Link tags: ownership

ChatGPT is not ‘artificial intelligence.’ It’s theft. | America Magazine

But in calling these programs “artificial intelligence” we grant them a claim to authorship that is simply untrue. Each of those tokens used by programs like ChatGPT—the “language” in their “large language model”—represents a tiny, tiny piece of material that someone else created. And those authors are not credited for it, paid for it or asked permission for its use. In a sense, these machine-learning bots are actually the most advanced form of a chop shop: They steal material from creators (that is, they use it without permission), cut that material into parts so small that no one can trace them and then repurpose them to form new products.

The Year of the Personal Website · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Especially if you are a designer, an artist, a photographer, a writer, a blogger, a creator of any kind, owning your work is as important as ever. Social media platforms might be great for distributing your content and creating a network of like-minded people around you. But they will always be ephemeral, transient, and impermanent – not the best place to preserve your thoughts, words, and brushstrokes.

Suspension · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

But most importantly, always write your most important thoughts on your own site. You can share the link on as many platforms as you like and have conversations with anyone who wants to connect with you and your work. But nobody can take it from you. You are in control. Forever.

Malleable Systems Collective

Modern computing is far too rigid. Applications can only function in preset ways determined by some far away team. Software is trapped in hermetically sealed silos and is rewritten many times over rather than recomposed.

This community catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power via several essential principles…

I’ll be adding those principles to my collection.

The Technium: Ideas Want to be Shared

The books I have written are created from words invented by others, filled with ideas created by others. Even the few new ideas that are new depend on older ideas to work. What I had to say would probably be said by someone else not long after me. (More probably there have already been said by someone I was not aware of.) I may be the lucky person to claim those rare new ideas, but the worth of my art primarily resides in the great accumulation of the ideas and works of thousands of writers and thinkers before me — what I call the commons. My work was born in the commons, it gets its value by being deeply connected to the commons, and after my brief stewardship of those tiny new bits, it should return to the commons as fast as possible, in as many ways as possible.

Meet the Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time

Taking the indie web to the next level—self-hosting on your own hardware.

Tired of Big Tech monopolies, a community of hobbyists is taking their digital lives off the cloud and onto DIY hardware that they control.

Presentable #96: The Employee-Owned Design Agency - Relay FM

If you want to know more about Clearleft’s new employee-ownserhip model, Andy tells Jeff all about it in this huffduffable hour of audio.

A future owners test // Cennydd Bowles

I’d like to see more of this thinking – maybe we could call it the future owners test – in contemporary responsible tech work. We mustn’t get so wrapped up in today that we overlook tomorrow.

Autonomy Online: A Case For The IndieWeb — Smashing Magazine

A wonderful introduction to the indie web—Ana really conveys her sense of excitement!

Local-first software: You own your data, in spite of the cloud

The cloud gives us collaboration, but old-fashioned apps give us ownership. Can’t we have the best of both worlds?

We would like both the convenient cross-device access and real-time collaboration provided by cloud apps, and also the personal ownership of your own data embodied by “old-fashioned” software.

This is a very in-depth look at the mindset and the challenges involved in building truly local-first software—something that Tantek has also been thinking about.

Design System Won’t Fix Your Problems | Viljami Salminen

This is something we’ve learned at Clearleft—you can’t create a design system for an organisation, hand it over to them, and expect it to be maintained.

You can’t just hire an agency to create a design system and expect that the system alone will solve something. It won’t do much before the people in the organization align on this idea as well, believe in it, invest in it, and create a culture of collaboration around it.

The people who will be living with the design system must be (co-)creators of it. That’s very much the area we work in now.

Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours – alexdanco.com

Worlds of scarcity are made out of things. Worlds of abundance are made out of dependencies. That’s the software playbook: find a system made of costly, redundant objects; and rearrange it into a fast, frictionless system made of logical dependencies. The delta in performance is irresistible, and dependencies are a compelling building block: they seem like just a piece of logic, with no cost and no friction. But they absolutely have a cost: the cost is complexity, outsourced agency, and brittleness. The cost of ownership is up front and visible; the cost of access is back-dated and hidden.

Manton Reece - Saying goodbye to Facebook cross-posting

Facebook and even Instagram are at odds with the principles of the open web.

Related: Aaron is playing whack-a-mole with Instagram because he provides a servie to let users export their own photographs to their own websites.

A love letter to my website - DESK Magazine

We choose whether our work stays alive on the internet. As long as we keep our hosting active, our site remains online. Compare that to social media platforms that go public one day and bankrupt the next, shutting down their app and your content along with it.

Your content is yours.

But the real truth is that as long as we’re putting our work in someone else’s hands, we forfeit our ownership over it. When we create our own website, we own it – at least to the extent that the internet, beautiful in its amorphous existence, can be owned.

Why I Have a Website and You Should Too · Jamie Tanna | Software (Quality) Engineer

I know a number of people who blog as a way to express themselves, for expression’s sake, rather than for anyone else wanting to read it. It’s a great way to have a place to “scream into the void” and share your thoughts.

Why We All Need a Personal Website – Plus Practical Tips for How to Build One - Adobe 99U

The best time to make a personal website is 20 years ago. The second best time to make a personal website is now.

Chris offers some illustrated advice:

• Define the purpose of your site
• Organize your content
• Look for inspiration
• Own your own domain name
• Build your website

mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes

Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.

Medium | Stackbit

This is very handy! Export your data from Ev’s blog and then import it into a static site generator of your choice.

You may have noticed the recent movement of people looking to get off Medium. Most of us are motivated by a desire to own our content, have data portability and get more control over how/where our content is displayed and monetized. Most importantly many of us consider our blog/site to be a core part of our online identity and while Medium offers a fantastic writing experience it sacrifices other important values. Luckily there’s a modern approach to running your blog which aligns with these ideals, its called the JAMstack and its all around us.

Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? | The New Yorker

This is a really great, balanced profile of the Indie Web movement. There’s thoughtful criticism alongside some well-deserved praise:

If we itemize the woes currently afflicting the major platforms, there’s a strong case to be made that the IndieWeb avoids them. When social-media servers aren’t controlled by a small number of massive public companies, the incentive to exploit users diminishes. The homegrown, community-oriented feel of the IndieWeb is superior to the vibe of anxious narcissism that’s degrading existing services.

Goodbye Google Analytics, Hello Fathom - daverupert.com

Dave stops feeding his site’s visitors data to Google. I wish more people (and companies) would join him.

There’s also an empowering #indieweb feeling about owning your analytics too. I pay for the server my analytics collector runs on. It’s on my own subdomain. It’s mine.