Internet companies attack the open web on multiple fronts: FB/IG, Twitter, now TikTok test paywalls. FB/IG, now Twitter deprecate links, the basis of the web. Thank goodness for Mastodon.
@jeffjarvis Paywalls are good. Sometimes they really succeed in monetizing a good thing. But mostly they kill off stuff that basically in the long run needs to die anyway.
@jeffjarvis I'm finding that "platforms" and "search engines" all seem to go through the process of enshitification.
I'm back to having to maintain bookmarks just to find the manual pages I access regularly. If I look for "tcl string command" I have to wade through pages and pages of stackoverflow threads that eventually have a post (usually from me) posting the link to the manual page with the real answer.
Nobody finds my etsy site from the ads I pay for. 99% of my sales are word of mouth.
Real open source LLMs predate LLAMA by years. The article seems to ignore this.
GPT-J 6B is a transformer model with 6 billion trainable parameters. It was released by the non-profit research group Eleuther AI in July 2020. The model is based on a 825 gigabyte open-source language modeling data set called The Pile.
To self-host GPT-J 6B, you may need a machine with at least 48 GB RAM, a minimum of 12-16 GB GPU RAM for inference, and about 90 GB GPU RAM for training.
Another good change in the latest Mastodon build (there are frequent changes on @Gargron's mastodon.social instance): Now private mentions are well labeled and -- even better -- marked by a different color. Thank you!
Confession: I have been on that Other Site for the last few hours talking about Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon because ... well, this is a good example of why I do miss search here. I want to see what people are saying; I want to know the latest reporting; and, yes, I want to quote-tweet NYTimes Pitchbot. Now it's OK if the community of Mastodon decides it doesn't want to be a key place for news but I'd regret that. And I'm not speaking so much as a journalist but as news user.
Thank goodness for Nilay Patel exposing the feckless, spineless, accessory to racism and other noxious speech that Substack is. Nilay gave Best multiple opportunities to say the right thing. He would not. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTR3mLGp2/
If Substack were a decent company, it would have federated its Notes with ActivityPub. The last thing we need is another conversational platform controlled by one company known for promoting questionable opinions. https://on.substack.com/p/introducing-notes
@jeffjarvis@donmelton ActivityPub + XMPP feel like a good technology stack combination. With XMPP handling bidirectional friendship presence announcement, real-time chat, and trivial P2P file transfers, and ActivityPub handling the larger-scale Operational Transform of content across the network.
It’s not like Facebook Messenger isn’t XMPP. Or Apple’s Messages. Or GTalk.
@jeffjarvis I can’t speak to SubStack as a company, or it’s ethics, but remember that ActivityPub is hard, timelines are tight, and the infrastructure underpinning most companies looks a lot more like a Rube Goldberg machine than any of us should be comfortable with. So, why build that into version 1.0? It’s very possible that management is taking a “wait and see” approach to this whole Notes thing.
@jeffjarvis I’m not an electric car expert, but my guess would be that sourcing raw materials at a reasonable price is crucial for maintaining the kind of profit margins that makes Wall Street happy. So Musk is actually, Putin’s and Xi’s bitch.
@jeffjarvis There are so many “very nice” Mastodon apps at the moment - at least in the iOS and macOS space - that I find myself jumping between them. I can’t decide which is best, so I use them all.
I’ve kind of settled on Mona for macOS and Ice Cubes for iOS, but I also use Ivory and Mona on iOS. On ipadOS, it’s Ice Cubes mostly. Then I find something new and live in it for a while. It’s a good problem to have!
No, no, no, God damnit, Washington Post, this is not a "new normal." The point you should be making is just how abnormal this is. But instead you quite literally normalize the criminal running for president. Trump campaign prepares for ‘new normal’: Running under indictment https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/21/trump-2024-ny-case-republicans/
@jeffjarvis all american media exists for now is to put the imprimatur of "normal" onto the grossest of behaviors. the anniversary of the iraq war has reminded us that they'll bend over backwards to parrot the lies of government, the war industry and anyone else wealthy enough to pay for play.
@jeffjarvis I think it's rather stupid to make important decisions based on a poll. Use a poll to choose what you should have for lunch, but not choosing when someone should be unbanned or if Musk should keep his job.
I will give big points to the first news organization, big or small, that: * Sets up an instance for its newsroom, * Sets up an instance for the community it serves, * Enables rel=me for staff, * Creates a boost-on-Mastodon sharing function, * Enhances that function so headlines/images (with alt-text) appear in the toot, * Covers the Fediverse as more than a geeky curiosity or alt-Twitter, * Listens to and joins in the conversation here.
You might ask how this is journalistic. Well, the first obligation of journalism is not to producing the commodity we call content but instead to serving the health of public discourse. I mean my suggestions as a tangible means of demonstrating that. Is there work? Yes. Is there risk? Yes. The greater risk is not to engage with the communities we serve, not to listen.
I'm proud to announce that we at the Newmark Journalism School's Tow-Knight Center provided initial funding for the journa.host Mastodon instance that @adamdavidson and a team of volunteers are running and moderating for journalists. https://journa.host/about
@jeffjarvis@adamdavidson@craignewmark That is a good start. should also think support newsie.social as well. we need a pool of donors and more than one news hub to be smart about this. Does that make sense.
Gregory's Server
