FeedCity

The new Amazon Alexa with AI has the same basic problem of all AI bots, it acts as if it's human, with a level of intimacy that you really don't want to think about, because Alexa is in your house, with you, listening, all the time. Calling attention to an idea that there's a human there spying on you is bad -- Alexa depends on the opposite impression, that it's just a computer. I really think AI's should give up the pretense that they're human.

Experimenting with a new Movies tab in our mobile app Epilogue. Feels a little weird… The app is for books. But also, I think it works here better than in the main app. I’m going to finish implementing it and use it and then decide for sure.

In today’s Stratechery interview they talk about the potential revenue that OpenAI lost by not having any ads in ChatGPT for the last three years. But there would’ve been a cost to having ads too! The product would’ve been slightly worse.

Jensen Huang on the Nvidia earnings call:

There has been a lot of talk about an AI bubble. From our vantage point, we see something very different.

I guess he would know, but this growth doesn’t seem sustainable to me. We’re not going to keep building data centers at the current pace.

Two interesting AI updates this week: It’s nice to read Andrej Karpathy’s review of Tesla’s FSD v13, as someone who was involved with creating their first self-driving efforts. I’ve only experienced v12, so very excited to try out the latest generations soon. Ubiquitous self-driving will reshape cities and save countless lives. On the heels of … Continue reading Gemini & FSD →

Finally worked through some Epilogue for Android issues. Submitted to Google for review! 🤞

Wednesday session

Bluesky is expanding their moderation tools and the granularity of reporting. Sounds like good changes:

Not every violation leads to immediate account suspension - this approach prioritizes user education and gradual enforcement for lower-risk violations. But repeated violations escalate consequences, ensuring patterns of harmful behavior face appropriate accountability.

Congrats to Gus Mueller on Acorn’s recognition as a finalist in the App Store Awards! I use Acorn pretty much every day, sometimes for design or mockups, and sometimes just as a scratchpad of screenshots and other graphics that need a quick crop or edit before uploading to my blog.

Love the covers on these special TikTok editions of a few of Brandon Sanderson’s books. Might’ve ordered a set for gifts. And I’ll keep The Emperor’s Soul, which I don’t have in print. 📚

I swear, this site is alive. If you are reading this site using RSS you don’t get every update. If you follow me on BlueSky or Mastodon, you get some. Pages which have been updated lately: Slashes — I updated the list of standard slash pages I have Colophon — I had a colophon in...

Machine learning is amazing if … the value of a correct answer is much higher than the cost of an incorrect answer. Related to Laissez-faire Cognitive Debt: And that’s where I start to get really annoyed by a lot of the LLM hype. It’s pushing machine-learning appro...

This report from Matthew Prince about Cloudflare’s outage yesterday shows the mind-boggling scale of their network. The graph has 25 million HTTP 500 errors per second.

After a rocky bit early in the year, I feel that Micro.blog is in a really good place right now. New users are joining and the features are the best they’ve ever been. So now I’m nervous that something else is about to go wrong. 🤪

I’ve been reading Doc Searls blogging for decades. He’s a straight shooter and a thoughtful writer. Was. Is. Will be. For however long. Leavings: So I’ll be devoting more of my bloggings to surfacing valuable lessons and stories left in my care by those now gone, and to making clearer what I’m bringing to generations...

One of the reasons Mastodon doesn't get credit for being "on the web" is that there's been no buzz about the ActivityPub support in WordPress. Ghost has been beating the drum about their ActivityPub support for (many) months. I don't know if they're actually there yet, I've ...

If Bluesky and Mastodon were "on the web" they would already interop because friends that's what the freaking web does. They behave like closed off silos, and until that changes, they can't claim to be on the web. Don't sell out the web so cheap. It really means something to be on the web.

I love the domain for MSNOW. Just before it came out, Jeff Jarvis wondered on all the social networks why it wasn't msnow.com. Well, because they found an even better domain.

The news gets everything wrong about the nouns of our political system. They talk about Repubs and Dems, but the real power is with the people. Something that Heather Cox Richardson said so eloquently in this week's podcast with Nicolle Wallace. I know I recommended it yesterday, but please do listen to this and don't forget it. When you're watching MSNOW you're getting the wrong nouns. I think this problem could be solved by moving every show on MSNOW to a different American city. The people on the panels should come to work in Detroit, St Louis, Phonenix, Denver, Charleston, Cleveland, Seattle, places like that. Get out of NY and DC. Really connect yourself to the whole country. That would rock a lot of boats.

I think of Cognitive Debt as ‘where we have the answers, but not the thinking that went into producing those answers’.

Lately, I have started noticing examples of not just where the debt is being accrued, but who then has the responsibility to pick it up and repay it.

Too often, an LLM doesn’t replace the need for thinking in a group setting, but simply creates more work for others.

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