As someone on the receiving end of POSSE, who is often on the multiple platforms people post to, this approach ends up feeling impersonal and spammy. I totally get the reasoning people have for doing it. But, to me, it's very "ship it" focused, rather than conversation focused. Maybe I'm just getting old.
atproto feels like a move in the right direction for personal publishing that makes content discovery easier withtout the need to post to multiple channels / platforms. https://standard.site/ is one initiative working towards making this a reality.
I don’t think it does. ATProto is merely “managed storage for apps” by Bluesky and it’s quite opposing to POSSE - You rely on third parties entirely, not just for hosting but also access and moderation to your own content.
What you can and can’t do with your own content is also limited and managed by someone else. The entire premise that you can move your posts history etc, while technically true, is not compatible with the web (e.g. support for things like redirects, canonical urls being handled currently etc is again all outside of your control and a not a goal of Bluesky).
ATProto is in many ways like the custom HTML extensions Microsoft had in Internet Explorer to “make better user experience”.
For me one of the main points of POSSE is resilience. If the VCs behind Bluesky got tired of it tomorrow, all that would die is some links to your website. Your posts and content, RSS subscribers, people who linked or bookmarked your website etc - remain unaffected.
With the IndieWeb version of POSSE, the source of truth is the webpage you control.
For the ATProto version of POSSE, the source of truth is the record in your PDS. That record is interesting because it is both content-addressed and signed with your private key.
Where ever that record is syndicated, the reader (or app displaying the content) should be able to demonstrably verify the authenticity of the record.
And you can host your own PDS entirely independent of Bluesky, there are several interfaces for both reading and publishing Standard.site records:
> content-addressed and signed with your private key
Technically valid but also not required. ATProto works hard to present them as valuable or needed, like added value of sorts but:
- The need for signed content is niche to specific use-cases. Not sure even news outlets need this as long as they control their domain.
- The PDS is a funny contraption of protocols and technologies that are quite complex and probably can't (usefully) exist on their own outside the "atmosphere" ... even if you manage to set one up.
The question would be, why bother with all this complexity and layers when you can self-host your website anyway.
The added value of a PDS/ATProto is to participate in the social cloud of Bluesky. Without it, the entire thing is more of an engineering showcase than a useful tool.
ATProto is a great idea that will never go anywhere because of its close association with Bluesky the service, and Bluesky the company, and that's a shame.
Impersonal in the sense the article etc isn't being presented for the specific audience. It's just being dumped everywhere with the same contextual text ("Wrote this piece about...."). So, I'm seeing it everywhere in the exact same way. Which feels way spammy (and which I've admittedly had to do myself, as per the times). But, I'm used to feeling like the person I follow is posting stuff to the community in language specific to their readers. I say "used to", but I'm probably thinking back decades now. Back when your audience / reader base was the metric of personal. Not the platform.
I feel conflicted with this view. It feels partially like something social media giants would advocate, the idea that their little social media platform is some special community where people are different and normal open web rules shouldn't apply.
I feel the philosophy of posting on the web and hosting your own website is that the web is the community with which I want to share my thoughts. If I just wanted to share my thoughts with just one platform/community, I would go and just post it on that one platform, I wouldn't go to the trouble of running a website.
I get that it's important that there's safe spaces, and some communities should be like that (essentially, private but online) but that view should be the minority and exception for edge cases, rather than the default view of all different websites or platforms.
I also find it ends up looking rather spammy. A blog article is written, and then it's posted everywhere in an attempt to drive traffic to it. It's often hard to see a difference between someone practicing POSSE and someone spamming in an attempt to help their SEO. This is especially true of 100% of their posts are just links off to the blog, where they treat all the social platforms like alternate RSS protocols.
A social networking site designed around POSSE may be different, where you can subscribed to your blog as a means to post, and the post shows up as the RSS would in a feed reader. This way people don't have to click through to read what was posted, or can at least read what is above the fold. This can be rounded out with comments, one-off posting, and maybe some standard way to write a blog post that references another, for a proper linked/threaded response for more thought out and thoughtful replies than a short comment.
I fully accept that my view may be dated to the point of having inverse consequences (maybe in line with what you're saying). But, there's just no getting around the feeling I get when I see the exact same post, in the exact same context, showing up on every platform I use. There's just no way that can't feel like spam. And when I do it, it feels like I'm spamming people, too. Having come up in the blogging days of 2003 on, I'm just sort of programmed that way now. But, like I said above, I get why people do it.
Side note: It's such a bizarre thing that the platform you're on matters at all. Not without reason (they all have a vibe now, that's basically politically informed). But, back then, you were just on whatever blog platform was the easiest. The platform was more or less invisible (or at least ignored).
I definitely relate to that feeling. I miss the days of forum signatures which felt like the perfect solution.
And funny you should say that side note, I also agree. A relevant observation/recollection a few days ago:
> there was a time where social media platforms were defined by their features, Vine was short video, snapchat was disappearing pictures, twitter was short status posts etc. but now they're all bloated messes that try do everything.
I feel blogging was one of the main platform and the main feature in the early 2000s. There was a period from mid 2000s to mid 2010s where there was a separation between platforms and features, and now they've reconsolidated into all platforms having all features... I think? I don't really follow/use social media much, I've not used TikTok but I guess it might break the cycle.
You have false illusions about "a community" where none exists. Jut like you don't belong to any community by following a TV series. You are a consumer, not a community member. There's nothing spammy about publishing your stuff on several different platforms. Different audiences are on different platforms, because they have different habits and different ways they prefer to consume information.
I'd love to be able to actually articulate what makes AI writing read like AI writing. A few of the common tells come to mind (contrast construction, hyperbole, overuse / wrongly used em-dashes, etc). The above quote doesn't have any of that, and yet it certainly feels AI. The first sentence (both what it says and where it's placed) suggest AI to me. But, I couldn't quite tell you why.
Before AI this style of prose was called "thank you for coming to my TED talk", with a little bit of "LinkedIn broetry". Confident assertions and pat explanations about truths that will make you a better person upon internalization; a pop psychologist convincing you of an unintuitive and surprising new idea about how the universe works that catches you off guard but then turns your perception on its head and revolutionizes the way you see the world. Contemporary marketing speak of a particular "coolly subverting your expectations and injecting the truth straight into your veins" flavor.
It is a style that AI (intentionally?) emulates for sure, though the "regression to the mean" and general vagueness seems to be what really separates the classic TED talk/puffy blog from AI. Humans like specific examples and anecdotes, AI fails at making those.
I think the main tell is that it says basically nothing, it reads like a human that is paid per word. Humans prefer easy to read articles that doesn't hide the point behind such fluff, so there is no reason to do it except just to spam words.
that's essentially it. But not only that, we learned to distinguish things written by humans for humans, and things written by humans (paid by the word) for SEO. LLMs tend to produce text that would be great for SEO, so it stands out as not for humans
Wikipedia has an excellent article about exactly this [1], in their editor information section. There's a section called "Undue emphasis on significance, legacy, and broader trends" that provides some examples:
>Words to watch: stands/serves as, is a testament/reminder, a vital/significant/crucial/pivotal/key role/moment, underscores/highlights its importance/significance, reflects broader, symbolizing its ongoing/enduring/lasting, contributing to the, setting the stage for, marking/shaping the, represents/marks a shift, key turning point, evolving landscape, focal point, indelible mark, deeply rooted, ...
Once I read this, it started sticking out to me all the time.
I like the take on "undue emphasis on significance." To me, that's such an obvious tell. That's actually an old pre-LLM tell, we just used to call it "pretension." Once we get into long lists of specific words, it feels like we're getting into rules. You can't use this or that word cuz LLMs do. That's crazy problematic. It has to be about the way the emphasis and the overuse of certain words in a single piece reflects inauthenticity. But, eff if I'm gonna stop using "significance" cuz some LLM does.
I can not stand that I'm expected to adjust my use of em-dashes because LLMs use them (incorrectly, typically). It brings up all these feelings from my younger punk / indie days when normies would get into a band we were into, and then we were expected to not like that band anymore. Since then I've tried to abide by what I call the Farting Billion Principle. People shouldn't have to change their ways everytime a billionaire farts.
At the risk of being the person who says, "it's capitalism," (I know I know).... When making profit is the dominant intent of a company, a worker doing something faster doesn't lead to the worker doing less. It leads to the worker producing more in the same time. If doing more yields too much of the thing produced for the market to handle, the company either A. creates more need for the more produced (fabricate necessity), or B. creates a new need for a new thing, and a new thing for you to produce. There's no getting off the wheel for the worker in capitalism.
My wife and I have an excavator on our property that we use for making trails, trenching, digging up stumps, etc. All of it is exhilarating. But, nothing beats simply digging. Something about breaking through the top layer and getting a big scoop of earth that just feels real good.
I’ve sometimes wondered about getting a big plot of land, some cheap old heavy machinery, and letting people pay to play with it.
Probably liability insurance makes it impractical, which is a shame. There really is nothing like playing with a big excavator. Very fortunate that it was one of my formative experiences.
We've thrown some parties on the prop, and have often thought, "Maybe it'd be cool to let people try some of this stuff out," at which point we remember how incredibly dangerous something like an excavator is, even when closely monitored and in a safe environment, and then have nightmares about worst case scenarios. So, it's been a no-go thus far. What we have actually considered, though, is seeing about renting it out to a known-to-be safe / mature user to use on projects when we aren't. But, haven't pulled the trigger on that yet.
Been using shift+option+hyphen to make and use em-dashes (sans spaces) since at least 2005, when I got my first publishing job and also started blogging (so writing a ton more). I also use option+hyphen (en-dash) for date and number ranges. In my experience, ChatGPT consistently adds spaces around both.
Nice piece. You and I (and I know many others) have come to the same conclusion: (an old video of mine on breaking down tasks into tiny bites https://youtu.be/b3blsuTqN9s?si=W373y92JzDfHIDvS). No doubt informed by our good friend David Allen.
Ps, I linked to your article in my newsletter this week. Hope it sends some visits!
As someone who's very much on the outside of the Apple / Android debate (though I've never owned an iPhone, I do use a Mac and an iPad), and as someone who's relatively tech illiterate, how does this announcement read in light of Apple's latest liquid glass stuff, and the pushback I'm seeing from almost every angle. Is this Google announcement at all in response to the negative reaction Apple is getting? Does what Google is saying here get anyone excited? Maybe even excited enough to switch over?
I've used an Android and Apple phone on and off since the first phones were available with the respective OSs. In general, I've found the Android UI to be more intuitive (although they've both had their boondoggles).
But lately it does seem like spinning wheels on the UI front for both. Without a distinct new feature to build the UI around, most UI changes just seem like change for the sake of change (ie. resume/executive driven design). Both OS seem to be approaching a very similar paradigm (Apple becoming more androidy IMO lately). Minor changes aren't going to cause major changes in popularity. "Liquid Glass" does seem to be uniquely disliked, and probably for good reasons, but Apple generally has ecosystem and brand lock-in that will put the brakes on much ship jumping.
Imagine how difficult it must be for the PM whose job it is to create a long term road map or strategy for phone UIs. Everything is already done.
The only strategy is to create work so the team isn't disbanded. Add gradients, and then remove them in a few years. But write high-brow text to explain the changes, like an artist who describes their solid gray oil on canvas so it can sell for a million dollars.
Android is a different beast since OEMs highly customize the UX. Samsung could easily make a horrible liquid glass ripoff and stick it on Android without Google doing anything.
Most of Google's work on Android seems to be around making smaller changes for the UX and bigger internal changes (splitting up the OS so individual parts can be updated without the OEM involvement, security changes, etc).
And just to clarify, Material 3 Expressive is not shipping in these builds, that will be in a quarterly release build in probably in the first week of September.
I read that IOS will pepvide the battery percentage pn screen (e.g. your battery is 75% charged) and also estimated time to reach 100% capacity when charging
Took four years hanging with the zettelkasten community, looking at the system from every angle, in the hopes of answering as many questions and clearing up as many confusions as I could. This book is the result of that work. In the end, I tried to write a book people would feel confident recommending. Hope you enjoy.
That link doesn't make a claim quite that strong. I also don't know anyone that has eaten it.
Given that I know dozens of people who demonstrably lost their sensitivity to poison oak via the accidental chronic exposure regimen I outlined above, at the very least it should raise a scientific question. It would be easier to dismiss if it was an isolated case or two. No one exposes themselves like that intentionally.
> lost their sensitivity to poison oak via the accidental chronic exposure regimen
This is not how the immune system is known to work.
Sensitivity does not downregulate. Increased exposure enhances detection and response. Recognition proliferates. Once you're allergic to something, it'll only worsen.
You can become allergic to new things, but you won't lose allergies unless the recognizer population dies off entirely. And even if it did, you're likely close enough to training your immune system to this sensitivity again. (You've already done it at least once.)
> Sensitivity does not downregulate. Increased exposure enhances detection and response. Recognition proliferates. Once you're allergic to something, it'll only worsen.
I don't think that's correct. If it were, then allergy immunotherapy wouldn't work. Which... it does. Not perfectly, and not for everyone, but it does for many.
One is correct in that repeated exposure to an allergen can upregulate IgE production, especially in cases of severe allergies like bee stings or peanuts. This is due to the immune system's sensitization process, where each exposure can lead to more intense reactions, driven by the Th2-mediated immune response that promotes IgE production and allergic inflammation.
However, one is also correct that controlled exposure through allergen immunotherapy (SCIT or SLIT) can downregulate IgE and mitigate allergic responses. This therapy works by gradually introducing the allergen in controlled doses, which shifts the immune response from a Th2-dominated profile to a Th1-dominated or regulatory T cell (Treg) profile. This shift reduces IgE levels and increases the production of blocking antibodies like IgG4, leading to long-term desensitization and reduced allergic reactions.
In particular environmental allergens (pollens, dust mites, animal dander, molds), insect venoms (bee, wasp) may respond well to immunotherapy but we’ve had poor success or disproportionate risk attempting to mitigate food allergens (peanuts, tree nuts, and shellfish), certain medications, and latex .
I don't think that's necessary. I've been doing allergy immunotherapy for the past few years, and it's all subcutaneous. Definitely not into the bloodstream.
Looks like you are giving "Ackshually" technically correct points, when it's clear what others are trying to say. Please engage with what they are trying to convey instead of coming up with technical gotchas.
From personal experience, exposure does not lead to lasting immunity. Quite the opposite. I've had several intense exposure rashes that were debilitating, like not being able to walk properly for a week due to leg swelling. And I still get rashes from poison oak.
Maybe there's a bit of short term immunity from severe exposure. I've never tested that since the discomfort from an intense rash makes me avoid exposure like the plague for a few years.
In fact urushi is the Japanese word for lacquer, the plant is in the genus Toxicodendron.
Like most jobs until recently, making lacquerware was hereditary, and (clearly) the people making it were able to withstand sustained and direct exposure. It's possible that there is a genetic proclivity involved in ability to do the work, but just as clearly, there is hyposensitivity gained in exposure.
Wasnt there some sort of natural selection centuries ago so that only folks tolerant to such chemistry actually performed the job?
I know next to nothing about these topics but there are some wildly opposite claims in this thread. Truth has the tendency, despite being complex, to generqlly favor one direction.
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