Scott Boehmer

Category: Technology

  • Social Media and Me

    Twitter was my favorite social media site. It was a great way to stay up-to-date on just about anything. I could get news of all sorts there from big headline news to news for my relatively niche hobbies. I never really used it to interact with friends and family (that was what I used Facebook and Instagram for), but it had been my most used of social sites for years by a wide margin.

    It wasn’t perfect though, There were lots of trolls on the site who would pounce on you when you said something they wanted to be controversial like “bigotry is bad”. It also offered some of the best tools to moderate your own timeline though. It was easy to block people. There were tools to block everyone who liked a particularly asinine tweet.

    When Elon Musk bought the site with the clear intention of making it more friendly towards its trolls, I deleted my account.

    I first made an Instagram account for testing when I was working on Windows Phone. It ended up being a great app. I could open it up and see photos from my friends. I even made a second account to have a public one to post miniature photos too, and a third for sharing my collection of LEGO minifigures.

    During the summer of 2023, the fact that I would open up the app and only see photos and video clips from people I didn’t follow and had no interest in ever following rather than the photos I wanted to see from friends and family wore me out. I haven’t posted anything to my personal account since then.

    Facebook has been a background social network for me. When I first started using it, I friended friends from school and family members and got a pretty good timeline to stay up-to-date on all those people. Over time, it too has morphed away from feeling like a place where I see things from my friends into one where Facebook shows me a random assortment of pages, communities I’m not part of, and ads. Pictures I posted to Instagram got cross-posted to Facebook for folks there to see, but like I said, I haven’t posted personal pictures in about a year and a half now. I have shared some news stories I’ve found interesting, but like other social networks, I’m pretty sure Facebook tries to minimize how many people see posts that are links to outside sites.

    With Mark Zuckerberg and Meta going all-in on accommodating the far right, I think the end of my accounts on Facebook and Instagram is quickly approaching.

    I’m not going to disappear though. I enjoy sharing things on the internet and seeing what others share. It’s just that the tools we’ve all been using for that are no longer doing a good job of it. Luckily, there are alternatives.

    Mastodon, an open-source, federated alternative to Twitter, has done an okay job filling my Twitter-shaped hole. It doesn’t have anywhere near the user base that Twitter once did, but it has enough people in areas I care about that I’ve got a useful timeline to follow for politics, tech news, and tabletop gaming discussions. If you’re on Mastodon, you can find me at @scottboehmer@mastodon.online.

    I’ve tried a shared album on Google Photos as a replacement for sharing photos with friends and family, but that hasn’t been working out as well. I haven’t been particularly good about advertising its existence, and not many of my family members seem interested in using the service. I’ve been meaning to look around more for a better alternative. For public sharing of things like pictures of my painted miniatures, I’m looking into Pixelfed, but I have yet to find something that looks like a good solution for more personal photos. If you have a photo sharing service that you like using, please let me know.

    Then I have my own websites for sharing things. This site is where I’ll be sharing articles and videos that I find interesting – the sort of things I might have once retweeted or posted to my Facebook page. Then I’ve had my gaming blog for years now, and that won’t be going anywhere. Both sites have RSS feeds and e-mail subscriptions to make them easy to follow. I also pay for hosting plans that allow both sites to not have any ads.

    For following other people, I’ve been prioritizing RSS and email subscriptions depending on what’s available. I’ve even set up an email account to use just for newsletter subscriptions so that I can keep them separate from my primary inbox. For following RSS feeds, I’ve been using Feedly for years, but I’m not particularly happy with their more recent embrace of AI. It’s another place where I have a todo list item to see if I can find a better alternative.

    I’d love to have the web feel like it’s easy to follow and share with all the people I care about in one convenient place again, but with the anti-human incentives of targeted digital ads, I feel that experience is now a thing of the past.

  • The TikTok Ban Has Happened Before

    This is all to say that I’m of two minds about the legitimacy TikTok ban. China has cultivated a national surveillance apparatus so powerful and so efficient that it now exports city-scale surveillance packages to more than 52 nations around the world. Data inside a Chinese company is effectively also inside that national surveillance apparatus. So handing a live nationwide psychological profile on 150 million Americans to a Chinese-owned company is asking for trouble. But we also have shown such callous indifference to the privacy of Americans that specifically wringing our hands about TikTok while giving free rein to the rest of surveillance capitalism rings hollow to me.

    Jacob Ward

    The TikTok Ban Has Happened Before (The Rip Current)

  • Elon Musk, the Right, and Wikipedia

    Similar attacks on speech are becoming only more common throughout the American right, with president-elect Trump’s longstanding hostility to the media escalating at a rapid clip. In recent months, Trump has suggested he wouldn’t mind if reporters were shot, threatened to jail journalists, editors, and publishers who refuse to reveal confidential sources, threatened to investigate or pull broadcasting licenses for news organizations that reported on him unflatteringly, and filed SLAPP suits of his own against news publications and pollsters.

    This hostility to information sources outside their control extends far beyond the media. Right-wing groups have launched coordinated campaigns to ban books from schools and libraries, particularly those discussing race, gender, or LGBT topics. They’ve pushed legislation like the “Kids Online Safety Act” that, while framed as protecting children, would require platforms to restrict access to information deemed “harmful” or “inappropriate for minors”, which is likely to include resources for LGBT youth and information about reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare, sexual education, or mental health. And they’ve supported state-level laws requiring internet platforms to implement age restrictions that threaten privacy and are vulnerable to weaponization against content deemed “obscene”. The common thread connecting these efforts is not protecting children or promoting “family values,” but controlling what information people can access.

    Molly White

    Elon Musk and the right’s war on Wikipedia (Citation Needed)

  • The LLMentalist Effect

    One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent.

    But there isn’t any mechanism inherent in large language models (LLMs) that would seem to enable this and, if real, it would be completely unexplained.

    LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

    LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.

    There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.

    Baldur Bjarnason

    The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con (Out of the Software Crisis)

  • Never Forgive Them

    The people running the majority of internet services have used a combination of monopolies and a cartel-like commitment to growth-at-all-costs thinking to make war with the user, turning the customer into something between a lab rat and an unpaid intern, with the goal to juice as much value from the interaction as possible. To be clear, tech has always had an avaricious streak, and it would be naive to suggest otherwise, but this moment feels different. I’m stunned by the extremes tech companies are going to extract value from customers, but also by the insidious way they’ve gradually degraded their products.

    Edward Zitron

    Never Forgive Them (Where’s Your Ed At?)

  • Why I Shut Off Comments for Millions of People

    Keeping comments up on our site was a guarantee of misinformation, because with an annual editorial budget as small as ours, one shrinking each quarter, we couldn’t afford the personnel required to patrol even one day’s articles for misleading comments, much less those attached to articles going back years that kept finding traction in Google search results. Social media companies, which were clearly replacing the role of magazines like mine, were the only ones with the money necessary to fight what I considered a holy fight against deception. And until recently, the heads of those companies did make some attempt to moderate dangerous misinformation.

    Jacob Ward

    Why I Shut Off Comments for Millions of People (The Rip Current)

  • Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago

    When Zuckerberg visited Mar-a-Lago on the evening before Thanksgiving, he and other guests reportedly stood with hands over hearts while listening to a recording of the national anthem sung by people accused of January 6–related crimes. Whether Zuckerberg knew who the singers were is unclear. But the scene was uncanny given that January 6, when it happened, was a bright-red line for the tech industry. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch banned or suspended Trump, and companies such as Amazon paused donations to election deniers. Now, with the arrival of Trump 2.0, that red line has been erased entirely.

    Lora Kelley

    Silicon Valley Heads to Mar-a-Lago (The Atlantic)

  • The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk”

    By reducing morality to an abstract numbers game, and by declaring that what’s most important is fulfilling “our potential” by becoming simulated posthumans among the stars, longtermists not only trivialize past atrocities like WWII (and the Holocaust) but give themselves a “moral excuse” to dismiss or minimize comparable atrocities in the future. This is one reason that I’ve come to see longtermism as an immensely dangerous ideology. It is, indeed, akin to a secular religion built around the worship of “future value,” complete with its own “secularised doctrine of salvation,” as the Future of Humanity Institute historian Thomas Moynihan approvingly writes in his book X-Risk. The popularity of this religion among wealthy people in the West—especially the socioeconomic elite—makes sense because it tells them exactly what they want to hear: not only are you ethically excused from worrying too much about sub-existential threats like non-runaway climate change and global poverty, but you are actually a morally better personfor focusing instead on more important things—risk that could permanently destroy “our potential” as a species of Earth-originating intelligent life.

    Émile P. Torres

    The Dangerous Ideas of “Longtermism” and “Existential Risk” (Current Affairs)

  • Standard Ebooks

    Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain ebooks that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of U.S. copyright restrictions, and free of cost.

    Ebook projects like Project Gutenberg transcribe ebooks and make them available for the widest number of reading devices. Standard Ebooks takes ebooks from sources like Project Gutenberg, formats and typesets them using a carefully designed and professional-grade style manual, fully proofreads and corrects them, and then builds them to create a new edition that takes advantage of state-of-the-art ereader and browser technology.

    Standard Ebooks aren’t just a beautiful addition to your digital library—they’re a high quality standard to build your own ebooks on.

    Standard Ebooks

  • Why Billionaires Obey in Advance

    The Trump administration is being actively taught right now that it can expect the full cooperation of the leaders of industry. Why are they offering themselves without being asked? Because that’s what they’re trained for.

    The myth of the moral billionaire has dogged me my entire career. For years I’ve been reassured by people inside and outside the power structure of Silicon Valley that the moral judgement of people at the top of major companies was so reliable that it required no real oversight.

    Jacob Ward

    Why Billionaires Obey in Advance (The Rip Current)