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 &…

a "how-to guide ... through an online survey of Blind / low vision / visually impaired people."Discovered via Mastodon, where the culture is not to boost any toot containing non-accessible images, but applicable to all online publishing. "alt text and image descriptions are ... not actually the same thing. Alt text refers to the tex…

A very funny round up from week 2 of the twitter migration: "It hasn’t even been two weeks since Elon Musk officially took over Twitter, and things look like they’re going about as well as a Cybertruck demonstration... one response to Musk’s tenure has seemed to really get under his skin: the verified impersonators."Funny, but the number…

"a guide & a general backgrounder/crash course on data protection law... primarily targeted at Mastodon instance owners ... and users, but much of the elements will likely also apply to other #fediverse services" by "an External Data Protection Consultant, researcher, and general buzzkill who focuses on helping organisations and…

Why is it important to choose your Mastodon home wisely? Because "You can move your user account from one instance to another, but you have to follow a special procedure which can be quite long... create another account on a new instance and import three lists... your followers, ... the accounts you have blocked [and] have muted".[note: …

how "Mastodon fits into the much larger concept of the Fediverse... visualisation ... many different use-cases and benefits of different services".Good intro to the Fediverse as a whole, plus the visualisation in png & pdf, and some Q&As covering multiple accounts ("a user preference"), Nextcloud (adding ActivityPub end…

... or Why Small is Beautiful when it comes to our homes online:"a concept – and a vision for the future of our species in the digital and networked age –... The Small Web.... [By comparison:] The Big Web has “users” – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict ... farm users in server farms... you…