bengrosser.bsky.social - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

ChatGPT's palpably excessive praise over the last week isn't an error or misconfig—it's a deliberate strategy by OpenAI to fine tune praise as an engagement tactic. They've been slowly turning that dial for 2 yrs and only now did users start to notice (I've been recording its praise the whole time)

submitted 15 days ago • 2 comments

if Facebook really cared about giving its users a no algo feed, it would make their new friends feed the default also, it’s a sign of how bad Facebook’s become that they had to build a new friends feed at all

submitted 47 days ago • 1 comment

TikTok has increased frequency of ads on my For You to 1 ad for every 2-3 videos.

submitted 84 days ago • 1 comment

there's no way to chat with deepseek's web interface without giving up your data for model training or any other purpose. while i don't presume openAI/anthropic/etc won't violate the opt-out agreement we have (as a paying user), at least there is an agreement

submitted 110 days ago • 0 comments

with tiktok back up, i’m still stuckinthescroll.com

submitted 114 days ago • 0 comments

My social platform Minus will never be sold, never monetize your data, and never shutdown for anyone anywhere (unless it breaks and I'm unable to fix it). It also won't manipulate your psyche to extract more data or keep you endlessly scrolling or clicking. minus.social

submitted 115 days ago • 1 comment

so much pandering

submitted 115 days ago • 0 comments

if tiktok goes dark in the US, i expect there will be a non-zero number of humans who look up from their phones for the first time in 5 years

submitted 115 days ago • 0 comments

Whether or not TikTok goes dark in the US this Sunday, the looming shutdown exposes just how fragile and controlled our access to software has become.

submitted 116 days ago • 0 comments

Whether or not TikTok gets a reprieve, what the looming ban makes most palpable is how important it is to get (what feels to many like) public culture out of private big tech platforms.

submitted 117 days ago • 0 comments

Zuckerberg says many laughable things, but saying he will “intensely” focus on “the future of social media” is certainly high on the list. His approach—for the last 15 years at least—has been to hold social media in stasis, to freeze the idea for almost everyone. So little change, so much copying.

submitted 119 days ago • 0 comments

Zuck only cares about one thing. It's been consistent since day 1. Everything else is secondary vimeo.com/333795857

submitted 124 days ago • 2 comments

Zuck must believe cranking up mis/disinfo will benefit engagement. I expect he’s right—lies and obfuscations will induce impassioned reaction by those who believe and those who don’t. In fact, I expect the engagement boost from his announcement is already paying off.

submitted 125 days ago • 1 comment

Zuckerberg has spent the last 20 years conditioning users to become machinic in their online interactions. So, flooding his platforms with AI machine “friends” must feel like a next logical step towards further automations of user behavior. www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

submitted 131 days ago • 0 comments

I want a t-shirt with one of Claude's favorite sentences--> Tip: Long chats cause you to reach your usage limits faster.

submitted 140 days ago • 0 comments

OpenAI's Sora ignores relevant data preferences you've already set with ChatGPT and instead defaults to sharing your data with the model and publishing your videos for everyone. It should import those preferences, not reset them.

submitted 147 days ago • 0 comments

automatic hi beams (brights) on cars are designed for a world in which there are no pedestrians. they presume that the absence of opposing headlights means it’s all clear to blind any living thing in their path. sadly they also fail regularly for cars too, so everyone in/out gets blinded.

submitted 147 days ago • 4 comments

chatgpt sure is slow tonight. i like it

submitted 149 days ago • 0 comments

chatgpt’s default voice performance style has this enthusiastic advertising/marketing aesthetic to it. at times i almost feel like the answers are performed in the form of a radio commercial. then i notice i feel bad when I ask it to moderate that feel—and it (kind of) does.

submitted 149 days ago • 1 comment

whether you agree with banning TikTok in the US or not, the ease with which lawmakers can enforce it for ~250M smartphone users—by ordering two corporations to remove the app from their stores—exposes just how fragile and controlled access to software has become

submitted 150 days ago • 0 comments

just updated this poetic computation starter pack 🌱✨ - lmk if you’d like to be added! 🦔 bsky.app/starter-pack...

submitted 156 days ago • 6 comments

Asking ChatGPT for its take on OpenAI’s latest $200/month tier

submitted 159 days ago • 2 comments

transforming our intimate relationship with music into an annual spreadsheet of metrics is an abhorrent capitalistic distortion of human experience. tech corps that focus users on minutes listened and decimal point taste percentages should not be trusted with such important artifacts of culture.

submitted 159 days ago • 2 comments

instead of reporting how many minutes of music you listened to in 2024, Spotify Wrapped should report how much they made off of your listening vs how little the artists did

submitted 160 days ago • 3 comments

Bluesky having 1/10th the user base of Threads is a good thing for Bsky. When it comes to social platforms, massive scale is a threat, not a feature. Zuck of course knows this, but always chooses the potential for more profit over the well being of users. My advice to Bluesky: stay smaller.

submitted 168 days ago • 1 comment

Screened the entirety of @bengrosser.bsky.social's Order of Magnitude (vimeo.com/333795857) to my Histories of New Media class today. I told them they could dip early if they felt the need; two left a bit after the midpoint, but the rest endured. More, more, MORE!

submitted 169 days ago • 3 comments

On Threads Zuck says they’re “testing” a new feature—a default Following feed. It’s the most requested change since day 1, but they’ve resisted. So now they “test” and voila: positive press! The tech press has to stop forgetting that Meta sometimes uses “testing” as a tactic to manipulate them.

submitted 169 days ago • 0 comments

I want to create a Starter Pack of Artists who used AI in their work before DeepDream/GANs/etc changed the field in ~2015. Who would you put on that list?

submitted 173 days ago • 1 comment

When you reference an artwork in academic text, please cite the artwork and the artist! Too often I find artworks mentioned but not cited. Sometimes the artist's name isn't included at all. Other times the author cites a secondary source when citing the artwork/artist instead was most appropriate.

submitted 173 days ago • 0 comments

this is a 100% human-generated post. no LLMs, no GPTs. just a squishy messy brain stuck in a meatbag thinking up a sequence of words to convey tone and meaning across the digital void, to you.

submitted 175 days ago • 2 comments

Zuck brags about Threads having 15x as many users as Bluesky as if that’s a good thing. Scale has always been his worst blind spot. The rising numbers he seeks are also his biggest liability, the foundational reason underpinning his worst problems.

submitted 177 days ago • 1 comment

The shameful way that Instagram and Threads both treat links reveals Zuckerberg’s disdain for the web. He happily built his fortunes on and with the web, but not long after chose, in return, to degrade and debase it.

submitted 178 days ago • 1 comment