Chaos & Amazement #2501 Google’s Identity Crisis, Spotify’s Ghosts, and Bobby Fingers’ Mini Marvels
🎉 Kicking off 2025 with curious shifts in tech, 🎧 creative twists in music, and 🎨 unexpected artistry—here’s to a year full of discovery!
Tech News
Google revolutionized search in the 90s with PageRank, ranking sites by their incoming links instead of just keyword matching. But as AI chatbots take over, are we losing the web's rich tapestry of human-made connections? https://aeon.co/essays/when-ai-summaries-replace-hyperlinks-thought-itself-is-flattened
Meanwhile, OpenAI's ChatGPT search feels like a throwback to Google's clean simplicity of the 2000s. Will Google rediscover its roots or face a shift in user loyalty? https://birchtree.me/blog/openai-is-early-googling-late-stage-google/
Reddit's stock surged 400% in 2024, fueled by profits and AI data licensing. But users fear over-monetization and bots ruining the platform's unique community. It’s on the fast track to enshittification. https://slate.com/technology/2024/12/reddit-wall-street-boom-ai.html
Report reveals Spotify's "Perfect Fit Content" program uses ghost artists and production companies to create low-cost playlist music, replacing work from real musicians to improve profit margins. https://harpers.org/archive/2025/01/the-ghosts-in-the-machine-liz-pelly-spotify-musicians/
From my blog
Bobby Fingers: Blending Humor and Miniature Masterpieces https://bnox.be/2025/01/bobby-fingers-blending-humor-and.html
Weird and Wonderful
Playing Doom in a CAPTCHA is wild - but it's just another reminder that almost every gadget today is basically a computer in disguise, whether it's running on your toaster or your web browser.
https://riddl.ing is a daily guessing game! guess the answer to the riddle in five clues.
True Facts by Zefrank: Rays, The Floppy Sombreros of the Sea