We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane.
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.
> We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don't you'd go insane.
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.
It’s funny, I’d genuinely say that Gravatar improved for quite some time. In the old days it was fine, then for quite some time under Automattic when they started fiddling with it it was ridiculously bad and for a while even literally unusable due to broken tie-in to WordPress.com accounts or something (I forget), then they finally got it together again so that it was arguably better than before they took it over, with the caveat that they had expanded its scope a little so there was foolish distraction, but at least the core flow was actually better… but then they’ve continued fiddling with it.
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 don't get it either. I clicked their link to the other person's complaint, too - I still do not understand.
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.
You have to read the image to figure out what they're talking about.
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.
Myeah, the first thing I saw when opening it on mobile is that the top logo is not centered and the menu is not displaying properly ("About" item single on a line with some random left margin).
Not that I care but then I was confused by the two comments here praising the design.
The logo is the one thing I didn't like but I don't want to clarify every single thing to prevent people from nitpicking and dissecting my words.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...');