Here’s a bunch of words that, free of any other context, have a LOT of meanings. Because of this flexibility, they can be instrumental in titles for your songs, poems, stories, and jokes.
Tag: tool
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Trello open source alternative
Experience efficient task management with WeKan – the Open-Source, customizable, and privacy-focused kanban.
Can be self-hosted.
Since leaving my day job two years ago, I’ve been writing personal weeknotes. In short: once a week, I publish on my blog a set of notes about what I did the past week. I believe weeknotes started inside organizations (here’s a good primer on professional weeknotes), but I appreciate using the weekly checkpoint as a personal tool to steer my attention and action.
This post is my entry for July’s IndieWeb Carnival on the theme of tools, hosted by James G. Crossposted to IndieNews.
Extensive knowledge of Adobe software is typically a requirement for being hired for any job in the creative industry, meaning you usually have to have learned it in school and paid for your own license before you’ve even started your career. Self-employed artists are similarly locked in when they’ve invested decades into learning Adobe’s tools, customizing their workflow within Adobe’s software suite and saving their entire archive of work in their proprietary formats. The switching cost is just too high for most people at that point.
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Weathering Software Winter by Devine
As an artist you spend time developing a skill, you become a Photoshop illustrator. When your connection to the internet fails and the software locks up, that skill that you thought was yours was actually entirely owned by someone, and can be taken away.
A consequence of our tools being owned by someone else, when our tools become an extension of ourselves, when we think with them.
See also: Scale requires deskilling
The Open Heart Protocol is a simple way to add anonymous reactions to your blog, developed by Mu-An Chiou. (I’ll say simple, with the help of Benji — my eyes glossed over at the actual protocol page, short though it may be.) I added it to my site this week, so anyone can “heart” a post. Benji set up some other emoji options but I’m going to keep it simple for now and start with only a heart.
This came out of the conversation the IndieWeb’s been having about casual interactions. The Open Heart Protocol adds an easy option for readers to react to a post without having to comment or send a Webmention*. I like when other people’s websites have similar functionality — sometimes I don’t have a response so it’s nice when there’s another means to show appreciation.
On social media, likes and reactions can influence people to post differently, seeking reactions. I doubt that adding this heart feature will make me feel any pressure since I don’t get a notification — I’ll just notice it the next time I go back to that post, which could be the next day or months later. I write often enough and about such a broad range of topics, I’d naturally expect some to be more interesting to other people, and not getting anonymous likes on a post I wrote for myself isn’t going to deter me from writing more things for myself. The indie web is also small enough that I’ve been trained not to expect a ton of feedback on anything I publish here.
Since leaving a heart is anonymous, there’s no social pressure for any reader to “be seen” liking something. In that sense it’s not a two-way “relationship building” feature, but not everything needs to be. We can be friendly strangers — driving, we’ve got the courtesy wave, online, we have reacjis 😄
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Information parasites
To even entertain the idea of building AI-powered search engines means, in some sense, that you are comfortable with eventually being the reason those creators no longer exist. It is an undeniably apocalyptic project, but not just for the web as we know it, but also your own product. Unless you plan on subsidizing an entire internet’s worth of constantly new content with the revenue from your AI chatbot, the information it’s spitting out will get worse as people stop contributing to the network.
See also: How Google is killing independent sites like ours by Gisele Navarro and Danny Ashton (HouseFresh)
If anyone finds out how to prevent Arc Browser from accessing your website, please let me know 😉 For now I’ve blocked Anthropic AI in my robots.txt file, in addition to ChatGPT. The kind of people who are ok being parasites on the information ecosystem probably don’t respect robots.txt though 🤷♀️
See also: The next big theft
Opting out of convenience to make a point
Blogs are written for people, not search
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The Information Environment: Toward a Deeper Enshittification Thesis by Adam Kotsko
Google Books assumes that what one wants out of their huge pile of books is not books, but isolated strings of information. That’s the same assumption that stands behind their disastrous attempt to revamp their search engine so that it doesn’t take you primarily to a website, but instead tries to directly present you with the answer.
Further reading: The Shallows
There is no such thing as the raw information devoid of presentation and context. We can’t get at that raw information, and we certainly can’t program computers to do so, because it does not exist. It is a fantasy, and it is increasingly a willful lie.
See also: Reaching the edges
Information does want to be free, as it turns out — free of context, free of pleasure, free of empathy, even free of comprehension. The effort to just cut to the chase and give us the information has actively destroyed the conditions for understanding and using that information in an intelligent way.
See also: Recipes as embodied writing and care
Controlling the information platforms, controlling the information
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The Cost of a Tool by Edward Loveall
So I want to write to those people who, like me, enjoy new tools and their potential. I’m talking to you: the prompt engineer, “it’s really good for some things”, gotta-break-a-few-eggs mindset, AI-experimentalist. It’s me: a luddite who nevertheless loves technology. I’m going to show you how I see these tools.
Because where you see a tool, I see a weapon.
Maybe you think calling ChatGPT/Stable Diffusion/etc “weapons” is too extreme. “Actual weapons are made for the purpose of causing harm and something that may cause harm should be in a different category,” you say. But I say: if a tool is stealing work, denying healthcare, perpetuating sexism, racism, and erasure, and incentivizing layoffs, splitting hairs over what category we put it in misses the point.
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Websites as tools
How could a website complement what you already do rather than competing or repeating? … How can the process of making and cultivating a website contribute to your approach?
My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they’re both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously. There are endless possibilities as to what a website could be… Whatever it is, there’s potential for a self-reflexive feedback loop: when you put energy into a website, in turn the website helps form your own identity.
A website, or anything interactive, is inherently unfinished.
Twenty years ago today, I wrote my first blog post! (I stopped blogging from about 2009-2011, so I haven’t technically been blogging for twenty years yet — guess I get to celebrate twenty years twice 😂)
My old blogs
In the intervening years, I’ve blogged at:
- a college blog,
- a daily photo blog,
- an original art blog I ran briefly with a friend,
- a post-college blog,
- another original art blog I ran slightly longer with my sister,
- two blogs through office jobs,
- my fiction pen name,
- my ongoing Cascadia Inspired blog,
- and this site (which I call a mind garden but is basically a blog heavily focused on links).
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Generative AI at work
The Bad
The DeSantis Campaign Texted Me with a Large Language Model by Alan Johnson
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Microsoft Publishes Garbled AI Article Calling Tragically Deceased NBA Player “Useless” by Victor Tangermann (Futurism)
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The A.V. Club’s AI-Generated Articles Are Copying Directly From IMDb by Frank Landymore and Jon Christian
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The Interesting
I’m much more interested in how LLMs could be a tool for analysis than actually generating text, which it does harmfully far more often than people do. I think hyperspecific, smaller models that focus on a specific subject area or type of work have much more potential in the long term as ethical tools since they may not need such massive inputs (of stolen data) and would use less computing power (and thus less water and energy), and without a focus on generation of material it might not support sexist or racist bias like current models do.
Using GPT-4 to measure the passage of time in fiction by Ted Underwood
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Getting creative with embeddings by Amelia Wattenberger
I am a careless person and AI is smarter than me! A self-fulfilling prophecy by Omayma Said
“I am a careless person,” he said “AI will help me write better feedback.”.
“Isn’t it better to try to be thoughful and think before writing?” I said.
“But AI can be my teacher. AI is much smarter” he said with absolute certainty.
If we do not value care (in this case, meaningful, thoughtful, helpful, individualized feedback), it becomes another task to be checked off as fast as possible, the intended outcomes forgotten. The completion of feedback is not what needs to be measured, but its effectiveness as a guide for future improvement.
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A prayer wheel for capitalism by Baldur Bjarnason
Writing is where I find out what I think.
This is why the first draft is often the hardest and why everybody dreads it. That’s the part where you dive into yourself and dredge up the truth itself.
The text detritus that the writing process leaves behind helps sell what needs to be sold, market what needs to be marketed, and guide what needs to be guided.
But, in a slight twist on the usual aphorism, it’s only the thought that counts.
At a certain point, completing tasks faster becomes less efficient as the quality degrades. This reminds me of driving through a tree plantation in New Zealand, full of a particularly fast-growing variety of tree; my teacher shared that the tree actually grew too fast and the wood was good for nothing but pulp, worth much less than timber. Sometimes it takes the time it takes. Capitalism wants everything to be done faster, faster, faster, but perhaps it’s no longer our tools that are the limitations on worker efficiency, but a limit on the speed of effective thought.