Do you want AI to do your shopping?
Also inside #8: ♾️ Meta sad at leftie internet, 🐔🍌 chicken banana, 🧭 time-limited social media
This newsletter is officially going into lazy mode (i.e. even shorter) so that I can put more time towards a few Bigger Things I’m working on. I’ll be launching them right here — and they are of course still in the service of making tech fun again!
🔗 FOR YOUR ATTENTION
Amazon is making an AI agent that shops for you — TechCrunch
Just to check: that’s the same company that routinely spams my search results with products I have no interest in, to manipulate me towards buying them? Great, sign me up!
Also, I’m not sure about this whole ‘AI agents shop for you’ thing (see it in action here). Research, maybe. Hit pay, less so. Somewhat related: here’s a great piece about how conversational interfaces aren’t always most efficient, which undermines the ‘AI for everything’ bull case.
The internet is too left-wing for Meta’s AIs — Meta
It’s well-known that all leading LLMs have had issues with bias—specifically, they historically have leaned left when it comes to debated political and social topics. This is due to the types of training data available on the internet.
It’s amusing to hear ‘the types of training data available on the internet’ from the company that illegally pirated 82 terabytes of books to train its AIs. Please, someone — issue Meta a refund. Those stolen books are too goddamn commie for them.
Retro Online Escape Room — Daniel Marino
A lovely piece of internet creativity. Even cooler that it’s built with HTML and CSS only, which, for people who don’t know tech, is a little like building a house without power tools.
Stuck in a TikTok AI chicken banana doom loop
One of the Bigger Things I’ve been working on has led to me spending more time on TikTok, where I’ve fallen into a deep hole of AI chicken banana videos, like this one where the chicken banana song plays while a chicken with a banana-head dances (8m views).
That’s just the tip of the AI slop iceberg. Here’s an AI-generated video of a baby carrying a fish (100m views), and you’ve probably already heard about the omnipresent Shrimp Jesus. Setting aside all the slop and deepfakes, do we see upsides from this democratization of CGI? New forms of art? Imagination turning into reality at a lower cost than we’ve ever seen?
Here are some hippos singing about chicken wings to help you mull that over.
Seven39, a social network which is only open 3 hours a day - The Verge
Another one in the BeReal mold of ‘add a time constraint to social media’. Definitely my cup of tea — a few years ago, I built a social network called Sunday which only fed you content once a week.
Something I often think about though: is it possible to make a ‘relevant’ social network — let’s arbitrarily say, at least 100m active users — while respecting your users? To put it another way, are ethics and growth-hacking fundamentally misaligned?
Kids, look away now
Gross. Someone please email PornHub’s Trust & Safety team. (Actually, might make more sense to contact Visa and Mastercard, the de facto regulators of porn.)
🎥 DIRECTING ATTENTION
Big URL-related news this week, with the launch of Attention’s shiny new domain, attention.to. I’ve been trying to get my hands on this domain for almost six months, because of the lovely domain hacks it makes possible — e.g. pay.attention.to/this. To justify buying attention.to, I’ve started letting go of many other domains I own but don’t use. Yes, I have a domain habit.
Back next week with (hopefully) one of the Bigger Things I’ve been working on!