🏖️ Instead of Lounging on the Beach, 🎙️ I Launched a Podcast
Why the future of good Internet vibes is for the humans, by the humans. By Jared White
(This isn't strictly true, I did go to the beach but that was back in the spring. 😋)
Happy Summer Y'all! (or for my southern hemisphere friends, Stay Warm! 🥶)
It's true, my new podcast is officially out: the ironically-named Vibe Coded. As it says on the tin:
A show about the perils & pitfalls of creative intellectual automation; and why the future of good Internet vibes is for the humans, by the humans.
You can listen to the first episode right here! (Subscribe in your podcast player of choice blah blah blah thanks a million!)
A couple of notes on the why and the how of the show:
Why? In a certain sense, it's for entirely practical reasons. There's so much news every single day on the hazards of genAI and the fails by "business idiots" (to use Ed Zitron's bemused phrase) running these companies going nuts over AI that I felt like it was overwhelming my o.g. podcast Fresh Fusion. Well over 100 episodes into that show, I didn't want it to turn into the "oh god what stupid shit's happening today" show. That's not really what Vibe Coded is about either. I'm hoping to make this show a little bit more lighthearted, a little bit more sassy and frolicky. Yeah there's stupid shit going down, but isn't it a gas to make fun of it? 😂
👋 Hey, while I've got your attention—apparently the most valuable currency in this economy—can you please ensure you don't miss another issue of Cycles Hyped No More:
Anyway, with this new show having a twin focus on genAI fails and meanwhile how awesome the human-powered grassroots Internet still is (fediverse, open web, etc.), I can return Fresh Fusion back to its roots of being a causal variety show about whatever I happen to find interesting to talk about (art, travel, local politics, etc.)
How? I decided to look for a new podcast hosting provider this year (and migrate off of Buzzsprout) because I wanted to (a) be able to spin up new shows without having to create and pay for new accounts, (b) integrate episodes with Buttondown-powered email newsletters, and (c) offer a members-only podcast easily once I reboot my Intuitive+ subscription platform (stay tuned!). In other words, I needed a podcast network provider, and that has turned out to be Transistor.
I'll keep you posted how that goes over time, but so far so good! I'm still finishing up the migration (and it'll be tricky to move Fresh Fusion over because currently that's hosted by my own weird site generator template/S3 bucket/Blubrry analytics/etc.) but the end goal is to get the “Intuitive Future Podcast Network” humming along like a well-oiled machine for years to come. 🥰
In case you don't feel like listening to the whole episode, here's a written excerpt from Episode 1 I think is really important to consider:
“You may have heard about the innovation adoption lifecycle: You have the innovators at the start, then early adopters, then the early majority. This is a big group of people. Then the late majority, another big group of people. And then the laggards at the end.
“If you think that generative AI is following this typical innovation adoption life cycle, you would be very wrong. We are not witnessing a bell curve. Instead, it's been more of an initial explosion where just an insane number of people, like mainstream populations for sure, suddenly jumped on things like ChatGPT and some of these other chat bots and image generation tools right when they came out. A lot of people right away started using all this stuff. Hype absolutely through the roof. And then a massive backlash. A whole lot of people saying, Hold on! Hold up! Time out! Let's talk about what's really going on here. Let's talk about how these tools are actually working. I have some questions.
“And you see increasingly the big tech companies realizing, Oh, we have a bit of a PR problem on our hands. We have a bit of a perception issue. And that's why you're hearing more and more stories of enterprises essentially forcing their employees, forcing users of these tools to comply or get lost. We don't want you here in our company if you will not use our AI platforms that we're rolling out.
“I want to remind you of something here. This is critical. This is a critical piece of the puzzle I think a lot of people are missing. Innovative new technologies at corporations, at enterprises, are almost always adopted by individual workers first. And then slowly it makes its way up to upper management, where they sometimes have to be dragged kicking and screaming into adopting whatever this awesome new technology is. We've seen that happen time and time again. A lot of popular tools in use in enterprises today started out primarily as consumer products and were beloved by the average internet user, individuals. And then these companies start to make the enterprise play.
“We've seen almost the exact opposite with a lot of these Gen AI services. They went after enterprises almost from the start. GitHub Copilot was rolled out entirely geared towards the sort of industrial level production workflows of big enterprise engineers.
“Do you think they care about how individuals feel? The individual software developer? Ha! Ha I say! This has been an enterprise play from the start. And AI has been used over and over again as a backdoor to, frankly, laying off thousands and thousands of workers. It's so dishonest. It's so ridiculous. And again, the point I'm trying to make, this is not the typical innovation adoption life cycle that we're seeing. We are seeing something very different.”
Thanks for reading Cycles Hyped No More. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss another issue, and I'll see you here again next week!
Cheers,
Jared ✌️
🤔🌩️ Things that make you think:
I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community. I do not know how to determine whether someone’s post about their new bicycle is genuine enthusiasm or automated astroturf. I don’t know how to foster trust and genuine interaction in a world of widespread text and image synthesis—in a world where, as one friend related this week, newbies can ask an LLM for advice on exploring their kinks, and the machine tells them to try solo breath play.
–The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess, written by Kyle Kingsbury, a.k.a "Aphyr"