Facebook AI – all your base are belong to us

I deactivated Facebook years ago. I never had it on a phone, and I’m quite aware it’s the Boomers’ platform of choice to keep in touch, I joined it years ago at work. But today I got the final kick up the arse to delete the account:

We’re updating our Privacy Policy as we expand AI at Meta

Hi ermine,

We’re getting ready to expand our AI at Meta experiences to your region. AI at Meta is our collection of generative AI features and experiences, such as Meta AI and AI creative tools, along with the models that power them.

What this means for you

To help bring these experiences to you, we’ll now rely on the legal basis called legitimate interests for using your information to develop and improve AI at Meta. This means that you have the right to object to how your information is used for these purposes. If your objection is honoured, it will be applied from then on.

We’re including updates in our Privacy Policy to reflect these changes. The updates come into effect on 26 June 2024.

Thanks,
The Meta Privacy team

No. Just fuck right off. I don’t need to beg you for an exception, Zucky-babes. I need you to stick your AI where the sun don’t shine. AI is out there stinking up the information space and trashing what’s left of the human-authored internet, and I don’t want to be part of it. Now I’m sure that Facebook will ignore this and salt away the data they claim to be deleting in 30 days to use for their AI anyway. Facebook has got previous form. All your base are belong to us. That’s the Faustian pact we all made with social media 20 years ago.

AI. Just say no. It’s not intelligent, and its talent for enshittification knows no bounds. Yes, protein folding is the exception, but it has trashed search, enabled legions of amateurs to make curiously revolting ‘art’ that looks superficially pretty but twists the gut and it is scattergunning randomly recycled text garbage across t’interwebs. It’s time we had the text equivalent of Foundview validated through the blockchain to save us from this sea of garbage.

Foundview was a quaint ambition to secure integrity of the photographic image. It failed because of Gresham’s Law – bad money in circulation drives out the good. We need the same for art¹ and for writing.

I have a sneaking admiration for Zuckerberg. We all know that this was the terminus that train was headed for. Now get the hell off my lawn, Zuck

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1. AI aficionados will say good artists will be able to use AI to do new things, and that’s no doubt true. The problem is that it will enable those with the artistic talent of a 6-year old to flood the space with ‘art’ so the problem will change from appreciating good art to finding it. We will miss the gatekeepers as time goes on ;) ↩

You probably won’t be repaying that 40 year mortgage into old age

The architect of Osborne’s pension changes in 2016, Steve Webb, is behind a slew of shock-horror headlines of GenZ paying their mortgages into retirement age, with the discovery that 42% of new mortgages are for terms ending past State retirement age  and in some cases stretching out to 40 years. I’m not sure that the portrayal of this as people paying mortgages into old age is helpful, or necessarily true for young first-time mortgagees. There are problems with such high earnings multiples, but the risk of your OAP self paying the mortgage is not the big problem.

Why is this happening – house prices are high relative to earnings. In particular, they are high near decent paying work. Take a look at this from Schroders, who are at least trying to put BTL landlords off from buying all the houses ahead of you.

house prices earnings multiples from Schroders report

You will observe the places with lots of work have higher income multiples. If you can find decent paying work in Scotland you will find cheaper housing. But if you need to pay 10 times gross earnings for a house, then it will be a very tough ask on a historical standard 25 year mortgage. Simple arithmetic shows if you aim to pay down 1/25th of the capital each year, that’s 10/25 (=40%) of your salary, and that’s before you’ve paid any interest, or even tax and NI on earning that amount. In some ways the 40 year mortgage is a halfway house between the 25 year repayment mortgage and the landlord’s interest only mortgage.

That’s right, who else takes long mortgages? Your unfriendly neighbourhood BTL landlord, that’s who – they usually go interest only, raking it in from the rent and the capital appreciation. So in some ways a 40 years mortgage is a bit like becoming your own BTL landlord, with you as the ideal tenant and no voids. You have a slight advantage over a BTL landlord in that you don’t pay capital gains tax on your own primary residence, and you have a disadvantage in that you can’t pretend to be a business offsetting¹ interest and maintenance off income tax.

What else happens over time? Money loses value. I recall the sound of the end date for my first mortgage taken out in 1989, which was in Feb 2014, and it sounded incredibly far away, and I imagined paying that off, living in that first house. None of this actually happened.