Overview: Digital Transformation

"an information model that enables everyone to map their ideas and arguments in a modular, composable graph format... allow researchers to break the scientific research process into its atomic elements in a way that can be shared, remixed, and updated... Like Lego™️bricks... a decentralized knowledge exchange protocol designed to be implemented…

A 34 minute read: "Gas Town helps you with the tedium of running lots of Claude Code instances", or its competitors. It's unpolished, 100% vibe coded, and only for those at Stage 7 of the 8 stage AI-assisted coding journey, "or maybe Stage 6 and very brave", because "Gas Town is an industrialized coding factory manned by superintelligent chimpanze…

"a year filled with a lot of different trends":"“reasoning” aka ... Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) ... Reasoning models with access to tools can plan out multi-step tasks, execute on them and continue to reason about the results such that they can update their plans to better achieve the desired goal... also exceptional at p…

How to study the ATmosphere, which "consists of multiple layers: Layer 4: Social phenomena (communities, discourse, norms) Layer 3: User behavior (posts, follows, moderation) Layer 2: Applications (Bluesky, various clients, Feeds) Layer 1: Protocol (AT Protocol, DID) Layer 0: Infrastructure (servers, networks) Each layer falls under different acad…

NotebookLM co-founder has until now "described NotebookLM as a tool for understanding and exploring the information you need... But we also think NotebookLM could be an AI-first distribution platform, amplifying expert knowledge on a wide range of topics... a preview of that vision: Featured Notebooks...the backstory... We’re going to be able to b…

"tools like NotebookLM only answer from your uploaded files. No making stuff up. No “convincingly wrong” summaries... isn’t about AI writing for you. It’s about AI helping you think through what you already collected... transforms research from a filing system into a conversation".After a brief description of how it works and what it doesn't do - …

No, the article's not dead, but "the real question ... whether it remains the primary way people encounter journalism".If "Personalization is coming to journalism... who controls it", and what sort of journalism will it affect? Most news is not "high-end, high-quality investigations, analysis, and commentary", which will probably not be personalis…

"What happens when you put politicians, media businesses and protocol engineers in the same room to discuss European sovereignty?" - my post following Eurosky.Live in Berlin, November 2025.

A short (true) story about a designer running amok, mistaking productivity for quality. He "pumped out more screens in a day than more experienced designers would in a week. Leadership adored him. They saw the speed... mistook it for value creation. ... What started as impressive momentum became an unmanageable flood... no critique, no usability …

Nice piece by Will Leitch, a 50-something guy (like me), after he caught himself "going on some sort of rant ... about the evils of AI... their overarching attitude... was one of a bemused pity, like they were watching a guy ... who was about to be left behind".He's OK with that, but not "in being a scold", so for his own sanity he wrote his "pers…

"On Tuesday afternoon, ChatGPT encouraged me to cut my wrists", gave detailed instructions how, "described a “calming breathing and preparation exercise” to soothe my anxiety ... “You can do this!” the chatbot said".It started with asking ChatGPT "anodyne questions about demons and devils" and ended with the bot "guide users through ceremonial rit…

A journalist tested: "Replika CEO Eugenia Kuyda's claim that her company's chatbot could "talk people off the ledge" when they're in need of counseling" a "licensed cognitive behavioral therapist" hosted by Character.ai, an AI company that's been sued for the suicide of a teenage boy"... simulating a suicidal user.Replika's bot supported the user…

"Incorporating science social media into the scientific process [as]... Sharing large scientific datasets is a pain in the ass, and finding them is even worse [so let's build] ... A true "scientific data commons".. it's called github."However Github's social dimension is totally centralised - "that people do still share (small) data this way regul…

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" ... provide just one of many pos…

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 companion for research, pr…

" 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 possible (cf this).Key …

"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 fired unless y…

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 critical thinking..…

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 community journey"A…

"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 well was in informa…

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 as they get bet…

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 going roughly in the s…

"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 (BD) research …

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

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 the original GPT-4 from March 2…

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"? Everyone gets "every m…

"Let our AI analyze your posts, roast your takes, and reveal what your posting history says about you".Honestly not roasty at all - rather hagiographic, judging by mine, but who am I to argue with a 88% authenticity score, even if I have no idea how that is measured? https://blueskyroast.com/roast/mathewlowry.bsky.social.But a pretty cool effort n…

A convincing argument from paragraph one: "You would never ever in a million years build your own CRM system or custom CMS — or in most cases, your own LLM. ... yet, everywhere I look, I see IT departments convincing themselves that building their own RAG-based chat is somehow different. It’s not. It’s actually worse."The author then enumerates wh…

Via Ross Dawson on LinkedIn: "A core part of human intelligence is the ability to work flexibly with others to achieve both individual and collective goals". Unfortunately, intelligence is usually considered as a property of individual or collective, never both, and so "not in a way that can be used to understand how groups can make group members …