"it’s surprisingly unclear what the AI search startup actually is"- according to its CEO it is, depending on when he's asked:"an answer engine...almost like Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid,,,a mere “aggregator of information”"All three cannot be true. The chatobot itself "is more specific... “Perplexity AI is an AI-po…

After so many years of spam, splog, slop, phishing and above all trolling, "Our guard is up. Our filters are activated. Our default mode is suspicion", something that's only going to get worse with AI: are those photos too good to be true? Can that video actually be real? Is that a spambot, or just "someone who isn’t neurotypic…

"There are now several Obsidian plugins available that allow you to use local LLMs instead of a commercial LLM provider", so PKM explorer tries Copilot for Obsidian plugin on his Windows laptop, because this plugin "not only offers the possibility to have a question and answer dialogue ... but also lets you [index your vault]... you…

A podcast with Charles Broskoski. founder of Arena, which "boasts a healthy, creative community and stable finances while rejecting many of the hallmarks of popular social media".

Loforo is "an ActivityPub Tumblr alternative whose vibe reminds me of the early days of Tumblr... second most active ActivityPub blog platform in the Fediverse, behind only WordPress". The author lists some areas of improvement, and claims that if Loforo can implement them it'll "inherit Tumblr's fallen crown [and] ... sur…

Applying Dawkins' selfish gene perspective to the evolution of AI

The Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure's manifesto sets out the three legs upon which an open public sphere must rest.

A report from Ghost on ActivityPub integration, starting with a nice intro for newcomers: "HTML is a standard for displaying text and images on a computer. Email is a standard for sending and receiving messages privately. ActivityPub, then, is a standard for sending and receiving content publicly.", and followed by some musings on the di…

First in a series on "how AI tools can transform intricate concepts into clear, practical frameworks and diagrams", starting with Napkin AI, which "generates interesting diagrams automatically from text input".Plenty of crap circles follow (" Upon completing each document, I exported them as PDFs. Find them here"), bu…

I share this experience with Patrick, who, when he starts work with a new client, starts by gathering information to create personas: "it could be user interviews, usage data, or whatever — because there has to be some baseline of the users" (he has a "lightweight personas approach ... [and a] personas template").Where the clie…

Good reality check from Benedict Evans: "LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all."Most technical developments take time to take hold, but not ChatGPT, which "got to 100m users in just 2 months", pa…

"The problem is not that AI is smarter than us, the problem is that it’s becoming increasingly easy for us to outsource our skills to AI... If we outsource our writing skills, we lose our writing ability... If we depend on AI to analyze information and make decisions, we lose our ability to think critically and analyze complex situations ours…

Michael Foster's "top ten unfinished building blocks" are:trust & safety: "heart of an ethical social web... [currently] delegated to a small group of volunteers... [but] green shoots emerging"spam filters: "there are some amazing tools now... Pixelfed has shown what can be done"safe spaces / bridging & f…

"Good tools can ... corral the daily deluge of research, interviews and half-formed thoughts into something coherent" - Westenberg's (Mac-focused) productivity stack consists of "Butter for drafting, Linear for managing projects and to-dos, and Readwise for wrangling research material".Reading up on her use of Readwise, in…

"I had just finished recording the final video of my personal productivity mini-course when I turned on the camera and ad-libbed from the heart. I was unprepared for what came out."

"A deep dive into Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone", over 20 years later, by "former New_ Public Research Fellow Serena Chao".Social capital, according to Putnam, "is the “connections among individuals — social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them”... [making] a strong case for a…

Really brilliant monologue on creativity and AI, putting the current moment in a historical context of industrialisation stretching back to the invention of the printing press."If we really could substitute for our labor with machines — ones that don’t pollute or create even more work — it wouldn’t be a problem, as long as we all felt okay ab…

"It's been over a year since I put this newsletter on hold to focus on integrating AI into MyHub.ai", but I've decided to bring it back...

Anuj Ahooja asks, on Threads' first birthday, the "existential question... Why does Threads exist? ... an alternative to Elon Musk's X. But ... a platform can't exist to be "an alternative." It should be able to stand alone with its unique purpose and be built to incentivize users to follow that purpose... [unfortunat…

I have used both the jobs2Bdone (JTBD, #jobtodo) and persona methodologies in comms strategy development, so this is a useful distinction: "Jobs-to-be-done focus on user problems and needs, while well-executed personas... add behavioral and attitudinal details". Abandoning personas for JTBD means "missing the key behavioral consider…

A quick to learn framework to build your own personal productivity system without falling into the "productivity porn" trap.

The 4-Step Communications Strategy Framework demystifies communication strategy.

"A giant step forward in the dream of collaborating on Obsidian notes with others...[via] Stashpad Docs — a web-based Markdown editor with shared commenting and review capabilities. An Obsidian plugin allows for exporting Obsidian notes to Stashpad Docs" but:it's one-way - no way from Stashpad back to Obsidian;footnotes aren't …

"NotebookLM is powered by Google’s latest Gemini language model which supports up to 1 million context window... [you can]:upload documents, create multiple notebooks based on specific topics, and query notes...up to 50 sources per notebook, with each source supporting up to 500,000 words...type questions in the search box, and the AI pulls r…

consilience is "the aspiration that the cross-pollination of ... perhaps initially unrelated snippets [of knowledge] can lead to spontaneous and unforeseen breakthroughs", but just downloading a notetaking app is not enough. "Folio is a system to accomplish that aspiration in Obsidian... a consolidation of many aspects of Obsidian’s…

"what causes the flow state, and what happens in the brain... a new study claims to have answers".There were 2 theories:"Hyperfocus... two brain networks unlock the flow state: the default mode network (DMN)... involved in things like daydreaming... spikes the most when we’re not engaged in any tasks" and "the executive co…

Casey first gets the Perplexity.ai scandal off his chest: "the Clearview AI of generative artificial intelligence companies: scraping billions of pieces of data without permission and daring courts to stop it. Like Clearview, Perplexity’s core innovation is ethical...".Is the Fediverse a solution? He likes it, but "a partial one... …

"Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms... [but] you can’t reply to replies “yet,”". Meanwhile, Fediverse integration expands to another 100 countries "and hope to roll it out everywhere soon".

"Channels enable any user to create a curated feed with a mix of post type, hashtags, lists, filters and mutes. Customised timelines which anyone can post to via their app or web UI, or by using a dedicated hashtag or emoji."This exists already outside the Fediverse: "The Farcaster app, Warpcast, has a fully formed and fast growing …

Now that Threads has joined the Fediverse, "I can follow Threads users that opt-in to Fediverse integration through my Mastodon account" - Anuj's journey, which apparently exceeded expectations, despite - or perhaps because of - his many issues with Threads (which I share): defaulting to For You, an impoverished chroni feed, no list…