¶Stubblebine’s argument—that it doesn’t necessarily matter whether a platform contains a large amount of garbage, as long as it successfully amplifies good writing and limits the reach of said garbage—is perhaps more pragmatic than any attempt to wholly banish AI slop. His moderation strategy may very well be the most savvy approach.

¶It also suggests a future in which the Dead Internet theory comes to fruition. The theory, once the domain of extremely online conspiratorial thinkers, argues that the vast majority of the internet is devoid of real people and human-created posts, instead clogged with AI-generated slop and bots. As generative AI tools grow more commonplace, platforms that give up on trying to blot out bots will incubate an online world in which work created by humans becomes increasingly harder to find on platforms swamped by AI.

¶Medium is taking an interesting approach to handling “AI slop” as it’s called. The platform isn’t banning it per se, but striving to reward it with zero views. I think I see a lot of it over there, so I think some of the slop is getting some views. I generally like Medium.

¶As part of the US$24 billion (S$31.6 billion) project, Australian solar project developer Sun Cable will build a massive solar farm in the southern region of Darwin, the state capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory. Electricity generated will be transmitted to Singapore via 4,300km of subsea cables.

¶This is an interesting project to watch — international, transoceanic delivery of renewable energy. Sounds like the project just passed a technical and commercial viability stage gate and off ramps are still on the horizon, but it seems to have some momentum.

¶Atlassian co-counder Mike Cannon-Brookes is behind the project, maybe trying to prove that not all billionaires are bad. This article gives some background on business of the project and Cannon-Brookes involvement.

¶“We took a powder of this material, put it in a tube, and we passed Berkeley air — just outdoor air — into the material to see how it would perform, and it was beautiful. It cleaned the air entirely of CO2. Everything,” said Omar Yaghi, the James and Neeltje Tretter Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper that will appear online Oct. 23 in the journal Nature.

¶This sounds promising.

¶…restaurant owners and independent repair professionals will be able to bypass the software locks that keep kitchen machinery offline until the “right” repair services get involved. This should lower prices and speed up repairs in such situations.

¶Your move, McDonald’s. If downtime on ice cream machines doesn’t drop drastically as a result of this exemption, it will likely melt away in three years when the Library of Congress considers its renewal.

¶A headline like, say, “Vision Pro Sales Are Exactly in Line With Expectations” is not going to hit people as a big story, but “Apple Sharply Scales Back Production of Vision Pro” does. It’s the same reason the classic “Man Bites Dog” grabs attention but “Dog Bites Man” does not.

¶Gruber’s critique of recent reporting on Vision Pro sales reminds us that “enrage to engage” is nothing new. Headlines have to draw people into the story, whether it’s in print or online, and whether its subject is politics or…tech financial data. I try to never forget that.

¶On the Vision Pro itself, I’m still intrigued and I hope Gruber is right that estimated sales figures are in line with Apple’s internal expectations because that would likely maintain momentum on the project. I did the in-store demo once and I was immediately enthralled. I left the store with my mind on fire about potential uses…and without a headset. I just can’t justify the price tag.

¶But, if Apple continues to move it forward, and the price comes down as a result, I can see myself buying one in the future.

¶RIP Phil Lesh.

¶Lesh wrote some of my favorite Grateful Dead songs, including Box of Rain and Darkstar.

¶And, of course, Truckin’, which has one of my all time favorite lyrics:

¶Sometimes the light’s all shinin’ on me Other times I can barely see Lately it occurs to me What a long, strange trip it’s been

¶We get some good days and some bad days and, in the end, they all add up to a long, strange, and beautiful trip. Enjoy it.

¶Thanks, Phil.

¶Perplexity, in its response today, argues that news organizations like News Corp that have filed lawsuits against AI companies “prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”

¶The difference between facts and facts, as reported by…is the key here. Media companies don’t own facts. They do, however, own the intellectual property rights that protect their reporting of the facts. The question the law needs to answer is whether AI training on their reporting of the facts violates those rights or not. It’s not clear cut, and courts will wrestle with this question for years.

¶And, yes, it’s a lawsuit…which is adversarial by nature.

¶Drinking water from brackish ground water, with only renewable energy input and no battery storage. Pretty cool.

¶“Being able to make drinking water with renewables, without requiring battery storage, is a massive grand challenge. And we’ve done it.”

¶This is great to see, but I’m not sure it does much to prevent AI companies from training on newly published books. I can’t imagine they’re scanning printed books for or buying ebooks to plug into model training. Maybe they’re scraping copies available on rogue sites, which would already be a copyright infringement.

¶It certainly feels good, though.

¶The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.