Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.
Steve Klabnik is disappointed in the AI discourse “all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized…both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true”
He recommends two good reads: The Software Engineering Identity Crisis and Algorithmic Underground
It was about a year ago that I posted about Puter. It’s a web desktop and got me thinking about these types of interfaces so I put together a page about them.
I used Cyd to migrate tweets to Bluesky on my @bmannconsulting.com account, self hosted on BringYourOwn.Computer.
Feature request: support replies using bsky’s facets to link to the Twitter original.
Chris Joel aka cdata just posted an announce thread that he’s building Familiar, a “magical notebook”, bootstrapping a healthier web from today’s ailing one.
Great Q&A with Robin Berjon about open social protocols wearing his Free Our Feeds hat in Columbia Journalism Review.
Explains open social protocols as roads shared by all, and gently pushes journalists to inform themselves & get better at explaining it.
Happy birthday Drupal! There’s a new Drupal CMS 1.0 release, which is a “distro” of configuration & plugins.
Out of Your Element is a “modern Matrix-to-Discord appservice bridge”. Seems simple and robust — just a NodeJS server. Discovered via Muni Town.
I’m a Weird Nerd -> weird.bmann.ca. The Muni Town team shipped paid subscriptions powered by Polar. Read their blog for background on where this personal page builder is going (including atproto integration).
User & Agents is a new community stewarded by Ankesh Bharti1. Here’s one line from the home page: “Our goal is to empower individuals with software that enables them to create their own agency”. Go read the whole thing and come join!
Playing around with the Obsidian Web Clipper. It has variable template types and basically just triggers new pages in your app.
Have to figure out an “archive” mode where I want to save the entire page, without republishing it.
I bought Path of Exile today, it’s at home downloading onto my Steam Deck, which is currently listed as unsupported.
MacOS also not supported for Early Access.
So of course I’m looking at Bazzite for the MiniPC PL63.
Very inspired learning about UKAI, who are hosting some workshops at Z-Space:
“Our mission is ‘culture for what’s coming’”
“…we seek and test out approaches to culture that make sense of the world we are creating and handing down to future generations.
We call this work cultural research and development, and just like R&D in other fields, we are trying to make things better. In our case, we are trying to build resilience to massive volatility and change.”
Doing some research on Public Mobile.
Low cost cellphone plans in Canada. They’re a TELUS subsidiary.
Anyone have personal experience?
Martin Fowler’s 2024 thoughts on the state of social media:
If I find someone doing what I’m doing - posting on Twitter and on other sites - I prefer to follow them on a different site. As far as I’m concerned, Twitter is in decline, and although I’m not leaving it for the moment, I prefer to follow activity in other places.
Gordon Brander, Places to intervene in a system:
“If systems are fictions, maybe we can learn to hold them loosely, to trade between them, or even to let go and allow reality to speak back?”
Ibis has just been announced as a federated Wikipedia alternative. It’s based on ActivityPub and written by one of the Lemmy developers. “built on a stack of PostgreSQL and Rust, …with a frontend written in Rust Webassembly”