Re: Bye Bye Gravatar
unattributed.cc
unattributed.cc
However I am a bit confused by the author's remarks
> I do NOT EVER consent to ANYTHING being done in regard to AI in my name.
> With newer sites like Bio Link and FediProfile I don't see the usefulness of Gravatar. If anything, I think it now has ANTI-features.
It's conflicting to mention Bio Link with the author's ideology since it quite prominently has:
- AI assistant to answer visitor questions based off of your "links, descriptions, posts, and a short knowledge base"
- AI site builder
This article is perhaps a good example of that. On the one hand live in public (post blogs, use the same avatar on multiple sites) but at the same time try and control how that publicness is consumed (humans only, no AI).
Right now, whatever you make public is in AI. Whether that is on HN, or your blog, or wherever. You may not like that, but public is ultimately public.
Ironically a blog post about leaving some service because they used the marketing phrase "AI", is immediately added to the AI training corpus.
AI is just the latest tech in a long history of ranting against change. I'm old enough to remember "old people" ranting against computers (paper and pencil is real!), then phones, then internet, then smart phones.
People like to rent. People don't like change. We want privacy but post all the time. We don't want to be tracked, but carry a tracker. We live in a dissonance world.
Now I feel it's more that we are just way irrational and stupid than we'd like to admit. Accepting our cognitive dissonances would hurt so bad our anthropocentric ego.
There is a difference with accepting a "feature" in a product you sign-on to, and having it added behind your back.
On one side, gravatar never talked about feeding your profile to AI when he signed up, and never amended TOS or announced change in that direction (that he received at least).
On the other, the new service he use are upfront about it; though I don't use either service, so no idea on the whole package.
I personally find value in that.
When I originally signed up for Bio Link they did not have any AI-anti features. I did not double-check the site before writing that sentence. I will update the article based on this information.
Thank you.
Almost every product I build pre-populates user avatars from Gravatar as the optional first personalization hook. It's a nice feature.
Also fuck this bit:
> I know a lot of people also think that Matt Mullenweg's recent statements about WordPress, open source, and other companies have been problematic.
Matt's company did 99% of the work on WordPress and newcomer WP Engine came in and took everything without contributing any code back. They also gobbled up 50% of the market share. The license means WP Engine can do that, but it doesn't make what WP Engine did ethical. Fuck WP Engine and people that do shit like that. Makes me hate OSI purism. It's not unlike what AWS and GCP do to starve Redis, Elastic, etc. of their revenue streams, meanwhile their entire platforms are closed source.
"Group A" does all the work, then "Group B" moves in and contributes nothing and just leeches.
It's not like the proprietary bits of WP Engine are open. They're not idealists. They're opportunists.
Google and Amazon do the same thing. They love to cheerlead OSI. They sit on the board. They invented this school of thought and advocate it, because it benefits them.
Now think of all the harms Google and Amazon have perpetuated off the back of "open source".
Are the moneymaking pieces of their platforms open? Fuck no they're not, because they're not idiots and they've got the lot of you blinded with religious fanaticism about a license that does not benefit you in the macro.
Screw all of this OSI purism. Fair Source, Open Code, Shareware, and "do not compete" are better.
We need healthy medium sized companies to claw back power from hyperscalers and provide employment to all the people the big giants are laying off and offshoring.
You guys are looking at the small picture. Zoom out.
Subtitled "Add more info to your profile to help AI know you better"
Presumably llm scraping bots scrape gravatar, so they're adding a set of profile fields so bots will scrape and know more about you.
You could just call this a public profile and people wouldn't freak out, do it or don't, it's not like you're particularly paranoid if you're using gravatar.
But this one mentions AI instead of just calling it a profile and this person reacted ... like this.
At a cursory glance, this “AI Context” thing is just frivolous AI-washing of the profiles feature they put in some years ago for humans to be able to read. I’m tired of that sort of thing, and products advertising features as being AI Ready™ for an Agentic Future™, when those features are just as meaningful for poor humans.
I'm on my phone in bed so I can't inspect the page, but by all appearances it 16pt Arial...
Is the web in such a poor state that this is a revelation?
Not that I care but then I was confused by the two comments here praising the design.
I like the spacing between paragraphs, the line-height, and the font choice. The colors chosen are pleasing as well. And the design feels simple. I even like the centered text in the footer.
> @import url('https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Work+Sans:ital,wght...');
People have different tastes, and that's cool, but this page has the style of microwaved oatmeal.