FeedCity

Wednesday session

What the heck, Austin? In the last few weeks we’ve now made two full-priced offers on houses and not gotten either one. Sigh. 🏡

[Gita Jackson at Aftermath] I love a good treatise in favor of the indie web: "Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to mak...

Ben Werdmuller writes about the fallout from an attempt to train AI on Bluesky posts:

So the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one that’s inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data.

I also like Tantek Çelik’s proposal to add a “no-training” flavor of Creative Commons. I blogged about that a couple months ago.

I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.

And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.

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Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at Hugging Face, took a million Bluesky posts and turned them into a dataset expressly for training AI models: “This dataset could be used for “training and testing language models on social media content, analyzing social med...

I hadn’t noticed this before. New styling for blockquotes on Mastodon. This post started on my blog: Markdown → HTML → ActivityPub → Mastodon. This version of Mastodon is probably deployed widely enough that I can drop the redundant quotes that Micro.blog adds.

This perspective rings true to me, on a platform’s decay from Steve Troughton-Smith:

Threads has the same problem all of Meta’s social media properties have: nobody really wants to be on them. That social graph may be the company’s crown jewels, but there’s a clear sense of decay, a radioactive half-life to Facebook, Instagram, et al that portends doom

Reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin.

I enjoyed this response article from Elizabeth Lopatto to Sam Altman’s notebook advice. “I do not rip pages out of my notebook regularly because I am not deranged.” 🤣

Podcast: We elected Archie Bunker. 17 minutes.

Sources Go Direct is the way everything works now. Ad dollars and gotchas are not how you get known. The only way that works is patience over long periods of time so the voters feel comfortable with the candidate. The story keeps repeating.

This is how the political system works now, but the Democrats haven't adjusted to the new reality. It's past time. We need to get going before the transition is complete.

Here's a transcript.

Three weeks since I stopped posting to Threads. I don’t miss it. If they ever actually finish the ActivityPub rollout, I’ll migrate my followers to Micro.blog and keep avoiding Meta. Your milage may vary.

Comparing ActivityPub and AT Proto is a useful exercise. It’s tempting but ultimately too simple to say that one is decentralized and one is centralized. Bluesky’s app and relay are centralized but personal hosting in Bluesky is decentralized. Mastodon’s instances are decent...

[Melissa Sanchez and Mica Rosenberg at ProPublica] Important resentments coming to the surface here: "Her anger is largely directed at President Joe Biden and the Democratic Party for failing to produce meaningful reforms to the immigration system that coul...

Carville gets close to the answer. The Dems shut down their online operation on Election Day, go off the air for 3.5 years, then reboot. The Repubs never sign off. Trump is Archie Bunker. People vote for him, even if they don't agree, over the stranger they don't know. Voters kept saying this, but somehow this didn't register. Never nominate a candidate again who isn't very well known to and tolerated by the electorate. Forget about gotchas. The old Dems revolve around fear of being got. It's no longer a problem, a flaw proves you're genuine, authentic. Dems need a complete overhaul top to bottom. Their next leader should have a top podcast, because that's how you will govern from now on. Expect to be surprised how Trump does this starting Jan 20.

Not sure why I didn’t think of this earlier, but I realized I could install the Micro.blog browser extension (which I wrote!) to Arc from the Chrome web extensions store. Easy. I bookmark a lot of pages in Micro.blog so this saves a step.