Overview: Media

I've been kicking the tyres of Sublime, a new personal and social curation app, and pondering its approach to integrating AI.

"a deep-dive on the concrete ways Sublime makes my life better", by Sublime.app founder Sari Azout.

"LinkStowr is a free, open source and privacy-friendly ... store valuable online resources in a structured and meaningful way". Uses a Chrome extension to save link + note to LinkStowr, and an Obsidian plugin to sync the card to a vault. LinkStowr then deletes its unneeded copy.

Cory Doctorow on the demise of Vice, "a Canadian media success story... founded by a motley clique of hipsters... transitioned to a string of progressively worsening corporate owners... one of the most enthusiastic marks for Facebook's infamous "pivot to video"... spending hundreds of millions to finance Zuckerberg's doome…

In this edition: join the ChatGPT integration free trial, check out the results of my latest experiments, and enjoy the Alliteration of the Month: Bullshit, Botshit and Bubbles.

"The indiscriminate proliferation of AI-generated content will not empower the underrepresented or democratise knowledge creation... [but] dilute and fragment the authenticity and reliability of information ... the discerning judgment of human curators is the only defence against misinformation and mediocrity".Why? Human curators :"…

Another word for the lexicon: when bullshit meets AI you get "botshit". "we’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job... there’s a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence…

According to:MIT Professor of AI Rodney Brooks, ChatGPT "“just makes up stuff that sounds good"... where “sounds good” is an algorithm to imitate text found on the internet, while “makes up” is the basic randomness of relying on predictive text rather than logic or facts",Geoff Hinton: "the greatest risks is not that chatbots w…

At an AI conference, Jeff Jarvis "knew I was in the right place when I heard AGI brought up and quickly dismissed... I call bullshit... large language models might prove to be a parlor trick". The rest of the conference focused on "frameworks for discussion of responsible use of AI".Benefits - for some, AI can:"raise the f…

One of my favourite writers/thinkers on all things digital future is "finally, definitely, fully leaving X, and probably all social media..."

Jon Stokes thinks "people are talking about this chatbot in unhelpful ways... anthropomorphizing ... [and] not working with a practical, productive understanding of what the bot’s main parts are and how they fit together."So he wrote this explainer."At the heart of ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) that belongs to the family o…

"You Are Not a Parrot and a chatbot is not a human" - an interview/profile of Emily M. Bender, the "computational linguist at the University of Washington ... [who] co-wrote the octopus paper... to illustrate what ... LLMs ... can and cannot do"The paper: "Climbing Towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Ag…

Wired's rules for using generative AI: "Not for images, yes for research, no for copyediting, maybe for idea generation". Meanwhile interactive book PromptCraft shows how to "get the most out of the creative man/machine communications... AI is like querying our collective intelligence".So how best to design an AI prompt?…

"the distributed/federated digital garden approach is the way to go for knowledge commoning... cribbing from ActivityPub's local, global, and 'those-you-follow' timelines... you could have local, 'those-you-follow', and global gardens... [with] some kind of liquid democracy", and interest-based groups, perhaps s…

"a modern version of del.icio.us meets Roam... a searchable, interconnected repository of the most insightful content on the Internet" - and a pretty interesting example of convergent evolution vis a vis myhub.ai

When James West "joined a small wave of users granted early access" to the new Bing (I'll call and tag it "BingGPT"), powered by the same LLM behind ChatGPT, which is "a great party trick ... powerful work tool, capable of jumpstarting creativity, automating mundane tasks", he soon "noticed strange inconsist…

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…

"I spent a few minutes in conversation with ChatGPT."This was both me kicking ChatGPT's conversational tyres and exploring its limits, both those it admits to and those it does not.Key takeaways from a first reading:Many, but not all, content creators are screwedFor "writers, journalists, copywriters, consultants, and even publ…

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

A research project which aims "to find data structures and interfaces that support synthesis and innovation in a decentralized discourse graph".Appropriately enough, it's presented as a hypertext notebook, built using Quartz, so "click on what is interesting... hypertext notebooks are designed for exploratory browsing. In a lin…

"Do you have a job that you secretly believe is pointless?... you have a “bullshit job.”", and so do "millions of ... clerical workers, administrators, consultants, telemarketers, corporate lawyers, service personnel...".We built enough tech to free us, but instead "we’ve invented a whole universe of futile occupations tha…

A short experiment on getting the most out of podcasts by using speech-to-text engines to create rtanscripts. TL:DR:Welder’s excellent and free; Otter.ai’s got some amazing features, but it’s pricey; just forget Google.

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…

"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…

"it's a start... Musk argued that disclosing what amplifies or downranks tweets would reduce the risk of “behind the scenes manipulation.” [but] algorithms alone offer limited insights" because it's not just an algorithm that defines what you see: it's a huge dataset - "content that enters the platform, each user’s p…

NYT's Kevin Roose writes "a column about NFTs that is, itself, being turned into an NFT and put up for auction". Good definition of an NFT: "digital collectible item stamped with a unique bit of code that serves as a permanent record of its authenticity and is stored on a blockchain... can be bought and sold ... can’t be delete…

Good intro to what Apple and Google are doing in the privacy space to fend off regulation. TL:DR; "Get ready for more random ads online, higher prices and subscriptions galore. But your privacy concerns may still not fade."Apple kicked this off in 2017 with a new Safari preventing the technology used by marketing companies to follow peop…

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…

Another example of topic-based aggregation being better at avoiding the toxic effects of a socially-based newsfeed (cf Reddit).Flipboard's new feature lets them quickly specify the subjects they care most about from among its 30,000-plus topics... "Flipboard uses AI to classify the articles and videos it’s aggregating and weave them into…