If you are reading this over here on Micro.blog, you should probably be reading it at @chipotle@mstdn.social instead!

@mandaris There's a few in the ridiculously long post about AI and creative writing: coyotetracks.org/blog/ai-w...

If nothing else, I’ve improved the look of my blog on tablets and phones. I gave up on footnotes—Zola’s markup for them is terrible—and went to margin notes, which (hopefully) move inline on phones.

Creative writing and AI’s failure modes: a too-deep dive into AI “novel writing” and what it tells us about generative AI’s future coyotetracks.org/blog/ai-w…

@jsonbecker That definitely sounds like it! Thanks.

There was an Indieweb-style cross-posting service people were talking about here on Micro.blog a few weeks ago, free with an improved paid service, but I can’t remember the name. Ring any bells with folks?

I love NetNewsWire’s speed, but I tried Reeder again after a couple years away, and fell back in love with its look. Aesthetics really do matter. (And Reeder is a much better Pocket client than Pocket, too.)

I’ve been idly wondering whether I could be a freelance technical writer without resorting to Upwork, picking up work from indie software companies that need documentation writing/editing. Pipedream? Hmm.

There are a total of eight smooth jazz songs:

1. The one with the sax
2. The other one with the sax
3. No, the other other one
4. The one with the drum machine
5. The one with both the sax and the drum machine
6. The one trying to be funky
7. The one with the weirdly subdued vocals
8. Winelight

@mandaris That makes sense. I suspect I noticed it when they were talking about the new 13" Air and called out how useful it was for split screen without mentioning Stage Manager at all, which seemed a little odd.

Was it just me, or was there a noticeable lack of Stage Manager in any of the new iPad presentation video from yesterday?

@pratik @stupendousman It’s at least worth noting that it hasn’t been established as a matter of law that using copyrighted material for LLM training is automatically fair use. It’s a plausible interpretation, but one of the factors used to determine whether a given reproduction is fair use is “the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work”; generative AI can clearly create works that do compete with the copyrighted work they’re trained on.

I publish a lot of things on the web and explicitly specify the Creative Commons “Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike” license, which means the material cannot be used for commercial purposes without my explicit permission; if my work is being used to train an LLM that the LLM’s owners are charging access for, that seems on its face to violate the terms of the license. “But you made it available on the internet, too bad so sad” is not and has never been a valid defense against copyright infringement, legally speaking. :)

Judge the AI that exists, not the AI you imagine coyotetracks.org/blog/ai-t…

@manton Didn't you mention a while ago that you had thoughts about a sort of "check-in" app like Foursquare/Swarm?

I’m fortunate to have a good 401(k) and “safety net” account from my last job, but I’m kind of angry it’s made me care about the stock market.

After many years of using SuperDuper!, I am trying Carbon Copy Cloner for the first time. Wait, backup programs can look modern? Be this user-friendly? What black magic is this?

@jsonbecker That makes sense. I suspect if I get blogging again not all of the topics would be particularly endearing to recruiters. :)

Setting up Micro.blog as my “syndicate nearly everywhere” service lets me revive my Medium account without effort, which is good, since I wouldn’t bother otherwise. Not sure about publishing posts to LinkedIn, though. On the pro side, LinkedIn, but on the con side, LinkedIn, you know?

I am creating a blogroll sidebar like it’s 2004 again!

Relieved that the website still looks good on mobile. I have to revisit the abandoned dark mode version sometime soon, though.

After noodling around with fonts, I think I’m sticking with ones from MB Type for my website—Concourse, with a few style set changes, makes a surprisingly readable body font, and Century Supra pairs well for headlines.

I also find myself with a weird desire to find a sans serif body font I like to redesign the site around. I don’t know if I will, though. (Currently it uses MB Type fonts: body text in Equity, headlines in Concourse.)

The one downside of bringing back my blog with an “archive page” format is that it shows how little long-form writing I’ve been doing recently…

The new website is up! I don’t think I can redirect the article feed from Micro.blog, but it’s available on the website itself, of course.

Next, to see if I can rescue and import a few posts I apparently only have on Medium…

And now the fun part: fixing links that have broken over the years! Yay. (Super grateful to Twitter turning all its links into 400 Bad Request errors.)

I’m not entirely sure I have any justification for rebuilding my website with Zola (a Hugo-like static site generator) other than it being fun. But it kind of is. Right now it looks almost exactly the same, but this framework might let me make more style changes down the road.

@help Probably odd question: will Hugo redirects work for a category feed, e.g., have <micro.coyotetracks.org/categorie...> redirect to a new blog's RSS feed?

The more I dig into generative AI, the more fascinated I get…and the less practical use I see, and this is apart from ethical, legal, and environmental concerns. If there is indeed a “there” there as I suggested last week, it’s mostly broken, and possibly unfixable without changing paradigms.

Started rebuilding my personal website, which is currently pure HTML/Markdown processed with CodeKit, to Zola, mostly with an eye toward more controllable long-form blogging. (We’ll see if it actually happens or not, of course…)

I have an article I’m puttering around with exploring “Claude-Author”, a professed AI novel writer that caused a hullabaloo earlier this week. Spoiler: it does not write well. It does not write well at all.

I have a set of techie peers enthusiastic about generative AI to the point of ignoring/dismissing the myriad of legitimate, possibly unsurmountable concerns about ethics and legality, and a set of creative peers hostile to any suggestion there could ever be even a little bit of “there” there.

@cdevroe I ended up switching back to Safari from Arc a few months ago, as I got more uncomfortable relying on Chrome. Safari adding profiles—and me forcing myself to figure out the way it does tab groups—was pretty helpful in migrating back.

@pratik he is also busy destroying the liberal arts college I went to in Florida.

@odd It is!

@manton There is some great coffee in both San Jose and Sacramento, at least. :)

@zorinlynx The office is in Mountain View, so, yes. TBF, I would prefer to be living out in NorCal, but I'm in Florida for family reasons, so moving back would mean either abandoning my mother or moving her with me, both of which would be pretty fraught.

@Tuftears Pretty much, yes.

@jasonekratz The vast majority of my non-techie friends hang onto their phones for three or more years—basically until they stop working (and they may pay for a battery replacement). Apple would love everyone to be on an annual upgrade cycle, but they absolutely know that's the exception.

@marcoarment That's what I had, and will probably miss, but it's a challenge in my current workspace. If I really pine for bigger speakers, I can work on the couch in the den. :)

@jsonbecker There is not, which I suspect is a big chunk of the problem—I'm now in a rural part of Florida, nothing but a single gas station within walking distance and very little else closer than a 20-minute drive. This is an extreme switch from living for ~20 years in Silicon Valley!

@jsonbecker I like many things about Nova, but I continue to be bemused that my old warhorse BBEdit really feels like it has better LSP support. (Absolutely no attempt at Vim emulation, of course, but that might be better than Nova's kinda-sorta emulation.)

@craigmcclellan I confess that as much as I love the idea of MarsEdit, in practice the editor and I don't seem to vibe with one another. I end up writing longer posts in Ulysses and just publishing directly from there.

@jatowler There's a non-alcoholic version of that?? I'm definitely going to have to investigate that...

@jtillessen @craiggrannell I think you’re right, and I didn’t fully consider the value of following Threads users on Mastodon clients, even if Threads makes them second-class citizens. As for the other, though, I’m still a bit skeptical. You make a good case—never underestimate the power of branding!—but I genuinely think the culture difference is real, and users who click with one aren’t too likely to click with the other.

@SallyStrange There are marginalized communities using Facebook and IG and, now, Threads, which is kind of what I’m trying to get at. I’m aware there are lots of people who take the position that because Facebook is awful and at a corporate level tolerates awful people, anyone who has an account on Facebook is awful. I am not sure they really understand how many queer and marginalized people are on giant services like that, and how few of them are going to go get an account on Mastodon because we’re yelling at them about how awful they are. The collateral damage potential seems to me to be pretty high, it will include marginalized people, and I think it could seriously break the Fediverse, which is kind of the core of my argument. I guess you think it’s not as serious as I’m making it out to be; I think it’s more serious than “eh, you might have to refollow a few people”.

At any rate, thank you for not really yelling yourself, even if you disagree with me. I knew I was probably going to kick a hornet’s nest if this went viral, and it kind of did, and I’m sorry people who, to be overly diplomatic about it, I don’t think I want to have speaking for me have engaged with you over this.

@SallyStrange @anttipeltola @tchambers I didn’t argue that instances shouldn’t be able to choose who they federate with, including Threads. I argued they should consult their users, not do it unilaterally, and that defederating with huge general-interest instances in retaliation for them not blocking Threads runs a high risk of breaking Mastodon as we know it. Maybe “treat Threads as if it’s functionally identical to Gab, no matter how much collateral damage doing so creates” is the morally correct answer. But it seems like people want to insist there won’t be any collateral damage at all. :,

@misc @tchambers I was certainly counting LoTT as TERFs, even if they're technically more…TERF-like? What I was trying to get at is that Threads is going to be akin to any other general-interest social media service with a percentage of bad actors and imperfect moderation (including larger existing Mastodon instances as they exist now), as distinct from Gab, Kiwi Farms, and other services whose membership is effectively 100% bad actors. We didn't all get off Twitter because they had a percentage of bad actors and imperfect moderation, at least until Musk came in and more or less said "bad actors are now our preferred audience." Does Threads need to be demonstrably better at moderation than pre-Musk Twitter, or is that level of wobbliness sufficient? Because it seems like we're kind of saying "no, that's not good enough," but I'm not convinced Mastodon as it exists now is collectively better at moderation than pre-Musk Twitter, except at the technical level that federation affords—which I don't think really goes away merely with Threads existing.

@jaz I’ve actually experienced this earlier in my Mastodon life on another account, as an instance with a dozen accounts I was following defederated from the instance I was on (and apparently didn’t even tell the “offending” admins what they’d done wrong). There was no notification to me; I just had to notice “hey, I haven’t seen posts from these people in a while”.

@mastodonmigration That’s understandable, yet “my posts must never end up on Server Foo” isn’t achievable unless there is literally no possible path between your server and Foo, is it?