" This new user agent is coming – but will it be something that's owned by one company & designed to extract from us, or owned by all of us & designed to empower us? We're building the latter."

From Sublime, who know a thing or two about curation: "At first, I saw using AI as a binary choice between soulless efficiency or becoming a luddite and preserving your authentic human creativity", but Claude changed that. "Curiosity is a better compass than cynicism... [stop] defending your territory [and] exploring what's pos…

"the Evil Housekeeper Problem... a principle of computer security ... once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop... the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble".Applying this to "the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE... What happens if someone comes in and tells you that you’ll be…

Full title: "The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers", first viewed and discussed on Bluesky."higher confidence in GenAI is associated with less critical thinking, while higher self-confidence is associated with more crit…

OpenSocial's AI integration provides "a unique AI model trained on your specific platform data... Gaia Chatbot transforms how you access information, making every interaction a seamless exchange of knowledge discovery".Works with all AI providersautomatic tagging and classification"adapts in real time to user ... individualized…

If, like many, you think Bluesky is "Twitter, but with less Nazis", this post is for you.

"most people think AI is human more than half the time. Apparently, AI does, too" - and by providing good examples (fiction, poetry), she's convinced me that I can't tell the difference, either. Only SurferSeo comes out well as an automatic AI detector in all examples.The only content that most (but not all) detectors performed…

"a type-safe library to build automation at the top of ATProto/Bluesky API... to make automating actions on Bluesky both friendly and highly flexible... a domain-specific language (DSL) and builder pattern abstraction ... to streamline common sequences of actions (like searching posts, replying, following, liking, etc.) which typically requir…

"Sill shows the most popular links being shared by accounts you follow on Bluesky and Mastodon", linking through to "the individual posts... with what people said about" them. You can sort (“newest” or “most popular”), "hide reposts, and limit posts to the last 3, 6, 12, or 24 hours".Built in response to the death of …

Gary Marcus pouring cold water on Deep Research, "which... can write science-sounding articles on demand, on any topic of your choice".In many ways there's not much new here, except perhaps for how model collapse will affect science, not just LLMs.As known:LLMs flooding the zone with shit has been a concern since the beginning, and …

Good career advice, and a great exploration of glue work: "the difference between a project that succeeds and one that fails"."nobody else is onboarding the junior engineers, updating the roadmap, talking to the users, noticing the things that got dropped, asking questions on design documents, and making sure that everyone's go…

I know: you've spent probably ~15 years diligently developing your following there. At the beginning Twitter was fun, particularly when you didn't have so many followers that you couldn't interact with at least some of them. But now, you may have a problem.

"Could seeing how opposite sides of the US political spectrum use the same words differently be a first step toward greater cross-political understanding?... What if generative AI could help us understand people with opposing views better just by showing how they use common words and phrases differently?"MIT's Bridging Dictionary…

"Blacksky Algorithms, the team behind Blacksky and rsky, is now officially Blacksky Algorithms Inc", a Delaware C-Corp with its own fiscal host, and bigger ambitions."Blacksky will continue to rely on voluntary, member-supported subscriptions while also building and hosting technical infrastructure for developers, communities, and t…

More evidence that science is thriving on Bluesky: "Seventy per cent of [almost 6,000] Nature readers who responded to an online poll are using the social-media platform Bluesky...53% said they used to be on X but have now left...55% of respondents to the question ‘What do you use Bluesky for?’ said ...to connect with other scientists, keep u…

I've been cleaning out a few rotten systems recently.

According to Science, Bluesky "fosters collegial interactions among scientists, but potentially limits interactions beyond the academic community".It is becoming "the de facto meeting place for academics—many of whom seem to enjoy this “good boring.”". Why?default reverse chrono feed supports smaller accounts, and doesn't …

"With Zuckerberg going full Musk last week, we can no longer let billionaires control our digital public square... it will take independent funding and governance to turn ... AT Protocol—into something more powerful than a single app... an entire ecosystem of interconnected apps and different companies that have people’s interests at heart. …

"some of the design and the principles behind this design, as I understand them... we’re going to start by exploring atproto, and then talk about how BlueSky is built on top of it"Basic infrastructural elementsIn atproto:users create records that are cryptographically signed to demonstrate authorship.Records have a schema called a Lexico…

Simon Willison's "review of things we figured out about [LLMs] in the past twelve months, plus my attempt at identifying key themes and pivotal moments" has 19 major points:"GPT-4 barrier was comprehensively broken": the year saw 18 organizations produce "models on the Chatbot Arena Leaderboard that rank higher than t…

From 2018, a good history, but no solutions: "Facebook didn’t invent the feature, but they definitely broke it. How can we better regulate future disruptive ideas?".Brief historyPart of the A Brief History of Attention series, starts with some brief history, culminating with Zuckerberg combining "three core concepts — the social gra…

"a lexicon type that supports markdown style notes... for syncing your (public) obsidian/logseq notes on your pds, just having a place where people can view your research notes, personal knowledge management, or community wiki's, which people can later build custom front ends for"Essential for MyHub on ATmosphere, and its already be…

Mathematical comparison of ATProto and ActivityPub

"misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet ... as a justification machine".Humans are "evidence foragers ... historically [that's] meant digging into a subject, testing arguments... That was the foun…

In a "1964 essay by historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford, “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics”... Mumford warned about the “magnificent bribe” that accounts for why “our age surrendered so easily to the controllers, the manipulators, the conditioners". The bribe "Under the democratic-authoritarian social contract"? Ev…

CLW with a response to Bryan Newbold's response to her post, so: "my final thoughts (for my blog at least) on Bluesky and decentralization".tl:dr; "my assertion was that Bluesky was neither decentralized nor federated. In my opinion many of the points raised in Bryan's article solidify those arguments... [but] "credib…

"Now you can ... create an instant Bluesky-powered comments section on your own site! Here’s an example of how I added it to my site—which is built on Jekyll."

Good non-technical explanation of Bluesk's potential, which is hidden to keep things simple for most users for good UX reasons: "While Bluesky looks like other social apps, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network".Emily uses Chrome as a good metaphor: "Bluesky as a browser with a whole marketplace of extensions"…

"This post was extracted from the draft of my December newsletter and published on Whitewind, demonstrating how a new array of apps on the ATmosphere - the ecosystem built with ATProto, Bluesky's protocol - could potentially usher in seamless decentralised collective intelligence."

"I usually circulate my newsletter to its subscribers via Mailchimp before reposting it to Medium for my subscribers there. However, for this edition I posted this content from Obsidian, my notemaking tool, direct to Bluesky's Atmosphere. It's early days, but I think this augurs well for decentralised collective intelligence."