When I saw this "Open space proposal by Boris (Mann) at Ahoy" I shelved my very similar proposal and proposed another, which was successful (good news) and scheduled at the same time as Boris' (bad news).Boris' idea is essential, imho, to my ideas for decentralised collective intelligence - a "long form, Markdown lexicon D…

The go-to article you need when you want to show how anything online can spiral into a commenting catastrophe, using as a case study "the website for ... a radio station in Melbourne... published a peppy, harmless instructional post for the making of an "Amazing Rainbow Tie-Dye Number Surprise Cake.""Thank god they took screens…

The 3rd post of the series focuses "on interoperability and composability—how we can combine data from multiple local-first applications, privately and seamlessly".The problem: by their nature, "Local-first software applications typically store data separately and independently", so it's fragmented. The lack of "commo…

Grjte's 2nd Groundmist post "to explore ... local-first AppViews for local-first data, similar to atproto's AppViews for public data" first points out that the protocol allows anyone "to build a wide variety of different views ... of public ... Personal Data Servers (PDSes). These interfaces are known as "AppViews&quo;…

Came across this via Boris Mann in the runup to Ahoy2025 - the very first time I saw someone developing the #ai4community tools I want for decentralised collective intelligence: "Groundmist echoes the design of AT Protocol... but applies these ideas and select elements of the protocol to local-first software and data... It uses Automerge, AT …

Boris Mann's personal notes on what he wants for what is essentially the private garden segment of #ai4communities: a "multi-player personal notes & publishing stack", a place to put "meeting notes, quick scratch notes, pages on their way to be published, links and a few comments, research from multiple web pages... your co…

"Skeets is a 3rd party iOS / iPad OS client for Bluesky" which I saw at the Ahoy conference. It's a good example of how Bluesky is more than a X alternative: it can be used by any (iOS-carrying) Bluesky user, but offers other features than Bluesky PBC's own app, including:"Keep reading position Edit posts Post notification…

Saw this presented at the Ahoy conference. It starts with a well argued outline of surveillance capitalism: "a few predominantly US and Chinese tech companies control information and public debate... users must disclose their most personal data to access ... [while] algorithms opaquely filter what users see ... freeing us from the common good…

Shawn Murphy channelling his inner Vulcan as he describes what happens when "two people only are having a conversation ... a particular magical thing ... call it Mind Melding". This is something similar to shared mental map, an idea I borrowed from England's relatively famous footback coach in the 1990s. But this isn't football…

" 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…

"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…

"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…

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…