People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
There's a documentary coming out about podcasting. I was interviewed in it and got to tell a bunch of stories, about how you get people interested in working with each other. I told the story of how I chose the Grateful Dead's music to get the initial implementation going, on both the sending and receiving side. I used their music, since it so totally fit in with the philosophy, ie come as you are, we're all just people. And the song I chose was a good one too, the US Blues. "I'm Uncle Sam, that's who I am. I've been hiding out. In a rock and roll band." Using great art to prototype this connection makes total sense. It says we carry forward our art where ever we go, no matter where it takes us, a great work of music or art is always a good thing to share.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Yet another journalism article about how AI is not really intelligent and all the tech industry hype must stop now or else we'll write another strongly worded article about how they are not really intelligent just like the 800,000 previous articles about how AI is not really intelligent.
Hel is a distorted Swiss variable font with three axes
I really like the thinking behind this project:
We believe computers should work for people, and dream of a future where computing, like cooking or word processing, is available to everyone. Where you can solve your own small, unique problems with small, unique apps. Where you don’t just rely on mass-market apps made by expert programmers. Where you share home-made little apps with family and friends.
Scrappy is our contribution to this dream.
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
Caveat Emptor One of the biggest of the very few companies still manufacturing typewriters in the new millennium is the Shanghai Weilv Mechanism Company. Sadly, for the hobbyist space looking to get into typewriters, while these are easy to find online, they are notorious for dreadful quality control, lots of plastic, and poor type alignment. … Continue reading The Typewriter You Probably Don’t Want to Buy
Idea for teachers. Allow students to use ChatGPT to write their papers, as long as they submit a log showing how they did it. Maybe they're getting help with writing, but the ideas are theirs? It might be possible to fake that part too, but for now, that's probably a bit too hard.
There’s more in Apple’s new Foundation Models than I was expecting. The struct interfaces and tool calling especially. Fascinating.
Planning to install macOS Tahoe later today. For now, only downloaded SF Symbols 7. Still no robot icon! 🙁
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
It’s June! And it’s gloom. I am well. To the extent that the world is, besides me being fine, not fine. The world is not okay but the world soldiers on. But my spirits are good. But then, when I, as a wee lad, lived in the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos I was also relatively...
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
…the moderates are always, either consciously or unconsciously, working with the authoritarians and enabling their agenda. We are, according to those who want nothing more than to maintain control, supposed to protest enough, but not too much. Because we should rely on them. Because we need to maintain our subservient position under the party as...
I use ChatGPT for all kinds of work problems, and for a lot of other stuff too. It can collaborate, and it has much more broad and deep knowledge than I do, than any human. No one knows whether it thinks or is self-aware, any more than we know whether humans think or are self-aware. For that reason, I think, ironically, there's no point discussing it, we'll never get an answer, because we have no idea what intelligence or thinking is. But it is every bit as thoughtful as any human I have ever worked with. And the whole business about pattern-recognition is imho bs. People who say that are just repeating what they heard from someone else. From a user standpoint, it's absolutely nothing like pattern recognition.
iPad windowing looks good. Funny we were so worried the Mac would become too much like iOS, but sort of the opposite has happened to the iPad over the years. Files app also becoming a little more like the Finder.
Looking forward to trying Apple’s on-device models. It’s a great direction for them to take. But I’m still doubtful they are going to be good enough for some things, after you’ve been spoiled on much larger cloud-based models. Would love to see Apple’s private cloud computer opened up later too.
New blog post about Micro.blog themes from @ericgregorich. I like the way he describes the “layers” of a custom theme. That’s not a word we’ve used, but it fits well.
My post yesterday about Sam Altman has been pretty well received. Not everyone agrees, which is totally fine! We’ll see how the post ages in a year. I tried to put significant thought into it, though, not just fire off another hot take into the “love AI / hate AI” debate chaos.
Good morning from San Jose. I need to find coffee. My brain is finally switching gears to WWDC. Have barely had a chance to really think about what to expect or to get excited.
I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances. I see the same sort of thing happening in LA now.
