Democracy, even at its most ideal, is often about overriding preferences. Netflix helps to float an entire industry of creators and a tangible pop culture. It's not entirely clear (or softened, maybe not clear to communities) what AI build out floats currently except AI companies and the tangible negatives of generative AI.
Look, I'm not entirely convinced AI will be as revolutionary as some believe but it's still pretty clear it's able to provide capabilities we've never had before.
It's probably silly to make OP's judgement of any of these implementations in isolation, but you can sense a real fear about the growth (or lack thereof) inside Bluesky. Fiddling with the presented metrics (likes count getting moved ahead of reposts), promoting total user signups while being silent on collapsing DAUs. They are promising a lot at once with AI custom feeds from Attie and subreddit-style communities that smells like feature creep.
They aren't my indicators, but they read as sweat against the observable metrics being in decline. There is a perception that they want to pull on users outside of Bluesky that I don't really think exist, and I guess I share in that feeling when I believe the core still has so much basic parity missing with X et al that would demonstrate confidence in the current users you already have. Still interested to see what they ship as.
The attendance was clandestine and performed by actors that misrepresented themselves to gain an intelligence advantage. I'm not sure what else you would call it.
Feeds still have a lot of inertia, at least. Most blogs generate them out of the box, and Wordpress being as predominant as it still is means you can still find them even where you don't expect to. Even social media profiles can compress into feeds with a little help from solutions like Nitter (or in Bluesky's case, offered natively). What I think is really missed is the social component that Reader had, which you still can't really find even with the variety of great readers that came in its wake.
I know I will probably just migrate them to RSSHub when the time calls, but YouTube's channel and playlist feeds have been such a great way to follow a large number of creators. I'm still holding my breath for the day they unceremoniously stop working.
Any boast about AI accelerating the development lifecycle comes with an equal or greater stock that examples like this become more frequent when there are less opportunities for someone to interrupt them with a smidge of common sense.
JR East is already in the process of eliminating departure melodies as they transition to one-man station operations, so these will unfortunately be gone sooner than later. The Nambu and Joban lines got rid of them last year and it looks like the Yamanote is scheduled for them to be gone by 2030 [1].
I'm sure they can figure out a way to trigger custom melodies with RFID or similar eventually. Keikyu figured out how to recreate their departure boards [2]. JR might be less willing to come up with something immediately given the optics around automating someone out of a job.
"trains on the Nambu Line have been operated by a team of two staff members, a driver up front and a conductor in the back [...] It turns out that in order to play the station-specific departure melodies, someone has to press an actual button located on the platform, and this has been part of the conductor’s responsibilities"
I should have specified I meant the custom melodies. My understanding was that they're now all generic. https://sheets.works/the-bells-of-tokyo is a good reference for the transition.
I hope they can find a way to keep them, it would certainly garner a lot of goodwill. Not like people will stop taking their trains because the melodies are gone, though...
For the digital flipboard on the Keikyu line, it's nice they did it, but I wish they would add a bit more perspective to the flippy parts. Right now it looks like a horizontal scanline just moving down the signs to reveal the next station name underneath.
No, it is impossible to keep them. Computers are not that far advanced yet. The melodies can only be played by pressing a button located at the end of the train.
My line lost its departure melodies in March this year :/
We should get our top frontier models on the task. Perhaps they can devise a motorized finger contraption to push the button without human intervention.
Dead internet theory seems mostly proven by blog posts gesticulating about it. Digital creation is easier, more collaborative, and just as fun as it has ever been if you stop thinking in terms of mass audience and following the herd.
I'll grant you: Flash is a hole that never fully healed back. Search engines might not be especially great for discovery now either. They weren't especially great for Geocities shrines either, though.
The advertisers that evaporated and left behind a lot of no label dropshipping scams seem to think so. Did a lot of them eventually come back because there is some audience to squeeze numbers from? Sure, but I also wouldn't negate that many didn't and aren't coming back because it is Elon's playground now.
We have probably crested over some peak, but you would not look at the broad numbers and say 3% of a peak is organic to that trend. That is a dying/dead website, at least from the position of someone running socials for EFF.
