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

"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…

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 …

After covering the "bullet train" trip (hubbed elsewhere), this provides a detailed elucidation of all the issues you need to address on "The road from Roam ... to Obsidian.md" by summarising and linking to dozens of other posts, threads etc., creating "one place to look and minimize the pain of flipping through numerous p…

New Public "spent two years reviewing the literature and talked to over 100 experts from disciplines ranging from social psychology to urban planning about the qualities of flourishing public, or semi-public, spaces" for their Building better digital public spaces report. The goal: "to support engineers, designers and builders who w…

Systems with Design from Trust: assume most (not all) people have good intent."initially feel counterintuitive, even risky...social: they rely on human relationships. appealing: once you wrap your head around them, you want more."The discomfort is a symptom of how today's default setting is mistrust: "we’ve internalized the ass…

A YANSS interview with Adam Grant, author of Think Again: The Power of Knowing What you Don’t Know. Generally an "extensive exploration of how to rethink your own thinking", including his WorkLife podcast interview of Margaret Atwood on procrastination.(When annotating a podcast I really like a transcript, but there was none for this epi…

Basically this piece starts to unpack for me my ideas of what millions of Hubs networked together and processed by AI would offer the world in terms of content discovery:With "tools like Notion, Airtable, and Readwise ... people are aggregating content ... reviving the curated web. But at the moment these are mostly solo affairs... fragmented…

Covers "a new class of apps called “Integrated Thinking Environments (ITEs)”... [and] NOTE framework, used to describe the specific feature sets ITEs provide... examples and some future directions".The term ITE riffs off "Integrated Development Environments... provide developers a comprehensive set of tools ... a kind of augmented c…

"the underlying problem is stubbornly intractable"Great piece, although I'm unsure that "a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic", it is true that:productivity geeks exist, develop their system and then try to sell it.speaking from experience, it is really, r…

"for nearly a decade... my own views have whipsawed between extreme skepticism and cautious optimism. These days... a crypto moderate... much of the crypto market consists of overvalued, overhyped and possibly fraudulent assets ... [but] it isn’t all a cynical money-grab, and that there are things of actual substance being built" Most …

The Identity Stack ... Traditional online bank accounts represent balances as numbers stored in a centralized database... requires placing trust in a banking institution. Blockchain protocols plus private key cryptography ...introduce ... full possession of digital assets, without having to trust a third party. Hence the terms “self-custodial” or …

NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, represent a unique relationship between owner, artist and art. They are "digital files created using blockchain computer code... essentially impossible to duplicate" and so can be owned & resold, like any work of art. Anyone can download a copy of the art, but the NFT is unique. Noone cares if the art i…

Wikis are like Minecraft for thought — very simple, very open-ended... can generate complex living systems, from personal notes, to collaborative fansites, to Wikipedia.While open-ended, there's scarcity: there can be only one page for each name, forcing "negotiation, communal norms, communal goals, communal meanings... Open-ended meanin…

Having fun using Andy Matuschak's wonderful site to explore his innovative ideas on note-taking, zettelkasten, writing, etc. This link opens a number of his interrelated notes, displayed horizontally using his innovative 'stacked notes' information architecture.Key ideas from this stack:the importance of 'task division' in…

Andy Matuschak's working notes "are mostly written for myself: they’re roughly my thinking environment... But I’m sharing them publicly as an experiment ... [see] Work with the garage door up... Write notes for yourself by default, disregarding audience)... there’s no index or navigational aids: you’ll need to follow a link to some start…

I suspect this will be a canonical text for me moving forward with myhub.ai.Mike Caulfield in 2015, when my first hub was only about 2 years old, had also "been experimenting with another form of social media called federated wiki... instead of blogging and tweeting your experience you wiki’d it. And over time the wiki became a representation…

A simple cartoon can spark a lot of thinking: what happens after "the “Cookiepocalypse” — when Google Chrome follows up on its promise to cut support for the third-party cookie by 2022"?My preferred answer is: better content marketing? Actually providing value to people, rather than surveilling and stalking them around the web?Others par…

CrowdTangle, "running quasi-independently inside Facebook since being acquired in 2016" was broken up because ... "journalists and researchers were using CrowdTangle... to analyze Facebook ... dig up information considered unhelpful" by Alex Schultz, CMO & VP of analytics. His "Team Selective Disclosure won" - sh…

First a definition of (the importance of) "Interoperability – the thing Facebook uses to slurp stuff in from the open web – is the key to self-determination." Without it:you're trapped: "leaving Facebook means leaving your communities, your relationships... your presence on Facebook is the reason someone else can’t go...you…

One of my favourite writers (offline and online) on his personal content strategy, first taking aim at the "tawdry and mercenary" version of "“why writers should blog”... the story goes, “and build a brand ... to promote your work.” Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is bullshit, and that one is no exception.&qu;…

Interesting piece on the reverse side of the network effect: the more people leave, the faster the remainder leave. So what will make people leave?Gen Z want privacy, hate bullying/speech, don’t like ads and think "Facebook is for moms and grandparents""Millennials Are Ready to Ditch... too old to bicker with strangers... [and] stil…

This article absolutely nails why I can't stand LinkedIn anymore, describing the site as completely performative, and the "LinkedIn newsfeed ... as a vast wasteland... almost entirely filled with marketing gurus, salespeople talking sales, and recruiters and “career coaches” offering the same job search tips over and over".Why? Beca…

Good short history: "design thinking ... has spread from products to services to just about anything in business... often used as shorthand for a magic potion approach to innovation and creative problem solving... end up being a theatrical thing that people can point to and say, ‘oh we did that.’ "So it's one example of how "or…

One of a great series of Reimagining the Internet podcasts. Guest: the Planetary.Social founder, discussing:the early days of Twitter: "Twitter's innovation ... happened all at the edges... users created everything... inline images and short links and retweets and the app, actual at and hashtags... the company... cultivated this garden w…

Watched the entirety over the last week of 2020. Highly recommended series for getting to grips with Roam, covering everything from the basic of how Roam works through to detailed HowTos on project & goal management, zettelkasten, etc. Having said that, I won't be migrating my tasks out of a dedicated task mgt tool, or pasting bibliograph…

After pointing out that mainstream - ie centralised - social platforms cannot moderate effectively due to scale, then introduces fediverse/activitypub-based platforms. Will they face same moderation problems as the mainstream if/when they grow?Takes Gab's unsuccessful move into fediverse as an example: "Almost immediately, Gab was met by…

"GPT-3 ... generates tweets, pens poetry, summarizes emails, answers trivia questions, translates languages and even writes its own computer programs, all with very little prompting"It's surprised a lot of AI researchers, but also "often spews biased and toxic language" and isn't always convincing. It's a univers…

Given the myriad problems posed by social media platforms - content moderation, disinformation, censorship, privacy, anti-trust - this article "proposes an entirely different approach... that enables more free speech, while minimizing ... trolling, hateful speech, and large-scale disinformation efforts... also might help users ... regain cont…

"adversarial interoperability... create a new product or service that plugs into the existing ones without the permission of the companies that make them... once the driver of tech’s dynamic marketplace" now stifled by legal means by Big Tech, which "climbed the adversarial ladder and then pulled it up behind them".EFF sees re…