First of 3 posts on managing tasks with Obsidian, which I need to invest in as I'm creating tasks as I write my notes and then never looking for them again. This post starts with installing Calendar and Obsidian Tasks plugins. As always, to follow this advice I then needed to set up another plugin. Journaling Using Daily Questions in Obsidian…

When James West "joined a small wave of users granted early access" to the new Bing (I'll call and tag it "BingGPT"), powered by the same LLM behind ChatGPT, which is "a great party trick ... powerful work tool, capable of jumpstarting creativity, automating mundane tasks", he soon "noticed strange inconsist…

Defining collective intelligence as "Effective, decentralized, and agentic decision-making across individuals and communities to produce best-case decisions for the collective.", this is "an incubator for new governance models for transformative technology" which wants to "overcome the transformative technology trilemma&qu;…

Jeff Jarvis is not a fan of Ted Chiang's piece on CgatGPT, although he does admit TC (one of my favourite authors) "makes a clever comparison between lossy compression... and large-language models, which learn from and spit back but do not record the entire web". Indeed, he takes the metaphor further: "what is journalism itself…

Interesting, illuminating (but contested) metaphor for thinking about LLMs from one of my favourite authors, Ted Chiang:"Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information... but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation... nonse…

via Chris Aldrich: "This template is used to turn a wiki page into a slideshow for presentation during IndieWebCamp events."Example: https://indieweb.org/2018/Baltimore/Building_Blocks#As discussed with Jerry, it creates a slideshow from the page's content, in the order as defined by the page. But I imagine the idea would be realiti…

Starts with articulating I've been meaning to write for many years about the oncoming AI-driven content flood: "The dark forest theory of the web: ... life-like but life-less state of being online... overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait... algorithmically manipulated junk... eerily devoid of human life ... liv…

Good example of a digital garden: "This is my space for Notes, saving and highlighting Articles. It's a [[Second Brain]] or personal wiki" built using loqseq.

"Micro.blog can now cross-post to a Mastodon user account... Your custom domain on Micro.blog can now be ActivityPub-compatible, so that you can follow and reply to Mastodon users directly on Micro.blog ... someone can follow your blog posts".As a result "you can consolidate your identity and posts back to your own blog at your ow…

Proof that one of the myhub revenue streams exists: "pay once, and you get lifetime access to my growing list of notes from the books I’m reading. If you went out and bought all of these books, you’d pay around $3,000. If you then spent the 3-6 hours reading each book, and 1-2 hours taking notes on them, it’d take you anywhere from 800 – 1,60…

This piece captures and then explores exactly what I've always thought about the future direction of myhub.ai: imagine what would happen if you had your own personal AI assistant operating across your content - your public posts, private library (including content shared from friends, stuff in your reading queue, etc.) and the wider web, emph…

"Ipop gloop glog bluba droma floom gloope splog slopa" - This sentence means "The happy slime sees the earth under the sky while eating the slime's food" in Glorp. Here's the breakdown of the sentence:ChatGPT and I invent a fictional language spoken by slime-people... It understands subordinate clauses ... so understa…

Is ChatGPT creator OpenAI "a potential Google slayer. Why look up something on a search engine when ChatGPT can write a whole paragraph explaining the answer?" It's very capable, but "struggles to distinguish between truth and falsehood... often a persuasive liar... a bit like autocomplete on your phone... trained on pretty muc…

"WordPress developer Johnathon Williams ... demonstrated that, with a little bit of expert guidance, ChatGPT can drastically reduce the amount of time it takes to extend WordPress... the plugin [written by GPT] ... worked on the first try... the best results from asking ChatGPI to generate entire functions versus specific filters or actions..…

Another piece pointing out that ChatGPT, while "easily the most impressive text-generating demo to date... trained through a mix of crunching billions of text documents and human coaching", should not be trusted."a generative AI is what it eats", and ChatGPT ate countless biases in the content it processed. "No one should …

The claims re: ChatGPT by "fascinated evangelists... [that they] contain “humanity’s scientific knowledge,” are approaching artificial general intelligence ... even consciousness", are simply "a distraction from the actual harm perpetuated by these systems. People get hurt from the very practical ways such models fall short in deplo…

"ChatGPT is not overly reliable... surprising how often ... right, but they can also be plausible and wrong a lot of the time, and downright obviously wrong some of the time... responding with errors of fact, ... responses that may only be true for certain (biased) contexts... wary of providing evidence or citations ... [but] happy to make up…

Articulates exactly my problem with most Tools4Thought, hence the "super simple Thinking Tool" I want at the heart of myhub's CMS."Perhaps something as simple as having the word ‘Tool’ first causes us to focus on the tool more than the thinking... to confuse thought as an object rather than thought as a process... [causing us t…

"fine-tune GPT-3 on their own data, creating a custom version tailored to their application" improving reliability for more use cases and making the model cheaper and faster. Any dataset of any shape or size, plus "incrementally add data based on user feedback... less than 100 examples to start seeing the benefits ... doubling the n…

ChatGPT... is going to change our world much sooner than we expect, and much more drastically

Yoyogi "breaks from the timeline... elevates the author and centers the thread".Pick a Fediverse account (Mastodon for now, Pleroma and Misskey next) that you’re following and see just their threads, in a columnar interface.You need to login and give it permission: the accounts you follow are presented at left, allowing you to select one…

Betaworx announcing "nine companies we selected and invested in for our THINKCamp accelerator program ... new technologies ranging from large language models and generative AI to graph databases and high-fidelity spatial user interfaces — to create tools for for how we may think."All probably worth checking out, ranging from Gordon Brand…

"It’s never felt more plausible that the age of social media might end—and soon."Provocative article, looking at the past 20 years as social networking evolved into social media - as I put it back in 2016, the evolution from social media (social as adjective) to social media, where the emphasis is on the noun."A social network is an…

Mastodon is "subtly designed to reduce the huge, viral surges of attention we see on Twitter" and others, which have "deformed people’s behavior... coaxed people to constantly try to hack the attentional marketplace... incessantly making posts ... operatically theatrical... enrage ... [other] high-voltage reaction".Hence “antiv…

"I wanted a way to add any bookmarks I make there into a 'Read later' category in my RSS reader ... I create a PHP file that gets the latest 20 bookmarks... and takes an access token from your mastodon 'development' admin page. Then I can give this URL to my RSS reader: https://neil.mckillop.org/stuff/mastodon_bookmarks.rs…

"Welcome To Mastodon Welcome to Mastodon, and The Fediverse! This is a living document with some tips and Frequently Asked Questions about Mastodon and the Fediverse..."Pretty complete-looking

convert any RSS feed to an ActivityPub

Awesome hot take open letter to Elon Musk: "You fucked up real good, kiddo... no possible way to grow ... without ... compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies... the problems with Twitter are not engineering problems. They are political problems... absolute monarchs u…

Those who've read Doctorow's books and blogs on the collective action problem stopping people leave the established social media walled gardens may not find anything new, except for the quite brilliant link he makes with "the 1971 film adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof ... the Anatevkans can’t just pack up and leave: they are being …

The story on Gab and Mastodon:"After crowdfunding millions of dollars... Gab abandoned its own code and switched to ... Mastodon software in early 2019 as a way of circumventing Google’s and Apple’s ban..."Mastodon's AGPLv3 opensource license allows this, of course, but there are conditions, which Gab then broke until JoinMastodon &…