There’s certainly something broken on X.com when Shlomit Aharoni Lir, with 2,397 followers, can get 171 retweets and 348 likes with a screencap of my post. Meanwhile, if I myself had tried to post the same thing a month ago, when I was still on X.com but greatly throttled, I guarantee I wouldn’t have broken 10 retweets.
In the meantime, I’m 100% OK with communicating with the world on my own platforms.
We live in an age in which what formerly would have been understood to be grave sin has been normalized. Both this fact and its consequences must be carefully explained to younger people, and indeed to many older people—Western society has been swimming in this muck for a very long time indeed.
The normalization of widespread wrongdoing does not remove the consequences. It does make us fail to connect our behavior with its consequences, though.
It falls to more enlightened people to tell the rest of us that it really is a dirty swamp we’re swimming in, and what it means. It’s been so long that these moralistic messages have been given voice, they sound edgy and fresh again. So there’s that, anyway.
Make an account here and like my posts pls tx 😁
Went to work using LLMs to generate commentary and links, using GPT 4o and Grok, and both of them at the same time started generating 90% fake URLs, i.e., which look real but result in 404s. Anyone else having this problem? It’s very weird. I didn’t seem to have this problem yesterday.
Then you’ll miss my stuff. So be it. I don’t care anymore. I’m not going to support a platform that refuses to support me. Why should I? Nobody sees my tweets anyway. Even if I pay the $228 per year, my reach is a fraction of what it used to be—if I do pay that much, my reach is comparable to an account with only 5,000 followers, and also with an upper limit to how widely any given post can disperse. It’s not just insulting, it’s literally a waste of time. If I put time into my own platform, I can build my own audience in a place that I have more control over.
Call on the name of the Lord.
Well, it’s here: an automatic encyclopedia article generator.
Try it out:
storm.genie.stanford.edu
Here is an example of an article I generated. The first paragraph is too long, but it looks good otherwise:
startthis.org:9932/driv…
I discussed how we should react to such a thing here:
Open source text-to-speech suggests that I could, perhaps, add an automatic audiobook option to ZWIBook. Wouldn’t fit on the drive I sell ZWIBook on now, but it would on a larger one. Thing is, you’d need to transfer the generation software function to your local machine FIRST, which is a heavy lift for most users. So I’d have to make a “local installer” for this software. Somebody COULD support this work of the KSF…
We also, of course, need to create a “read this article aloud” function for EncycloSearch and EncycloReader.
Tell me again how the good guys are in charge.
I wonder if Trump really meant this!
These are my old stomping grounds—this is what I am nostalgic about.
A reminder from the distant past…back in the third grade, 47 years ago, we moved to a new house in the Oceanview neighborhood of Anchorage, Alaska. I wanted to continue going to my old school, Rabbit Creek Elementary School, but to get there, I would have to walk 1.5 miles both ways in the freezing cold in the winter. I remember the walk pretty well. I had to go through one neighborhood, then another, then across the main highway through Anchorage on a long pedestrian bridge, and the wind was very cold on that bridge. I tried it a day or two, in January—and that was enough for me. So I went to Oceanview Elementary School, and made new friends there.
Well, that pedestrian bridge just blew down in 70-mph winds.
I guess I’ll say the obvious: the recent push by left-wing Wikipedians to stop using the Heritage Foundation as a source, because Heritage seeks to dox (name and shame) anti-Semitic editors on Wikipedia, is predictable. If Heritage is de-sourced, it will cause Wikipedia to become even more biased and less relevant. 😱
There does, of course, need to be some accountability for Wikipedia editors. For one thing, admins and those with significant authority in the system should be as easily named and shamed as any ordinary journalist.
A non-negligible part of my brain is occupied with conceiving new schemes for making it super-easy for people to connect with each other online en masse in a way completely out of the control of Big Tech.
Blogging and RSS are a strong contender but the really exciting, but cryptic, possibilities lie in simply injecting some *idea* about how to behave that goes viral. Like, “share your top five links of the day under the hashtag #FiveLinks.” Not that, that’s not it, but like that.
