Remember Verner Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, and its “net of a million lies”? I wonder what he’d write about a “net of a billion bots talking to each other.”
Tag: social media
An AI app I’d find actually useful
I’d like an app that could take my various social media feeds, the RSS feeds I used to follow (until my feed reader broke), and the various news sources that I subscribe to, and find all the articles that I really want to read, and present them to me in a useful order.
Of course it needs to do a lot more than that. It should watch me read them, pay attention to which posts I linger on, which ones I follow internal links in, etc., and try to learn what I actually want to read. (And then give me more of that stuff in the future.)
It would also be nice if it noticed when I read something by a new person I don’t follow (because it was boosted by someone I do follow), and consider following that person as well.
And by “in a useful order,” I mean the AI should understand which articles are full of background information versus covering the latest breaking news, and present the background information first—unless it’s background information that I already know. In that latter case, it should just offer a link to the background information, in case I feel like I need a refresher. It should also present the information grouped by topic (so, news first, then economics/business news, then science news, then the very narrow sorts of cultural news that I want to read).
2025-01-24 06:49
I don’t know, but I assume this is happening because I block scripts from sites other than the one I’ve gone to visit from running in my browser.
I wasn’t going to turn on scripts, because it didn’t seem important to visit this particular page, but in the time it took me to capture the image below and write this text, the page seems to have decided that I am human after all!
2024-11-04 05:16
Because I am not as clever as Cory Doctorow, I just frittered away 15 minutes setting up my domain to be verified as my Blue Sky handle: https://bsky.app/profile/philipbrewer.net
I post almost nothing there—basically, just links back to my blog here—but you can go find me there with the other cool kids who are not as clever as Cory Doctorow.
2024-11-03 14:57
Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) writing for the economics journal “Duh!”:
I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will.
Newsletter mis-feature on micro.blog
I use micro.blog to send out my newsletter. I’m generally pretty happy with its newsletter system, but it does have a serious mis-feature: There’s a very narrow window for editing the newsletter between when it generates it, and when when it sends it out.
The main thing I want to edit is the front text that goes at the top of the email, ahead of the blog posts that I’ve identified as ones that should go into the newsletter. As near as I can tell, there’s no way to create that text until micro.blog gives me the draft newsletter. By default (the way I had it set up until a few minutes ago), there is then only 30 minutes before the newsletter goes out.
That might be fine, except in practice it turns out that the alert arrives after I’ve left on my main morning dog walk, and then the newsletter goes out before I get back.
As a stop-gap I’ve increased that gap to 3 hours (the largest gap the system allows, it would appear). That’s not perfect—I’d like to be able to write the front-matter anytime in the month before the newsletter goes out, and then edit it repeatedly over the month. But it’s good enough that at least I won’t keep missing it just because my dog gets to luxuriate in a long morning walk every day.
2024-08-20 14:58
This guy has an app for bulk unsubscribing (and text in Section 230 that perhaps protects it).
Personally, I’d like the opposite of what this app is described as doing: I want a plugin to purge my feed of everything except posts by people I follow. (All the rest of that stuff is “objectionable material” as far as I’m concerned.) That would make Facebook usable again, maybe.
… focused on a part of Section 230 that spells out protection for blocking objectionable material online.
Source: NYT
Newsletter going active!
I’m finally sending out my newsletter! An “issue zero” just went out, but starting next month you’ll be getting actual newsletters. My first cut at a title is “Sword fighting, writing, and a dog,” because that’s what I seem to be spending my time on these days. (I’ll try to get more writing stuff in than I have been just lately.)
If you’re interested, subscribe here: https://philipbrewer.micro.blog/subscribe/
2024-05-31 13:26
“… the largest part of the active author community has settled at Blue Sky where they are once again suckling on the teat of venture capital.”
Steven D. Brewer https://stevendbrewer.com/social-media-as-an-author/
2024-04-23 09:31
Instagram would have me believe that I have 30 followers there who want to follow me on Threads.
I assume this means that 30 people who follow me on Instagram have Threads accounts.
If you want to follow me, follow me either on this site’s RSS feed or else on on my Mastodon account: @philipbrewer@wandering.shop. (Or, if you’re the appropriate rare breed, follow me as https://micro.blog/philipbrewer.)