Notices by Andy Baio (andybaio@xoxo.zone), page 4

Google used to take pride in minimizing time we spent there, guiding us to relevant pages as quickly as possible. Over time, they tried to answer everything themselves: longer snippets, inline FAQs, search results full of knowledge panels.

Today's Bard announcement feels like their natural evolution: extracting all value out of the internet for themselves, burying pages at the bottom of each GPT-generated essay like footnotes. https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/

Twitter just announced free access to the Twitter API will end on February 9, with unannounced pricing or usage details, effectively killing every free fun and useful thing ever built with it: bots, games, mashups, visualizations, research projects, autoposters, autoblockers, deleters, and so much more. https://twitter.com/twitterdev/status/1621026986784337922

Last month, I saw this wonderfully entertaining process video of artist Cat Graffam recreating Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Son" in Mario Paint. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJSx7q-Mt0c

I loved it so much, I bought it… in the form of the original Mario Paint cartridge she made it on. It's my new favorite possession. Digital art ownership with provenance and scarcity, no blockchain required!

Twitter quietly changed its Developer Agreement today to retroactively justify their unannounced ban on third-party Twitter clients. They added a single line forbidding "use or access the Licensed Materials to create or attempt to create a substitute or similar service or product to the Twitter Applications." Here's a diff between the two. https://www.diffchecker.com/DmAjUJGK/

An absolute kick in the teeth to all the indie devs who worked so hard to make Twitter a better experience for so many. Twitterrific was officially discontinued today and pulled off the App Store after 16 years of development. Among other firsts, they first used "tweet" to describe an update, first used a bird icon, and were the first native client on iPhone and Mac. https://blog.iconfactory.com/2023/01/twitterrific-end-of-an-era/

ChatGPT makes a perfect reply guy.

who could have ever predicted a student coding project with three people working on it and over 2 million users would have multiple critical vulnerabilities?

"The issues we reported allow any attacker to access all data, including private posts, private messages, shared media and even deleted direct messages. This also includes private email addresses and phone numbers entered during login." https://zerforschung.org/posts/hive-en/

Hive is adding ~500k users daily, passing the 1 million user mark on Monday and then 2 million users earlier today. They're supported only by the 24-year-old founder, two employees, and zero moderators.

It's completely irresponsible for them to have unlimited signups when they can't possibly handle abuse, harassment, scams, spam, disinformation, or illegal content. https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-competitor-hive-social-run-by-24-year-old-founder-2022-11

Last week, a Redditor fine-tuned an AI image model on the work of one illustrator, sparking a debate about the ethics of reproducing a living artist's style. I talked to that artist to see how she felt about it, and the person who made it. https://waxy.org/2022/11/invasive-diffusion-how-one-unwilling-illustrator-found-herself-turned-into-an-ai-model/