My sons hike around the “21 Horse Cave” area near Conkle’s Hollow State Nature Preserve, Hocking Hills, Ohio, August 2023. #OhioBeauty
I am aware, of course, that X.com tried to solve this problem by adding paid accounts. But I think solving the problem was only an excuse for monetizing and basically ruining the platform.
Going forward, it will be a requirement of genuine, worthwhile conversations that they be had between somehow provable human beings. Digital IDs are central to this of course. The sad thing is that really there is no way for this to happen for grandma without giving Big Tech ownership over grandma’s digital ID.
Respect for human dignity is the key.
If this actually could be solved via free Internet tools, it would be worth a Nobel Prize (or the like).
X.com (and other circa-2025 social media) is increasingly artificial, manipulative, an ultimately infantile game.
The reason that my own social media site feels so liberating is that, as I have come to realize, the problem with X.com, and of course, the others, is that they all feel completely inhuman and deeply estranging. Here, I might only be talking to a handful of people, but I can vouch for the fact that this is very real; no one is being manipulated, except maybe by me. 😆
And when somebody shows up to interact, that’s nice. It’s like a guest arriving. This is not the same thing as a giant group chat on a big social media platform. I kind of miss that, how it used to be and how it still is on a smaller scale on local installs. But I feel no pull to engage in such discussions on X.com anymore, for example, because of the overwhelming sense of unreality such discussions now have for me. It’s just over.
The world desperately needs an actual search engine that weeds out the crap and digs deep into the real content.
This is Minifeed. It’s a WordPress blog “theme,” which combines design and code to to make a blog look and act like social media. It also uses the Blogosphere’s pingback system to show other people’s posts on your timeline. (I see more posts when I come here on SangerFeed than you do.)
I’m not kidding, SangerFeed is awesome. I am so glad I decided to move my social media activities here!
I DON’T CARE about the lack of likes and shares (although, sure, I’d love to see more likes here, and shares on social media). But after one full month, I am more on board than ever.
I feel free! But is my audience smaller? Sure…for now…but it also feels more real. The people who show up here WANT to be here. And I am committed to showing people another way. It’s more genuine and it has an important purpose.
I want other people to do what I have done and install Minifeed (the software, a WordPress theme, just ask me for it). If you do, and we get into a conversation, do you know that your threads will be shown in both places?
The future of social media should be self-owned. We just need to start doing it.
I have.
Russ Ulbricht with an emotional thank-you to Trump for pardoning him.
AI will change a lot of things, that’s for sure. But Americans (and others) must zealously defend their rights of self-determination. The rise of AI does *not* mean bedrock principles “will be up for debate and reconfiguration.” And I’ll tell ya…I cannot just stand idly by while the likes of Sam Altman subtly implies that he’s going to be out front of such changes. He might as well declare himself, and his company, on the forefront of a political revolution. No, I’m not cool with that. We can discuss various changes, and of course we will, but not *fundamental* changes to our basic political rights and values.
This always happens when big new technologies come on the scene. “This changes everything!” And then it really changes nothing, at the end of the day.
I liked those executive orders, too!
Rasmussen (the original one) reports a rising approval rating for Trump.
Source: x.com/ScottWRasmussen/s…
Prompt engineering sure is hard. Iterating over and over until you get precisely the results you want, from one particular engine, needs patience.
I submit that the purpose of an encyclopedia today is less about serving as a reference and more about declaring what things are true or worth investigating. An encyclopedia article is an affirmation of truth or of the bounds of acceptable views.
As expressions of leading or acceptable views, encyclopedias always had this purpose, but in an age of increasingly accurate AI, it becomes the one remaining purpose that AI itself certainly cannot perform.
“V for Vendetta” is the correct answer.
Also Carmen Sandiego LOL
x.com/RealJamesWoods/st…
Well, now I’m interested: this suggests an eschatological timeline and that Muslims calling to prayer at an Orthodox Moscow church fits on it. But do explain, Fr. Joseph!
Larry Ellison celebrates the ability of AI to more effectively monitor everybody.
Are we supposed to be OK with central monitoring and a social credit system, because it’s run by friends of the Trump administration?
Isn’t this the sort of thing a Trump administration was supposed to stop?
I believe more people are driven away from the faith by bad churches and bad teaching and apologetics than by actual frontal atheistic attacks.