Meadow - Posts tagged with technology

Take care not to tread on those apples

Tue, 19 Aug 2025 17:43:49 GMT

One of my favorite authors of all time is Ray Bradbury. I enjoy the way he constructs tales, his frenzied kind of storytelling. I first got to know of him by reading the excellent Zen in the Art of Writing, a recompilation of essays around the art of writing stories. He's one of those authors that's really successful at just letting his own subconscious guide the whole process, and trusting the process enough to not get in the way. The best thing, he says, that a writer can do is to be observant, everything else takes care of itself.

...

While falling asleep yesterday, I found myself thinking of a quote I once read from Bradbury. It's a quote that he gave in an interview¹ about Fahrenheit 451 (great book by the way). I'll let the quote speak by itself:

In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

I find this really interesting. The woman was just walking with headphones on, and that was enough to cause such a reaction in Bradbury. I say "just" because for us walking while listening to music or an audiobook is absolutely inconsequential. Actually, it might even be considered to be more in the here-and-now than many of our modern entertainments. To read this quote, in our current technological world, is almost comical. And yet, I think Bradbury hits it right on the head. The anecdote seems to ask: "Why would anyone want to escape such an idyllic afternoon stroll?"

We have a much bigger issue though: our phones. They not only capture the attention of our ears, but also our eyes and ultimately, our thoughts and minds. We've been desensitized to the ordinariness of everyday life. It's become boring. I know it can be so for me, and I imagine it is so for many others. I often find myself taking out my phone just to stare at it, even when there's a perfectly nice thing going on around me. When I'm waiting at a restaurant, or even when I'm playing with my son. The funny thing is that I don't really do anything with it. I just take it out to see if someone has written me anything. This is silly, because very rarely does anyone ever write to me. Then I put the phone back in my pocket for a while, and then the whole scene repeats itself. I sometimes open up Instagram or Reddit to look at things I really don't care much for. Why?

I often wonder what Bradbury would say about the current state of things. We think of our phones as something liberating, something that frees us from the limits of our bodies and allows us to connect with others in ways that wouldn't otherwise be possible. On one hand, that's true, as evidenced by your reading this. However, this freedom also means we're free from two essential limitation of our natural bodies: the world around us and boredom.² I think these two go hand in hand.

This freedom, I think, is way too large for our human minds. Having access to everything we see the details of nothing, we're blind to all but the coarsest shadows and we think that being familiar with them is what being an informed and socially connected human being is all about. But how can we call ourselves "connected" or "realized" if we don't even take time to see the world around us? We take no time to see the beetles scurrying along in our backyard. We're not even familiar with the birds that frequent it! It's like we're living entirely in a world of our own making, which is nothing but a bleak reflection of what's really out there.

Wouldn't it be nice if it weren't so? I know I'm not alone in feeling like this. The hard part is that the path to get there is not clear at all. What are we to do? The truth is that leaving our phones in a drawer is not really the solution, nor are they the entire problem. If we abandoned our phones I'm sure the overall situation would improve, but the basic issue is a problem of habit. Were we to give up our phones we would soon find ourselves being distracted by something else. Sure, maybe it's something healthier that offers less immediate gratification, but wouldn't it be nice if we could be really observant, present with the things around us?

This reminds me of another quote by Bradbury, this one from Zen in the Art of Writing:

[...] ideas lie everywhere, like apples fallen and melting in the grass for lack of wayfaring strangers with an eye and a tongue for beauty, whether absurd, horrific, or genteel.

May we all be on the lookout for fallen apples then. May we all strive not to squash them under our boots as we trample through life.

I tried looking for a link to the interview but wasn't able to find it. If you know which one it is then please do let me know! ↩
There's much to be said about how boredom has basically become to be perceived as one of the greatest evils in our modern world. We should avoid boredom at all costs. Just a couple of weeks ago I heard someone say that "boredom" was a bad word, and she meant it. ↩

piclog.blue walkthrough on Android

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 15:09:57 GMT

I've been using piclog.blue for some months now and I really love it. I don't know why I feel the need to keep two photo libraries. I guess one is for high quality photos and the other is more for the whole poetic aspect of low resolution and limited color images. I don't know, I like that it leaves a lot of the beauty to be interpreted by the person that's looking at the picture. I first stumbled upon it a long time ago while reading Rat's blog. I remember at the time thinking "what is this crap? You can't even see the subject in the photo clearly". However, as time went on I started to get the appeal.

For those that don't know, piclog is one of the many projects made by the prolific m15o (also author of Status Cafe, The Midnight Pub, and many others). It's a really simple platform where you can upload images, one image at a time, and associate it with a caption, and the image gets downscaled quite a lot after uploading. That's it. No likes, comments, or reshares. You can then see your piclog on your profile page, or embed it into your site. For example, here's my latest piclog

The sad thing about piclog is that not many people use it. At least not nearly enough as I think should! The home feed is pretty static. In my estimation, I would say that around 20 images are posted every day, which is a shame! I think the main reason why people don't use it is because it's hard for non-technical users. When uploading an image you need to upload one that's at most 50kb (or something like that) and modern phone cameras take images that are multiple orders of magnitude larger. This means that a user would usually need to take a photo and then somehow downscale it to fit the platform's constraints before being able to even upload it.

But, what if I told you that, at least on Android (sorry iOS friends), you can tell your camera to take really crappy pictures. Usually that's not something you would do, but it's perfect for us. However, you don't want to change your default camera settings, as that would mean that you would then need to switch them back whenever you wanted to take a nice, full picture. Instead, what you can do is install a separate camera application and use that as your piclog camera.

...

Now, I'll tell you how I did it, but you might very well opt to do it some other way. Let me know if you think of something better.

First of all, we need to decide which camera app we'll use as our piclog camera. After some (shallow) research I decided to use Open Camera. It's open source, and you can download it both from Google Play store or F-Droid.

Then, you need to open Open Camera (heh) and change the settings to take low resolution images. These below are the settings that worked for me, but depending on the native quality of your camera you might need to adapt them as needed. An easy way is to play with these and then take a picture, and see how "big" that picture is.

In Open Camera's settings (gear icon on the top right):

Open Photo settings
- Set Camera resolution (the very first item) to 960x720 (4:3, 0.69MP)
- Set Image quality to 50%
- Ensure Image format is JPEG

And that's it! Really simple, right? Now you can go ahead, take a crappy picture and upload it to piclog, and it should just work. No need to use separate software or anything beyond the camera app.

Happy piclog-ing! 📸

PS: For easy access, I created a "group" on my navigation bar (I think that's how the bar at the bottom of the screen is called). Now I can access both cameras easily, and the muscle memory is basically the same. Quite handy!

LLMs, Infinite Monkeys, and Shakespeare

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 03:31:22 GMT

I've had this idea going around my head for a while that the infinite monkeys writing Shakespeare are not really, in fact, writing Shakespeare. To a reader it may seem so, or even to an external observer, but the monkey has no greater or lesser perception about what it's doing, no difference between the indifferent smashing of keys, and the indifferent smashing that produces poetry.

It is true that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Not only beauty but also meaning, emotion, interpretation, and, ultimately, the experience of the whole thing. But there's also experience at the moment of creation, of conception of an idea. Why, it's probably more important what Shakespeare felt when he put words of love and wrath in the mouths of his characters than what bored students feel when they're forced to read his works as part of their high school curriculum. Isn't the boredom of the student (and often the entire lack of attention) akin to the mindless smashing of the monkey? It's just going in the opposite direction.

Same for LLMs then. They're smart (or at least sound smart). They write well (or so it seems to us). But does an LLM really write Shakespeare? Or is it just another monkey smashing out that work email you're too lazy to write yourself?

Not really related to the above, but while writing it I thought how easy it is to become dependent on AI to review what you write. It makes sense; you have someone that's happy and always available to check your work, so you take advantage of it. But feedback starts coming in (hallucinated or otherwise), and it slowly starts adding up. When you realize it, you're now more self-conscious than ever about your work, and the loop keeps feeding itself.

While thinking of this, the following just happened

Be free my love

Heed not the words of the hateful raven that in mimicry of the great ones spews letters of rage and bliss, but no meaning perceives in them

Cold is it's heart, not out of cruelty but out of a complete lack of meaning

Your deepest, most secret words, unable to reach it

Leave it be I tell you

Be your own your self

Be free

You don't need AI to tell you that you're great! You are great, trust me.

Introducing Mochi — and thoughts on analytics and webmentions

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 14:23:36 GMT

I've been working on a new personal project for some months now. It started when I migrated my blog from Bearblog to a custom, statically generated site. I'm not one to obsess about analytics (but god knows I have done so in the past) but I do care about when other people comment on the things I've written in their own blogs. I'm always happy to read what they say, be it good or bad.

There's a cool technology floating around the Indie Webs called Webmentions, that is supposed to address exactly that issue. You write a post that tags my post and then let me know about it by sending an HTTP request to my Webmentions server. Sounds awfully technical for the average non-technical user, and it is.

I spent some time researching this and saw a pretty clear pattern: webmentions have been set up for almost all sites whose authors have a technical background (often using a custom built server). But in the sphere of non-technical bloggers, almost no one has the ability to receive webmentions.

Granted, there are some cool projects out there, (most notably webmentions.io) that try to make it easy for anyone to add a webmention endpoint, all through a web UI. Still, it's not super clear how to use it. Though it's good that it exists. From what I've seen this is the service that most non-technical people use.

But all of this is about "receiving" webmentions. The sending of webmentions is actually more complex and harder to do for the average non-technical person. The best solution I found for this is webmention.app, that finds and sends webmentions for every link in a given page. Still, it's a manual process, as the user needs to go to the app every time they want webmentions to be sent. It works, but it's tedious, meaning people won't do it consistently. There's the ability to automate it, but you need to write a script, which again is a barrier for non-technical folks.

At the time I was also experimenting with different analytics services, most notably Tinylytics and Umami. Both were great but I absolutely loved Tinylytics. So clean and simple to use. No weird, complex options. I realized that up until now my experience with analytics was constrained to corporate analytics: complex platforms catering to the "marketing department" with tools to improve revenue. Here, in Tinylytics, I'd found a platform that was truly aimed at the small web, with the average personal blogger in mind.

So I set up Tinylytics on my site, but at the same time I could feel a seed starting to germinate in the back of my mind: "how does it work?" As always, I gave myself to this thought and started experimenting with how I could go about building a simple analytics platform. It turned out to be a good technical challenge: hard enough to be fun, but easy enough not to be frustrating.

Functionality wise, the first version of Mochi was pretty much a carbon copy of Tinylytics, with some minor changes to accommodate the UX to my own personal preferences. Around this point I realized that I'd built a platform that could be useful for others, but I didn't really want to make it public yet. It being so similar to Tinylytics, I felt it was "immoral". So I sat on it. I kept using it as my analytics platform on my blog, but never announced it anywhere. I told myself I would keep it private until/unless it became a drastically different platform. For some months it was relegated to the background, I kept hacking on it when I had time, inspiration, or a bug, but it otherwise stood untouched. That is, until I started to seriously consider having it support Webmentions. In the past I'd of course already heard about them and even set up a webmentions endpoint with webmentions.io, but I quickly grew discouraged with the technology, as everyone seemed to have webmentions set up, but no one was sending them. I just put it down as another failed attempt at bridging the gap between the islands that are personal blogs.

Then I somehow stumbled on the spec. "Holy shit, this is really easy to implement and it would be a great feature for Mochi"! It became apparent that any analytics platform for the indie web also needed to support both the sending and receiving of webmentions.

After some more months of hacking I think I can now say that Mochi is that platform I envisioned all those months ago. I'm making this post as an invitation to anyone that wants to try it out. The project is open source and in the near future I really want to make it possible for anyone to easily self-host it should they want to.

Anyway, that's it 🤗 if you do decide to try it out please let me know of any issues you encounter! The platform has some peculiar design choices (more on them below), and I don't know how the system will behave under stress. Currently, I'll only allow a max of 20 accounts to be created so I can see what happens, but if everything is stable then I'll quickly raise this number.

Oh, and I know some people don't like analytics. Know that you can still use the webmentions functionality without using the analytics tracker!

Notes on technical details

Mochi is built in Golang, which allows for building and distributing a single binary that's easy to deploy and lowers the entry barrier to self-hosting.

The main experiment I'm running with Mochi is the database: I'm using SQLite. This is mainly out of personal curiosity as I really want to see how the simpler SQLite holds up in this kind of application. To get around the "single concurrent writes" limitation what I'm doing is having a separate database file per user, and then there's a shared database for less common operations (e.g., user settings and webmentions). Having one DB per user turned out to be a neat idea as it also enforces privacy (data from one user is very unlikely to be shown to another), and it makes exporting and deleting a user really easy and safe (just export/delete their db file).

I think this should work, though the whole thing is still bound by the filesystem I/O speed. That's why I'm slowly increasing the allowed amount of accounts. We'll see. If it goes well I might do a follow-up post, as I think using SQLite is easier/better in most cases than requiring a more "powerful" hosted DB like PostgreSQL.

Another thing I'm experimenting with here are alternative modes of notifications. We all know that email is the golden standard, but from a developer's point of view it's so darn tedious to set up! So I thought "there are so many other communication services out there, why not use one of those?". So, for Mochi, I've initially decided to send notifications through a Discord bot. Not only is it free (sending emails can get expensive) but it was also extremely easy to set up, and it also gave me a chance to play with the Discord bot API 😊

Of course, the drawback here is that not everyone uses Discord, while most people do have email. But well, that's the benefit of building something that's "free", I can do what I want and I don't have any stakeholders telling me to do otherwise. I might start adding other notification backends in the future (Telegram? Mastodon?)

Emojis are cool

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 15:02:00 GMT

I use a lot of emojis when I write (especially chat), and it has always struck me as interesting that most people around me don’t. “Don’t they want to convey how they feel about this?” I ask myself. So much so that, for a long time, I thought my overuse of emojis came from a needy, co-dependent part of me that wanted to be pleasant to others and avoid any misunderstandings by being extra clear that I wasn’t angry or displeased with them through the use of the smiley face.

It wasn’t until quite recently that I realized my use of emojis was not “a weak front” (as is usually viewed by the professional and academic worlds), though it is neither a strength. What is it then? Well, it’s just an extra set of punctuation marks.

Emojis have drastically evolved since their first (genius) inception and introduction in the early 80s. At first, I imagine they were thought of more as just cute pictures to add weight to your messages—more like signs than actual grammatical elements. But at some point (and I guess this is quite recent), they adopted a whole new power and significance and started to be used as an extension of punctuation marks, as stress markers, emotion markers.

Once you have that extra power of expressibility, it’s hard to go back, hard not to use it. This is, I think, especially true for those of us who grew up in the era of instant messaging, especially around the 2000s when Microsoft Messenger was the only option and there were no established rules regarding what this new form of communication looked like.

The fact that it was real-time chatting meant you needed to maximize the amount of meaning you could convey per second. As our teenage selves spent the night chatting and bathing in the cathode rays of our screens, we saw emojis and abbreviations (idk, IIRC, brb, etc.) organically emerge and be tested by everyone. If they were useful, they were kept; if not, they were discarded or replaced. A giant network, chattering with each other and in so doing coming up with a new way of using language.

This shorter, faster format meant that 1) there was a larger probability of miscommunication, so emojis could help clarify your stance on a topic, and 2) they could themselves be used instead of words (❤️ instead of love, etc.). I think the first point was by far the most important (the second could already be solved by acronyms, often better).

Now, fast forward to 2024. We have other, faster chat formats like Twitch chat and massive Discord rooms, both of which see extensive use of abbreviations and emojis.

There’s something that abbreviations don’t provide, and you only get from emojis: emotion. Annotating your emotion in what you write is extremely powerful and expressive, especially if the text in question is short and with sparse context (again, chat messages). Take, for example:

“We never say anything unless it’s worth taking a long time to say it. 🍵”
“We never say anything unless it’s worth taking a long time to say it. 😡”

The first is clearly a calm reflection, while the second is someone trying to force their beliefs on you.

If you’re like me, then you can certainly feel how differently you react to the two above sentences. Even if the text is the same, the perceived intent and state of the speaker are completely different. Once you recognize this, how do you avoid clarifying your position by employing the correct emoji?

Sure, oftentimes the emotion and intent are clear, and there’s no clarification needed. Still, I find myself adding an emoji just because it “feels right.” I guess once you form the habit, it becomes hard to break it, like when you see an the trick of an illusion. It’s then hard to unsee it.

Well, that was a long way to say a simple thing. Could I have made it shorter? Yeah, of course—possibly it could’ve been a paragraph or two, but

You must understand, young Hobbit, it takes a long time to say anything in Old Entish. And we never say anything unless it is worth taking a long time to say.

Finally, I wanted to point out a really cool use of emojis as a pictorial writing system for the constructed language Toki Pona (of which I’m a huge fan). Granted, this is a bit of cheating because each emoji stands for a pre-agreed-upon Toki Pona word. Still, the fact that this is possible shows you the enormous amount of semantic meaning that emojis have as a whole.

👍↪️👉 (pona tawa sina: peace be with you)

Taking refuge in the digital space

Sat, 30 Mar 2024 15:38:00 GMT

When the world outside is a bit too much it's nice to come back to the safety and controlled calm of my computer. I know to many it can seem an illusory peace — after all a digital space is completely virtual — but to me that's not the case. Instead, it is a very real place, much like my office or my bedroom, one in which my mind can borrow into and entertain itself with other things, forgetting about what's happening out there for a bit. It's a grounding place, a resting space, and sometimes also a maddening one, but I know that here it's only me and myself.

It sounds a bit austere, and to be sure, it is. There's no one else here in the digital realm, and the only things around me that have a modicum of personality are the furniture. Some of it I've crafted myself, a fact on which I take a generous pinch of pride and pleasure, and others have been graciously given to me by others, the fruits of their own efforts freely shared. The only interaction with other (human) intelligences happens through small windows — websites, blogs, the odd micro-blog, emails — enough to not feel alone, but we're still each in our own virtual submarine, looking out at the sky through our personal collection of periscopes.

I don't mind that it's this way, I actually enjoy the separation, the allowance it gives to talk about things of the soul and the heart, to say things I wouldn't dare say in my real life.

What initially seems as separation bringing us closer than we would ever be if we were to meet out there.

Discoverability and Visibility in the small web

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:22:00 GMT

I found a cool website by Manuel Moreale called The Forest which will send you to a random blog every time you click on "Walk the Forest". Most of the sites I landed on are personal websites but I did stumble on some that are promotional websites trying to get you to buy something, probably submitted by some people trying to exploit the tool to increase their reach. Anyway, I guess this is understandable since manually monitoring all the links submitted to the system would be a huge undertaking.

This, and many other sites like it (as well as web rings), are trying to solve a situation with the small internet, one to which I've also been giving some though lately. That is, the issue of discoverability (note that this is different from the issue of visibility).

I'm using discoverability as how hard is for someone to randomly end up at your site, be it through a search engine or something like The Forest. On the other hand, Visibility is how many explicit links there are to your website which a person would need to explicitly click to get to you.

In the normal (i.e., corporate) web the canonical goal is to maximize visibility, which motivates the rise of highly unified mega-sites such as Facebook or Google.

But I don't think visibility should has role in the small web.

This is mainly because of the astronomical amount of sites there are. It's impossible to be highly visible. And by consequence, being highly visible (or popular) has no real meaning besides the fact the the blog in question is lucky. But this fact doesn't mean it is good or better than the competitions, as it is often interpreted in the normal web.

Actually, the terms of good and bad are a bit misleading in the small web, since these also don't mean anything. A personal site is good as long as it is crafted with love and attention. It has nothing to do with form and content since each are tailored to personal aesthetics, which can't really be measured. I guess you could argue that the do (or don't) align with some status quo, but again, that doesn't mean anything.

I think the aspect of discoverability itself can't really be addressed in its entirety. It would be nice to have a website like The Forest that redirects you to a random blog, but it's unfeasible to imagine that everyone would register their site there. There are also aggregators like Bearblog that show you lists of the most recent posts as well as the most popular, but these have the important drawback that they only show info about the sites they know about (in the case of Bearblog it would be only those sites hosted there), and the most popular list is extremely easy to hijack.

I'm thinking a cool idea for a side project would be something like The Forest but besides allowing you to hop on to random blogs it also shows you the latest posts from the feed of those blogs it knows about, all aggregated in a single list. Of course, there might be a nontrivial amount of computational requirement in pulling and processing the feeds of lots of blogs, but it would still be fun!

... shameless plug below ...

I wrote the above a couple of weeks before publishing it, and since then it has come to my attention that there're actually many different sites that help people find other small blogs (for example, see this list). After navigating through them for a while I'm starting to appreciate just how many blogs are out there, and I'm sure I haven't even seen the surface of the proverbial iceberg.

Sill, as the good software developer that I am, I just had this idea that it would be nice to create such a site, regardless of how many other such sites exists. So I went ahead and after some thinking and investigation created Mire, which is itself a fork¹ of the excellent vore.website, a minimalistic RSS reader.

I basically kept the RSS reader functionalities from vore and on top of it added a couple more features. Most relevant to this are the global and random links at the top of the page: the former will show you a global feed of all the feeds Mire knows about, while the latter will send you to a random post that Mire has in its memory.

Some other extra features it has:

Keep track of whether you've read a post or not
Provides a public blogroll link that shows which blogs you're following (example)

For those interested, the code is hosted here; any collaboration (or complaint) is welcome! If you want to collaborate but don't know what to do then feel free to send me an email.

For non-tech people, a fork is basically a copy of another project, and usually means that the first project's code was licensed in such a way that made this possible. For example, vore's code is public and the license allows anyone to copy and modify the code as long as the original license is preserved. ↩

Technology should enhance humans, not replace them

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 01:29:00 GMT

This morning I was listening to an interview by Neil Gaiman on an Icelandic TV channel. The interview itself was pretty short, only around 7 minutes or so. He talks about a variety of topics but there a specific thing he mentioned that I wanted to comment on here. I don't remember his exact words but it was something along the lines of:

Humanities are disappearing. There's a lot of focus right now on the importance of kids (and adults) understanding science and engineering, and I think people sometimes forget that we created these in the first place for the humanities.

In other words: the goal should be to make our lives easier, not to replace the humanities.

There is a lot to be said here about how science is important but it's humanities that make life human, that make it worth living, but I wanted to constraint myself to talk about what the current LLM¹ phenomena is doing to humanity. These are being marketed more and more with the goal of making it easier for anyone to create stuff. But who is actually doing the creation? Is it the person who prompted the model to create that beautiful image? Is it the one who asked for a wonderful kids' bedtime story?

I would say no. The creator is the model, of course. The users are just requesting what they want and the model generates it for them².

If we take a moment to look more deeply into this then it becomes obvious that, if we advance time a bet, what AI is evolving towards is a situation where humanity is offloading its creative agency to "other beings", and relegating itself exclusively to the role of consumer.

This ties back to Niel Gaiman's comment. These tools have a huge potential to help humanity be better but the way they're being (in their majority) sold to us is as a replacement of what it means to be human³.

All the existing uses for LLMs and motivations people have for using them can be (mostly⁴) boiled down to the fact that we're each trying to leverage this new technology to get one-up on each other, to be more productive, have more social merit, get ahead in the race.

Coming back to LLMs' role in replacing the human creative agent, I don't really think this will happen. Or at least not entirely. Humans have too much of a creative spark in them for all the peoples of the world to go along with this story. I would actually argue that — in a world where Netflix doesn't record their entertainment offerings beforehand but generates them on demand based on the viewer — the real, honest creations will be a premium commodity and will themselves be more appreciated than they are today.

In some way we're already seeing this shift with lots of people abandoning (entirely or in part) the use of centralized social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and instead preferring to keep a blog and follow a handful of other people, preferring the intimate over the impersonal. We're seeing a shift from quick-easy entertainment to valuing more the individual thoughts of other humans⁵.

I imagine the internet user of the future will likely employ a mix of both.

On one side they will have Netflix-LLM or some other monstrosity that generates content for them on-the-fly based on their mood and what they had for breakfast. This content will be 99.99% accurate to the tastes of the viewer and will be manufactured in such a way that it will evoke a certain emotion. This is more or less how movies work now, but producers have to consider the sensibilities of a lot of people at the same time. It's likely that this same kind of fast-food entertainment (fast-entertainment?) will also be available in shorter form (for example, a nightmarish Reel-LLM™).

However, the people of the future will also have another form of content they consume which is directly made by other humans⁶. I imagine this kind of content will be long-form blogs much like the ones you can find on Bearblog.

Of course, other human created content (e.g. movies, books) is not really going anywhere. I imagine it will be sort of like owning handcrafted furniture vs IKEA stuff. The IKEA sofa is convenient and comfortable, but only the handcrafted will be considered art.

LLM stands for Large Language Model. They're a family of machine learning models that are especially good at dealing with language and manage to generate pretty good text. The most popular example, right now, is ChatGPT from OpenAI. ↩
To be fair, there is a nontrivial amount of skill that's needed to make the model produce what you want. But I would say this is only temporary and will become less and less important as these models get smarter. ↩
This comments apply mainly the way humans have thought of using this models and not about research (which can't be stopped, there will always be someone curious enough to go poke the weird slimy blob). ↩
I should recognize that not everything is bad. There are some legitimately nice uses out there. Like having LLMs help people understand topics, or helping those that want to make art but are not able to do so for some reason. The line is blurry at best, and it's located in different places for different people. ↩
I'm most definitely biased on this, since I haven't done extensive research on the topic and the observation is limited to my personal experience and social sphere. ↩
And it won't be informational (as in how to do X) since LLMs will be better at explaining things using the best pedagogical strategy for each individual. These human posts will, by nature, be about human connection and ideas. ↩

Meadow - Posts tagged with technology

Take care not to tread on those apples

Footnotes

piclog.blue walkthrough on Android

LLMs, Infinite Monkeys, and Shakespeare

Introducing Mochi — and thoughts on analytics and webmentions

Notes on technical details

Emojis are cool

Taking refuge in the digital space

Discoverability and Visibility in the small web

Footnotes

Technology should enhance humans, not replace them

Footnotes