Bonum Certa Men Certa

Taking Back Control or Seizing Autonomy Over the News Cycle (Informing People, Culling the Marketing)



Video download link | md5sum 6c1484d9bde38cacb2e9a0c3351de662 What Lies Ahead for Us Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: The World Wide Web has become so utterly full of trash and classic plagiarism/egregious spam that separating the wheat from the chaff is fast becoming a truly challenging task (not just due to machine-generated spew disguised as 'articles' because it's grammatically solid -- hardly a new thing by the way!)

THIS past weekend, and more so yesterday (Sunday), we hardly published anything other than Daily Links. Instead we were developing various tools, for means of gradual improvement, in order to extend our scope of coverage, investing in a chain of commands that can better serve the site's audience.



"We try to cite more and more sources over time."Unlike s***GPT, which I discuss in the video above, a set of tools can rely on human understanding and curation, with actual sources to be cited. We try to cite more and more sources over time. Seeing that the Web is getting smaller and search engines keep getting worse (for a number of reasons), we need to more properly assess what's published and where. Some former news sites became spamfarms and some automatically generate their "content". Some of the media just blindly parrots lies that come from any random company, more so if it becomes a paying "media partner". We need to respond to that, not relay that.

With the EPO coverage slowing down a bit in recent years, and given that I'm not writing much about the company I left (anymore), we want to place greater focus on tech issues, including mobile phones, "apps", and their impact on society. At the core we're still all about Free software, but we must look ahead at other challenges such as software patents and various malicious companies other than Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft is becoming less relevant each year (ignore the s***GPT noise machine; it is a paid-for PR campaign, not journalism) and we're exceedingly worried about openwashing. It's basically extinguishing a brand long associated with Software Freedom as the "business world" wants to do things secretly, in a proprietary fashion, while calling itself "open" (I should know; I left such a company 2 months ago after it had changed for the worse).

"At the core we're still all about Free software..."At the moment we're in a bit of a "flux", as we abandoned graphical RSS readers and are instead processing OPML files "by hand"*; over time, we believe, this will pay off. _____ * Mostly parsing, editing in a text editor, and joining; nothing over-engineered or overly complex, as those would be harder to maintain in the long run.

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