Month: April 2023

Daring Fireball on a demo for a connected wearable device that takes an anti-phone position:

Chaudhri thinks something is wrong that so many of us turn to our phones to photograph or film major moments in our lives, rather than just enjoying them through our own senses. I get it to some degree. If I’d been at that Lakers game, my phone would’ve been in my pocket at that moment, not just to absorb the actual game experience, but because I know that no photo I could take could possibly be as good as those being taken by courtside professional sports photographers. But those thousands of fans who did have their phones out for that moment weren’t thinking "_This sucks, I wish I didn’t have to stare at my phone to capture this._" They were thinking "_This is awesome and I’m glad I can capture this._"

People take their own photos at major events not because they think those will be great photos, but because they’re proof that they were there. Selfies are the new autographs, and a shaky iPhone photo from the perspective of your own seat at the event is the new certificate of attendance.

I’m quite sensitive to sounds, so I use white noise extensively to focus and to drown out distracting noises. Today I learnt about brown noise:

brown noise is the familiar, staticky sound of white noise (that is, all the audible frequencies simultaneously) but with the low frequency notes augmented and the less pleasant high frequency notes turned down, counteracting the human ear’s natural tendency to hear higher frequencies louder.

Here’s an example (YouTube) of what brown noise sounds like.

It sounds less harsh than the white noise I’m used to. I’m going to give this a try over the next few days to see (hear?) if it’s as effective as white noise at drowning out the sounds that are typically around me.

(Via 512 Pixels)

One of the most dramatic examples of the distortions caused by the Mercator projection: swapping Greenland and Mexico.

Here's another from @neilrkaye comparing Mexico with Greenland pic.twitter.com/P6F9SDnX6f

— Tomas Pueyo (@tomaspueyo) April 14, 2023

From Jason Kottke’s post marking the 25-year anniversary of his eponymous website:

It’s an absurd understatement to say that the web has changed a lot in the nearly 30 years since… it’s now a massive, overwhelmingly corporate entity that encompasses and organizes an ever-growing share of human information and activity… [but] the core of my own personal experience of the web has always been self-expression and making websites for individual humans to read & experience.

That web still exists, but just like in those early years, you’re going to have to discover, curate and bookmark it/subscribe to it on your own. It’s not hard, but it does need to be deliberate.

We cannot and should not expect new, more passive means of discovery (search and recommendation algorithms) to deliver the same independently published web of old.

The Apple Mail app in recent versions of iOS and Mac OS includes the new Follow Up feature:

If you send a message and don’t receive a response for several days, the email automatically moves back to the top of your inbox to help you remember to follow up.

But it can’t distinguish between email that’s meant to receive a reply and that which isn’t. I’ve increasingly been posting to this blog via email, and both my phone and Mac remind me that I haven’t heard back from WordPress, and if I’d like to follow up with it.

Which is what will happen with this post too.

📱

Any organisation that wants to be trusted long-term should ideally publish from a URL it owns and have an RSS feed (that functions as a notification mechanism). Doesn’t matter if it’s short- or long-form.

From Axios:

PBS has not tweeted from its main Twitter handle since April 8, following Elon Musk’s decision to label the outlet “government-funded news.”

NPR said Wednesday it was suspending its use of Twitter after the platform labeled it “government-funded.”

The journalist Matt Taibbi has been “shadow banned“:

Mashable’s Matt Binder solved the mystery and revealed, somewhat hilariously, that Taibbi’s acount appears to have been “max deboosted” or, in Twitter’s terms, had the highest level of visibility filters applied, meaning you can’t find Taibbi in search.

NPR and PBS have their own websites, of course, and Taibbi has published at his own URL Racket News. Even though Taibbi’s site is a Substack newsletter, he can move it to whatever online publishing platform he likes while keeping his online presence unchanged at that URL.

Far, far less consequentially, this site has existed since 2004 at this URL. Social networks have come and gone, and this site itself has been published on Movable Type, Blogger and WordPress, but the URL has remained the same.

An argument in favour of social networks is how easy it is to subscribe to someone’s posts – you just tap ‘follow’, and posts show up in your feed.

RSS is less convenient – but not a great deal. You paste the site’s address into your RSS reader, confirm and… that’s it. If you like you can organise your feeds by folder, but you don’t have to.

What you get in return is writing from those that you follow, untampered by boosting/de-boosting algorithms like on social networks, and without risk of shadow-banning or de-platforming. If they publish it, you’ll see it.

If you’re a news organisation or independent journalist, offering that kind of experience to your readers as your primary online presence is a must long-term.

This post is, well, for posterity. To record that the Elon-Musk-owned Twitter Inc auto-responds to all press inquiries with a "poop" emoji:

Going forward it will automatically reply to journalists’ inquiries with a single poop emoji, Musk announced… When asked for comment on Monday morning, Twitter promptly responded to NPR’s email with a scat symbol.

NPR also posted a screenshot of its experience:

This post has no particular significance than to record this for my future self’s chuckles.

From the Recommendo newsletter:

An artist I follow on Instagram is Tim Tadder. He is a fashion photographer and recently his fashion photos have all been AI co-generated. These images are no more (or less) synthetic than most fashion photography, and a lot more imaginative. We should call them synthographs, and Tadder, a brilliant synthographer.

What do we call passages co-created with generative AI? Arguments formulated using the tech? Code written by it?

I understand why one thinks how AI-created and edited images and other material are qualitatively different from their human-only counterparts, but I personally no longer think so.

We have used technology to enhance photographs for decades now. The first zoom lens did not make a picture a zoomograph. Nor did the first digital camera turn it into a pixelograph. As for synthographs, phone have been using on-board AI techniques to edit & “improve” images for a few years now. The line between the essence of what those techniques already do and generative AI does is, in my opinion, blurry.

What we call a photograph has changed dramatically over time, and our expectation of what one is has likewise changed.

It’ll be the same when it comes to other applications. Philosophy aided by generative AI won’t be called philosynthosophy – but it’s going to be rather interesting.

The Verge:

Substack is getting a new tweet-like feature called “Notes,” the company announced on Wednesday. The feature will let users publish small posts about things like “posts, quotes, comments, images, and links,” according to a blog post from Substack co-founders…

The Substack Notes vs Mastodon competition for Twitter emigrés will likely go to Substack.

Tumblr really should have won this; they flubbed it.

Ultimately, publishing on “someone else’s site” will win until self-hosting becomes easy enough to go mainstream. I feel WordPress – Tumblr’s owner and what runs this site – flubbed this too.

Via Twitter:

I wonder if generations are alternately “light” and “dark”. Boomers are (with huge racial, gender, geographic exceptions) happy with the times they came of age in; GenX not so much; Millennials, especially older ones, generally yes; GenZ once again not.