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New Host: Hostinger. Same RealityFragments

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

So… it’s been quiet around here lately, though my mind has not been. One of the things I was waiting for was jumping to a new host. Goodbye, Automattic! Goodbye WordPress.com! The tiers of managed hosting were not priced to my liking, the AI scraping thing that I really didn’t like the default setting of, etc.

Freedom comes at a cost, so I’ll have to be more about managing the site than I used to be – but it ain’t really that hard for me. Wrestling Drupal 11 would be much more of a headache at this point, but I almost did switch…

So the site is on Hostinger.com now. Well, it, as well as 2 others as well as a few unannounced projects.

I went into more technical reasoning for changing hosts at KnowProSE.com.

Web hosting is a thing. I have a technical mind, as you will see if you visit KnowProSE.com, but I have more than a technical mind, as you see here on RealityFragments.com. We are more than just one mind.

That’s a bit of a hint about one of the projects I’m working on which is a hint about one of the projects I’m working on – mainly writing.

Other than that, quite a lot has happened since last I wrote here. Despite everything, the world has managed to continue rotating.

Back to writing!

Kill The Social Networks.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ Leave a comment

There was a time when blogs were a big deal. We had our own network of blogs, we had a website called Technorati that ranked them and where we could see who was writing about stuff we were interested in.

The early blogs I found really great. We had people discussing all manner of things, with ‘pingbacks’ between blogs allowing for the crosslinking so even though you didn’t comment on their website, there was a link to the author referred to. WordPress.com does that, and to an extent it still happens in open source blogs, though a few things happened that changed the way things worked.

For example, at the same time, to make their sites more popular, crosslinking was done, and sometimes it was done to such an extent by people who had more marketing than thought that the search engines smacked it down in their search engine results. Search Engine results were important, so that was done more carefully. It was all very cliquish, and in some ways very elitist. Though I knew and even worked with some of the more famous bloggers, they weren’t interested in the content created. They were interested in their own audience, as well they should have been.

For all of the flaws, it wasn’t a bad system. It was decentralized, and the only real limit on content you could find was your ability to find it. Search engines cashed in a bit more because search engines were used a lot more. Nowadays, people are fed pulped fictions with some interesting stuff every now and then.

Social networks showed up and threw everything out the window. When you have centralized networks, you have the centralized ability to shadow ban people on the network, and once it hits critical mass, it becomes arbitrary, with the owner of the network enforcing their own version of what is right or wrong without even a conversation. Facebook does it, Twitter does it, Instagram does it… so the only path to not being shadow banned for something real or imagined is to simply leave the network.

But it doesn’t really end there. Now everyone is training an AI on user data, and no one has control over what user data they train on and how it is used. Chandra Steele writes a bit about how it feels like it’s the end of the shared Internet:

“…This is why the Tumblr and WordPress news [about selling information to AI companies] seems like a heavy blow to a shared internet. It’s taken away the possibility to return to the purer place we came from. PCMag Security Analyst Kim Key reached out to Automattic, which owns both platforms, and the company did not confirm or deny the rumors, though it did direct her to a statement that seems to indicate that if the deal goes through, users will be able to opt out from having their work included in AI training…”

“WordPress Wants to Turn My Old Blog Into an AI Zombie, and It Breaks My Heart“, Chandra Steele, PCMag.com, February 29th, 2024

It’s not the end of the shared Internet at all. Some of us don’t write on PCMag.com, and there are plenty of other options that exist. WordPress.com was just a later website built with open source technology, but before that we had GreyMatter, etc. She mentions 2009 for her blog – I was blogging since 1999. A lot happened in those 10 years.

These technologies still exist. If we want control of our content, we should move off of platforms where we cannot. I’m considering this myself in the context of WordPress.com. I only got here because I was tired of the trouble of maintaining my own sites, but during the time I have used WordPress.com, website hosting has improved to include managed open source content management systems, the open source content management systems themselves have become more easy to maintain and more powerful…

If you feel boxed in, get out of the box. I’m considering options myself since I feel my own trust was betrayed by WordPress.com, and they haven’t really discussed with us what is going on since that bombshell was dropped.

What we need to remember is that we always have options. The only way to effect change is to actually change ourselves. Don’t like a network? Get off it. No one will die.

If you write good content, they’ll find you.

Manipulation of Tech.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

Manipulation doesn’t really require much. It’s pretty easy to manipulate or be manipulated, and despite the negative connotations, manipulation doesn’t always have to be bad.

What differentiates good and bad as far as manipulation is subjective. Being volunteered for a ‘greater good’ is usually seen as ‘good’, but being manipulated against one’s own interests for a ‘greater good’ that doesn’t include you doesn’t seem very good.

An example: WordPress and Tumblr users were volunteered rather than asked to volunteer information being sold to artificial intelligence companies. If they were actually volunteering, the default setting that was set up for 3rd parties being allowed to use the data would have been off. It wasn’t. The manipulation here was, “Hey, we told you to go in and do this if you don’t want to do it.”

That’s not voluntary in most stretches of the imagination except the unimaginative: Law. It was a manipulation, and I’d offer that it wasn’t fair to people.

If WordPress.com and Tumblr users were paid for it, maybe I’d think it was worth doing. Instead, the owner of the platform decides. It’s not in the interest of the users.

It’s only in the interest of those that own the platform.

WordPress.com, Tumblr to Sell Information For AI Training: What You can do.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

While I was figuring out how to be human in 2024, I missed that Tumblr and WordPress posts will reportedly be used for OpenAI and Midjourney training.

This could be a big deal for people who take the trouble to write their own content rather than filling the web with Generative AI text to just spam out posts.

If you’re involved with WordPress.org, it doesn’t apply to you.

WordPress.com has an option to use Tumblr as well, so when you post to WordPress.com it automagically posts to Tumblr. Therefore you might have to visit both of the posts below and adjust your settings if you don’t want your content to be used in training models.

This doesn’t mean that they haven’t already sent information to Midjourney and OpenAI yet. We don’t really know, but from the moment you change your settings…

  • WordPress.com: How to opt out of the AI training is available here.

    It boils down to this part in your blog settings on WordPress.com:


  • With Tumblr.com, you should check out this post. Tumblr is more tricky, and the link text is pretty small around the images – what you need to remember is after you select your blog on the left sidebar, you need to use the ‘Blog Settings’ link on the right sidebar.

Hot Take.

When I was looking into all of this, it ends up that Automattic, the owners of WordPress.com and Tumblr.com is doing the sale.

If you look at your settings, if you haven’t changed them yet, you’ll see that the default was set to allowing the use of content for training models. The average person who uses these sites to post their content are likely unaware, and in my opinion if they wanted to do this the right way the default setting would be to have these settings opt out.

It’s unclear whether they already sent posts. I’m sure that there’s an army of lawyers who will point out that they did post it in places and that the onus was on users to stay informed. It’s rare for me to use the word ‘shitty’ on KnowProSE.com, but I think it’s probably the best way to describe how this happened.

It was shitty of them to set it up like this. See? It works.

Now some people may not care. They may not be paying users, or they just don’t care, and that’s fine. Personal data? Well, let’s hope that got scrubbed.

Some of us do. I don’t know how many, so I can’t say a lot or a few. Yet if Automattic, the parent company of both Tumblr and WordPress.com, will post that they care about user choices, it hardly seems appropriate that the default choice was not to opt out.

As a paying user of WordPress.com, I think it’s shitty to think I would allow the use of what I write, using my own brain, to be used for a training model that the company gets paid for. I don’t see any of that money. To add injury to that insult of my intelligence, Midjourney and ChatGPT also have subscription to offer the trained AI which I also pay for (ChatGPT).

To make matters worse, we sort of have to take the training models on the word of those that use them. They don’t tell us what’s in them or where the content came from.

This is my opinion. It may not suit your needs, and if you don’t have a pleasant day. But if you agree with this, go ahead, make sure your blog is not allowing third party data sharing.

Personally, I’m unsurprised at how poorly this has been handled. Just follow some of the links early on in the post and revel in dismay.

92 Day ‘Streak’ Introspection.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 2 Comments

For those of us on WordPress.com, where this blog presently resides, we get these updates whenever we write at least a post a day. WordPress.com calls them ‘streaks’.

People who do laundry are familiar with streaks, too, so I’m not sure that’s a good thing. WordPress.com also doesn’t give prizes for this other than another one the next day.

Not very inspiring. I’m not sure if that helps anyone, actually.

What I am sure of is that I’m back in the rhythm of writing, though I will admit that I’m not working on the book(s) as much and I do need to focus a bit more on that.

Some of the things I’ve learned over the last 90 days is how so many people will like a blog post but how little cross-linking there is to riff with other people. There are good ideas out there worth cross-planting with. Then there are the people who just like things so that you look at their stuff – which works maybe a few times if their stuff isn’t all that grand.

Hiding underneath all of that are the actual likes, which aren’t as representative of traffic. Strangely, RealityFragments.com has a lot more content – almost double at present that of KnowProSE.com, largely because that’s a more serious blog – yet KnowProSE.com has more SEO penetration, perhaps because… it’s a more serious blog. Strange how that works.

At the same time, and perhaps related, I have been seeing a psychologist regularly to check on whether or not I’m completely bonkers. As it happens, I’m not, so there is that, but it’s been interesting unraveling myself with her as I unravel other things elsewhere. It’s helped a bit with the introspection.

In normal introspection, we’re there, we’re thinking about things, and we hopefully come out better for the experience. Yet some things are tied to observations of other people, and people can be so ludicrous that I wonder at times if I’m not the crazy one.

When you look at things like The Fumigator and note how everyone else just ignores the strange behavior, there is a part of me that wonders at times if I’m not the one who is a little bit… off. I see this more often than not, these behaviors that others gloss over. I’m not going to say in any way that I’m some standard of normal – I am not – but I do wonder if when we ignore some strange behaviors if we’re not ourselves being a little crazy ourselves. In the case of the fumigator, I was a silent observer trying to figure out what was going on, but everyone else just… went about their business as if nothing crazy was happening.

This could explain governments around the world.

It disturbs me a little that we have gotten to this level of complacency about so many things. I suppose, in a way, that’s what my writing is about – not being complacent, not just doing what you’re told because you are told, and being aware of things and working towards making the world better.