to be back on the dating scene but her friends have convinced her that the only way to get over a guy is by meeting someone new.

So, she downloads a dating app her friends recommended, matched with someone interesting enough and, here she is, on her first date after being in a relationship with Geto Suguru for two years.

Warmth floods her veins at the look her date is directing her way, gentle and curious, it’s a sight Y/N hasn’t been on the receiving end in a very long time.

She’s glad she is on this date. It’s time she thinks of herself for once.

But her resolve shatters when her phone lights up, showing Suguru’s name.

She picks up her phone to block his number but his message has her rolling her eyes. Typing a quick response, Y/N blocks her ex.

Sukuna:

Finally, after years of emotional abuse, of nights crying herself to sleep, Y/N has finally broken-up with her boyfriend of five years. 

Ryomen Sukuna’s luck runs out when he finally pushes Y/N over her limit. Their last fight has Y/N throwing whatever object she can find at the tattooed man. When he successfully dodges them, she chases him out of her apartment with a kitchen knife.

That was a month ago.

Now, Y/N is in the living room of her new apartment, playing some violent game where whenever she rips off the arms, legs and head of a male character, she pictures them as Sukuna.

Horrifying, true, but this is what happens when you date someone as deranged as Sukuna.

Which is why when Y/N gets a text from an unknown number, her blood boils. 

How the fuck did Sukuna manage to get her new number?

Yuuta:

Dating Okkotsu Yuuta is like dating prince Charming. 

He spoils you with gifts, sings songs of praise, touches you with care and wakes and sleeps to your name on his tongue. 

Which is why, when Yuuta calls Y/N the wrong name in bed — the name of a deceased lover, no less — it is as if she has been doused in cold water, waking her up from her dreams.

What surprises Y/N even more is how incessant Yuuta is; calling her phone nonstop, loitering around her work place, following her room, banging on the door and begging for forgiveness. 

When Y/N grows fearful for her life, she quits her job, packs up her shit and leaves. 

Little by little, pretty colors paint Y/N’s world and she finds herself alive again. 

But the vibrant colors are painted over by dark and dull shades when a spam of messages from an unknown number reminds her of the past she’s been trying to escape.

Y/N isn’t going to give up. She will fight for the life she deserves. And if breaking his heart is the price for it, then so be it.

[pastel-charm-14]

dealing with academic burnout

hey lovelies! if you're feeling burnt out with school right now, you're not alone. here are some tips to help you push through and finish strong!! (long post incoming :))

BREAK IT DOWN -

big assignments can feel overwhelming, so break them into smaller, more manageable tasks. instead of "write a 10-page paper," think "write an outline," "research for 1 hour," "write the introduction," and so on. this makes the workload less daunting and helps you make consistent progress. it's also helpful to keep track of those smaller tasks in a list.

BE REALISTIC -

prioritize your tasks and set achievable daily or weekly goals. don't try to do everything at once. make a to-do list every day, and highlight your most important tasks. this helps you stay organized but also it feels really good to check things off your list :) for example, aim to complete two math problems instead of the entire set, or read one chapter instead of the whole book, and see where it goes from there.

TAKE BREAKS -

in order to be productive, you need to rest your mind!! try the pomodoro technique: work for 25 minutes, then take a 5-minute break. after four cycles, take a longer break (15-30 minutes). during your breaks, do something completely different from your study activity. get up, stretch, grab a snack, or go for a quick walk outside. it's refreshing for your mind and body.

STAY ACTIVE -

physical activity helps reduce stress and improve your mood. so you should aim to get at least 30 minutes of exercise a day. this could be a workout, a yoga session, or even just a really fast walk. if you don't have much time, try putting short bursts of activity in throughout your day. for example, do some stretches or a few jumping jacks between pomodoro cycles.

GET SUPPORT -

talk to friends, family, or a counselor if you're feeling overwhelmed. sometimes, just having someone listen can make a huge difference!! if you’re struggling with a particular subject or area, try forming/joining a study group or seeking help from a tutor. working with others can give you new perspectives and helps with loneliness.

HAVE A HEALTHY DIET -

your brain needs proper fuel to function at its best. try to eat balanced meals with fruits, veggies, whole grains, and protein. avoid too much caffeine and sugary snacks, because those can lead to energy crashes. keep a water bottle with you and make sure you're drinking enough throughout the day to keep your energy levels stable.

GET ENOUGH SLEEP -

pulling all-nighters is going to affect your concentration and memory. go for 7-8 hours of sleep each night. get a bedtime routine in place to help signal to your body that it's time to wind down. this could include stuff like reading a book, listening to calming music, or doing some mindfulness exercises. avoid screens at least an hour before bed, because the blue light can interfere with your sleep.

REWARD YOURSELF -

give yourself something to look forward to after completing a task. a favorite snack, watching an episode of your favorite show, or spending some time on social media, really anything that makes you happy. rewards reinforce your positive behavior and make studying feel more manageable. for example, tell yourself, "after I finish this chapter, I'll take a break to watch a funny youtube video."

STAY ORGANIZED -

keep track of deadlines and dates!! it will save you so much stress!! use a planner, calendar app, or bullet journal to log all your assignments and exam dates. you can also color code by subject/priority to make it easier to see what needs attention. review your schedule often and adjust it when you need to.

GIVE YOURSELF SOME LOVE -

it's okay to feel tired and stressed!! be kind to yourself and remember that you're doing your best. if you need to take a break, don't feel guilty about it. self-care is just as important as academic achievement. try some mindfulness or meditation and just take a moment to ground yourself.

hang in there, you've got this! just a little bit more to go and it'll be all worth it in the end. 🫶

[dagwolf]

Recent viral images of Southwest agents getting yelled at and crying have resurfaced a valuable lesson about the nature of our economic system that’s worth examining this holiday season: the deliberate, built-in ways corporate “customer service” is set up to not only shield those on the top of the ladder—executives, vice presidents, large shareholders—but pit low-wage workers against each other in an inherently antagonistic relationship marked by powerlessness and frustration. It’s a dynamic we discussed in “Episode 118: The Snitch Economy—How Rating Apps and Tipping Pit Working People Against Each Other,” of the Citations Needed podcast I co-host, but I feel ought to be expanded on in light of recent events. Watching video after video, reading tweet after tweet, describing frustrated stranded holiday travelers yelling at Southwest Airlines workers, and hearing, in turn, accounts of airline workers and airport staff breaking down crying, is a good opportunity to talk about how none of this is natural or inevitable. It is a choice, both in corporate policy and government regulation. 

There are three main ways capital pits workers against each other in the relationship we call “customer service”:

1. Snitch economy. As discussed in Citations Needed Ep. 118, we are provided with more and more apps, websites, and customer surveys to effectively do the job of managing for management—free of charge, of course. Under the auspices of “empowering” the consumer, we are told to spy on our low-wage servants and gauge the quality of their servitude with stars, tips, and reviews. Uber, DoorDash, Fiver, Grubhub—a new “gig economy” has emerged that not only misclassifies workers as freelancers to pay them less, but hands over the reins of management to the consumer directly. This necessarily increases the antagonism between working-class consumers and the workers they are snitching on. 

2. Automation. Increasingly, even getting to the bottom rung employee to yell at is difficult. Under the thin pretense of Covid, increased labor power has exploded the use of automated technology that creates a frustrating maze to get a simple problem solved or task accomplished. Don’t go to the register, instead download the app and order. Scan the QR code, don’t wait on hold, go to our website and engage a series of automated prompts and maybe you can solve your problem. More and more consumers are being pushed away from humans onto automated systems we are told will “save us time,” but instead exist solely to save the corporation labor costs. So, by the time the average consumer does finally work their way to seeing a human, they are annoyed, frustrated, and angry at this faceless entity and more willing to take it out on someone making $13 an hour. 

One recent visit to Houston’s George H.W. Bush airport portended our obnoxious “automated” future. To cut down on unionized airport labor, all the restaurants use QR codes and require you to order food and drinks for yourself. Per usual, it’s sold as an exciting new technology that’s somehow good for consumers, but really the basic technology is 30 years old. It’s just a screen—the same ones restaurants have had for decades. The only thing that’s changed is the social conditioning of having you do all your own ordering and menu navigation. The waiter hasn’t been replaced by an iPad, they’ve been replaced by you. Invariably, it’s clunky and annoying and reduces the union jobs that airport construction is said to provide to justify soliciting public dollars. The only winner is a faceless corporation with a Delaware LLC and its shareholders living in a few counties in Connecticut and Texas.

Automation not only annoys and adds labor burdens to the customer, there is also evidence that it is a significant contributor to income inequality. A November 2022 study published in the journal Econometrica looked at the significantly widening income gap between lesser and more educated workers over the past 40 years. It found that ​​“automation accounts for more than half of that increase,” as summarized by MIT News. “This single one variable … explains 50 to 70 percent of the changes or variation between group inequality from 1980 to about 2016,” said MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, co-author of the study. Whether or not, under a different economic system, automation could be a force for good is a debate for another day. But what is clear is that, while both consumers and workers are harmed by this trend, there is a significant want of solidarity between them. 

3. Deliberate understaffing. This is a major culprit in this week’s Southwest Airlines meltdown. In parallel with the increased use of forced automation, cost-cutting corporations, facing increased labor power, are gutting staffing to its bare bones and hoping their corporate competitors doing the same will lead to a shift in consumer’s willingness to put up with substandard service and conditions, and overall bullshit. “We apologize for the wait,” the automated phone prompt tells us. Of course a machine cannot be contrite, so the effect is both surreal and grating: You’re not fucking sorry, you don’t exist. You're a recording. But now, who am I yelling at? 

...

[snowbunnywatching]

Even though Black Men will be earning the highest incomes and sit at the very top of the dating market, there'll always be pockets of white girls who'll fail to make an impression, or fail to put in the work necessary to compete with Black Women, or will just be bad at dating and bad in the bedroom. This may be a minority, but it won't be zero.

If cultural encouragement and economic incentives fail to get some girls to step up their game or put out on the first date, maybe Black Men can avoid wasting time on them with an app that lets them rate and review local white girls, similar to Uber? white girls who desperately need a push can access the app to see what their reputation is and what they need to improve, but only Black Men can review and rate.

Since the goals are to help Black Men avoid bad dates while simultaneously improving low-performing white girls (rather than brutalizing them,) the ratings will be incredibly lenient, at least at first. It's important to keep white girls in line and remind them that it's they who need to impress Black Men (rather than the other way around,) but it does no good to immediately yank them out of the dating pool for any small misstep. It's only when a white girl shows no improvement after about 5-10 bad dates/hookups that she should be worried. At that point, she might as well either try to go gay or join a nunnery, since he prospects amongst Black Men will be slim to none.

Your thoughts?? :)

What a great idea.

I'm thinking a Tinder-like dating app, but with the ability to look up profiles using their profile name. Most white girls would display their profile name on their social media pages, and it would be costumary to share it with any Black men flirting with you - and it would be a major red flag if a girl claimed not to be on the app or refused to give her profile name.

A Black man having been in the vicinity of a white girl for three hours (using GPS information from their phones) will be given the opportunity to rate and review her. And of course provide any information that other brothers will find relevant.

Are her profile pictures several years out of date? Does lighting and camera angles represent her as more attractive than she really is? Is the starfish her favorite position? Everything will be revealed.

[rideboomindia]

How drivers can earn more with RideBoom

Sure, here are some tips for drivers to earn more with RideBoom:

Drive During Peak Hours: Identify the busiest times in your local market (e.g. rush hours, weekends, holidays) and aim to drive during these peak periods when demand is highest. You'll have more opportunities to accept rides and earn higher fares.

Leverage Surge Pricing: RideBoom implements surge pricing during times of high demand. Be ready to take advantage of surge areas and earn higher fares during these periods.

Maximize Efficiency: Plan your driving route strategically to minimize downtime between rides. Use the RideBoom app to identify high-traffic areas and reduce dead miles.

Provide Excellent Service: Maintain a high customer rating by delivering a safe, friendly, and professional experience. Positive reviews can lead to more ride requests and opportunities for tips.

Participate in Promotions: RideBoom may offer various promotions, such as referral bonuses or incentives for completing a certain number of rides. Keep an eye out for these and take advantage of them.

Drive During Special Events: Major events, festivals, or concerts in your area can create spikes in demand. Plan ahead and be available to transport passengers to and from these high-traffic occasions.

Consider Vehicle Upgrades: Driving a more fuel-efficient or larger vehicle may allow you to earn higher fares per ride, especially for premium or luxury service tiers.

Track Your Expenses: Closely monitor your fuel, maintenance, and other costs to ensure you're maximizing your net earnings.

Remember, driving with RideBoom should be viewed as a flexible way to supplement your income. By optimizing your time and effort, you can maximize your earning potential with the platform.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI is a WMD

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (TOMORROW, May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (TOMORROW, May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management.

By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager. After all, the company used its access to the capital markets to buy control over the internet, spending billions every year to make sure that you never try a search-engine other than its own, thus guaranteeing it a 90% market share:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Google seems to think it's got the problem of deciding what we see on the internet licked. Otherwise, why would the company flush $80b down the toilet with a giant stock-buyback, and then do multiple waves of mass layoffs, from last year's 12,000 person bloodbath to this year's deep cuts to the company's "core teams"?

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

And yet, Google is overrun with scams and spam, which find their way to the very top of the first page of its search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The entire internet is shaped by Google's decisions about what shows up on that first page of listings. When Google decided to prioritize shopping site results over informative discussions and other possible matches, the entire internet shifted its focus to producing affiliate-link-strewn "reviews" that would show up on Google's front door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

This was catnip to the kind of sociopath who a) owns a hedge-fund and b) hates journalists for being pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud sticklers for "truth" and "facts" and other impediments to the care and maintenance of a functional reality-distortion field. These dickheads started buying up beloved news sites and converting them to spam-farms, filled with garbage "reviews" and other Google-pleasing, affiliate-fee-generating nonsense.

(These news-sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile OS monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Now, the spam on these sites didn't write itself. Much to the chagrin of the tech/finance bros who bought up Sports Illustrated and other venerable news sites, they still needed to pay actual human writers to produce plausible word-salads. This was a waste of money that could be better spent on reverse-engineering Google's ranking algorithm and getting pride-of-place on search results pages:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

That's where AI comes in. Spicy autocomplete absolutely can't replace journalists. The planet-destroying, next-word-guessing programs from Openai and its competitors are incorrigible liars that require so much "supervision" that they cost more than they save in a newsroom:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

But while a chatbot can't produce truthful and informative articles, it can produce bullshit – at unimaginable scale. Chatbots are the workers that hedge-fund wreckers dream of: tireless, uncomplaining, compliant and obedient producers of nonsense on demand.

That's why the capital class is so insatiably horny for chatbots. Chatbots aren't going to write Hollywood movies, but studio bosses hyperventilated at the prospect of a "writer" that would accept your brilliant idea and diligently turned it into a movie. You prompt an LLM in exactly the same way a studio exec gives writers notes. The difference is that the LLM won't roll its eyes and make sarcastic remarks about your brainwaves like "ET, but starring a dog, with a love plot in the second act and a big car-chase at the end":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Similarly, chatbots are a dream come true for a hedge fundie who ends up running a beloved news site, only to have to fight with their own writers to get the profitable nonsense produced at a scale and velocity that will guarantee a high Google ranking and millions in "passive income" from affiliate links.

One of the premier profitable nonsense companies is Advon, which helped usher in an era in which sites from Forbes to Money to USA Today create semi-secret "review" sites that are stuffed full of badly researched top-ten lists for products from air purifiers to cat beds:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

Advon swears that it only uses living humans to produce nonsense, and not AI. This isn't just wildly implausible, it's also belied by easily uncovered evidence, like its own employees' Linkedin profiles, which boast of using AI to create "content":

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

It's not true. Advon uses AI to produce its nonsense, at scale. In an excellent, deeply reported piece for Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré brings proof that Advon replaced its miserable human nonsense-writers with tireless chatbots:

https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content

Dupré describes how Advon's ability to create botshit at scale contributed to the enshittification of clients from Yoga Journal to the LA Times, "Us Weekly" to the Miami Herald.

All of this is very timely, because this is the week that Google finally bestirred itself to commence downranking publishers who engage in "site reputation abuse" – creating these SEO-stuffed fake reviews with the help of third parties like Advon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

(Google's policy only forbids site reputation abuse with the help of third parties; if these publishers take their nonsense production in-house, Google may allow them to continue to dominate its search listings):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

There's a reason so many people believed Hardin's racist "Tragedy of the Commons" hoax. We have an intuitive understanding that commons are fragile. All it takes is one monster to start shitting in the well where the rest of us get our drinking water and we're all poisoned.

The financial markets love these monsters. Mark Zuckerberg's key insight was that he could make billions by assembling vast dossiers of compromising, sensitive personal information on half the world's population without their consent, but only if he kept his costs down by failing to safeguard that data and the systems for exploiting it. He's like a guy who figures out that if he accumulates enough oily rags, he can extract so much low-grade oil from them that he can grow rich, but only if he doesn't waste money on fire-suppression:

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

Now Zuckerberg and the wealthy, powerful monsters who seized control over our commons are getting a comeuppance. The weak countermeasures they created to maintain the minimum levels of quality to keep their platforms as viable, going concerns are being overwhelmed by AI. This was a totally foreseeable outcome: the history of the internet is a story of bad actors who upended the assumptions built into our security systems by automating their attacks, transforming an assault that wouldn't be economically viable into a global, high-speed crime wave:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

But it is possible for a community to maintain a commons. This is something Hardin could have discovered by studying actual commons, instead of inventing imaginary histories in which commons turned tragic. As it happens, someone else did exactly that: Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons/

Ostrom described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.

When that breaks down, commons can fail – because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse.

Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again.

It's not just the spammers who take advantage of Google's lazy incompetence, either. Take "copyleft trolls," who post images using outdated Creative Commons licenses that allow them to terminate the CC license if a user makes minor errors in attributing the images they use:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

The first copyleft trolls were individuals, but these days, the racket is dominated by a company called Pixsy, which pretends to be a "rights protection" agency that helps photographers track down copyright infringers. In reality, the company is committed to helping copyleft trolls entrap innocent Creative Commons users into paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to use images that are licensed for free use. Just as Advon upends the economics of spam and deception through automation, Pixsy has figured out how to send legal threats at scale, robolawyering demand letters that aren't signed by lawyers; the company refuses to say whether any lawyer ever reviews these threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

This is shitting in the well, at scale. It's an online WMD, designed to wipe out the commons. Creative Commons has allowed millions of creators to produce a commons with billions of works in it, and Pixsy exploits a minor error in the early versions of CC licenses to indiscriminately manufacture legal land-mines, wantonly blowing off innocent commons-users' legs and laughing all the way to the bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

We can have an online commons, but only if it's run by and for its users. Google has shown us that any "benevolent dictator" who amasses power in the name of defending the open internet will eventually grow too big to care, and will allow our commons to be demolished by well-shitters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/09/shitting-in-the-well/#advon

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Catherine Poh Huay Tan (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/68166820@N08/49729911222/

Laia Balagueró (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/lbalaguero/6551235503/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[financialoptions113]

Digihost.plus Review (Is Digihost.plus Legit Or Scam? Get Answers Now!)

Digihost.plus Review (Is Digihost.plus Legit Or Scam? Get Answers Now!)

Finding a suitable source of income on the internet is what everyone hopes to achieve, and not every passive income sites allows that. Well, at some point you could get discouraged after being scammed multiple times by different websites. Digihost.plus is a new passive income sites, and you technically don’t need to deposit on this site. However, you can always upgrade your earnings, but you & I…

[thewhumpyprintingpress]

10 Ways To Support Your Favorite Small Presses

(these tips also work for supporting your favorite authors!)

Reblog reblog reblog! Reblogging their posts on tumblr is one of the best ways to help new readers find them.

Tell a friend. Word of mouth is golden. If you enjoy a book, recommend it to a friend who you think will like it too!

Leave a review. Whether you review on your social media, reading tracker app (e.g. StoryGraph, Goodreads), or on your preferred book retailer, every review helps.

Request that your local library purchase their books. And if your library has a service like Hoopla, see if their books are available for check out!

Subscribe to their newsletter. Most presses have semi-regular email newsletters where they give publication updates. By subscribing, you can keep up to date on new books and other fun stuff. (Plus, you might get cute cat pictures)

Give a one-off donation via Ko-fi, Buy Me a Coffee, etc. Everything so far has been completely free. But if you have a little cash to spare, this is a great way to show your support.

Pick up an ebook. You get to read an awesome book AND support your favorite press??? It's a win-win! Also, if your press has their own store, consider purchasing directly from them rather than through a third party.

Pick up a physical book. Not only do you get to support your fav, you also get to add a beautiful book to your bookshelf! And if you purchase directly from them, you might get some extra goodies or even a signed book!

Become a member on their Ko-fi, Patreon, etc. One of the biggest struggles with publishing books is the lack of consistent income. Providing monthly financial support can help the press stay steady during slower periods. And it probably isn't as expensive as your think! (Here at WPP, our Ko-fi membership tiers start at $1 per month)

And finally, let them know that you enjoy their work! Publishing is a long, lonely process that involves a lot of smashing keyboards and trying to decide where the commas should go. Telling them that all their hard work has paid off and that you enjoyed what they created will make their day. I guarantee it.

[mostlyghostie]

I really really love your art, your posts on my dash always make me excited :) I’m hoping to buy Christmas gifts from your store for some bookish friends of mine (and probably get something for myself too lol). As a budding artist myself, I was wondering if you consider it worthwhile to post on Tumblr. I’ve seen mixed reviews on whether or not it’s helpful for creators to try to generate business on Tumblr and was hoping you would weigh in :) thank you, and happy holidays!

Ah thank you so much!

I’d say that even though Tumblr has no algorithm or features to specifically try and sell products like the other social networks, I have probably generated 60% of all my sales from here.

I’m sure that if I really wanted to, I could make more from concentrating fully on Instagram, but to be honest, it makes me anxious trying to compete for attention on there. Tumblr rewards you for posting good stuff whenever you feel like it- sometimes I’ll get a thousand notes and half a dozen sales based on a post I made a year ago that has picked up momentum again, whereas you can post something at the wrong time of day on Instagram and it will never be seen by anyone. I also don’t have the time to learn how to make professional looking videos and am not keen on putting my face all over the internet either, both of which are seemingly important for Instagram and TikTok.

I like the lack of hustle culture here too, I am not bothered at all if people like and interact with my work forever without buying anything, because I’m also just sharing my work for fun. I don’t feel like I need to grow my audience because it just kind of happens organically here.

If I had to make art my main source of income, I’d need to sell a lot more so I would then probably dive into the other apps, but I’d keep Tumblr too. Oh, the Blaze feature is actually pretty fantastic, once I worked out which of my artworks the Tumblr audience were actually interested in, it’s a very simple and quick way of advertising.

(Send me a message when you order and I’ll put some free stuff in for you!)

Saying all that- you can still follow me Instagram / Shop