🔗 WWW
There are a lot of links out to different parts of the web on this site. I try to mark them all so they get listed here.
🔗 Karl Lagerfeld had odious views. We shouldn’t be putting him on a pedestal.
Filed in my bucket of things that I don’t pay attention to, so not aware of the claims. That said, is this another case of judgement of historical behavior because the modern context has changed? If so … is that right?
Discuss.
What if Amazon offered used readers, in bulk, to people in states that are banning books, and in school districts that are limiting what kids can read? What if it offered special deals on banned books, and brought titles to young people some of their “betters” are forbidding for them, to encourage reading?
💬 Dana Blankenhorn
💬 Hate Speech On Core Intuition
🔗 Just finished listening to the latest Core Intuition.
At one point in the conversation @manton and @danielpunkass were talking about community guidelines, social norms et al. Hate speech on Bluesky was specifically brought up. Apparently they have a way to add tags to posts so that posts can be marked as ‘hatespeech’, ‘not safe for work’, etc.
Sounded a pretty neat solution to me - but apparently someone over on @mastodon suggested that this meant BlueSky was allowing hate speech.
Have to say, one of the common threads running through a lot of Mastodians I observe is the ‘superior’, ‘better than thou’, ‘my way or the highway’ attitude … even down to comments like ‘if you don’t ‘alt text’ your images - I will unfollow you'.1
But, ‘allowing’ hate speech? There is no agreement what constitutes hate speech, so I guess this individual is judge and jury? Don’t get me wrong … I think most ‘decent people’ can bucket up the obvious extremes … it’s when it gets to the grey areas it becomes difficult. Like art - we can’t define it - we just ‘know it when we see it’.
I was reminded of a well used amorphism
“One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter”
This also ties into something I wrote just yesterday
1] I wonder if Mastodon is filling up with ‘snowflakes’. (Back when my mum was alive she used to rail on ‘do gooders’ … a term that seems to have fallen out of use these days - but the sentiment remain in these ‘behavioural vigilantes’.
2] I wonder whether the meek have inherited the earth … at least in terms of public discourse?
3] Has the pendulum swung too far? Satire and parody has lost meaning and too many people are cancelling themselves for fear of public admonishment and worse - retribution from the herd.
What do you think?
-
Too late - I have already unfollowed you. (Not that I disagree with the need to do it - and I try - but it doesn’t always happen and life is too short.) ↩︎
Funny - I am writing my next newsletter and 🔗 this is one of the top of mind issues that I am covering off in it. Might add it as a link in the final newsletter.
FINALLY - 🔗 The backfill is completed.
If you have been following along, you will know that I am a big fan of Lockhead and Category Design. But on this one - I totally disagree. It’s only 15 minutes - less if you remove the top and tail. For example - jump right in at 1’ 56” and you can stop at 12’ 50# - so what 11 minutes?
🔗 Elon Musk’s New Category Design For Twitter: Will it work? - Lochhead on Marketing
I do agree that Musk is up to something. BUT
The thesis of Category Pirates lands on how this Blue Checkmark fiasco is the start of ‘great thinking … marketing even … from Musk … in that this is ‘the first time we have seen an attempt to deliver a paid for social platform at scale’. Me - no idea if that is true, BUT riffing on ‘Theodore’ for a moment … people are on Twitter not because they want a blue checkmark - but rather to ‘say and write stuff and have it pushed out to the unsuspecting world’.
I don’t disagree that Musk is up to something as he works through the monetisation question - BUT - the idea of faffing around with the check mark is the result of some great marketing mind is nuts. The idea that he is in the process of creating an entirely new category is nuts. Trying maybe - but not yet creating,
🔗 A bullying politician or snowflake civil servants? The downfall of Dominic Raab
I do not know Raab, other than his public persona, so take my thoughts with a pinch of NaCl. That said, there is a consistency to the back stories that keep getting published. Bottom line - to me - he doesn’t seem to be a nice man.
That said - I am sympathetic to his claims. We are living too much in a world where if I even feel offended - you will pay. To continue down that path will result in more and more people being ‘quietly silenced’.
Silencing Raab is one thing - but it will work (is working?) both ways.
🔗 Dream dinner party guests: Obama, Springsteen and Spielberg delight Barcelona restaurant staff.
Love Those Smiles. Warming the cockles of my heart
🔗 Worldwide public cloud spending heading for US$600 billion
“If you found yourself wondering why the cloud hyperscalers have chosen this moment to build in New Zealand, the answer lies in Gartner’s latest cloud forecast.”
@billbennettnz not sure you actually answer that question? I mean I get that Gartner is predicting outsized growth - and why NZ would want those data centers - but you don’t seem to offer a reason why MSoft and AWS are making the investments? Or have I read too fast?
🔗 You Probably Shouldn’t Work at a Startup.
YUP - at least from a financial rewards perspective. But there are other considerations (as I said to a long time friend this past week) who is thinking of launching ‘StartUps Anonymous’.
Email me if you are interested in joining.
🔗 Twenty Years Ago, Apple Launched the iTunes Music Store.
The first Mac I ever owned arrived Christmas 2001. The iPod had been released and I wanted one - but it was Mac only back then. So I also ‘needed’ a Mac! It can’t have been two years before I had completely left Windoze behind.
It also means that I spent close to two years ripping CDs into the Mac to play on the iPod. (Still do that actually.)
🖋️ The Largest Project In The World That You MIGHT Not Have Heard Of
Quotes from Galloway talking about NEOM.
🤖 ChatGPT chats to ChatJP
Turns out that ChatGPT can be pretty useful. Who knew?
In case you aren’t keeping up - I have been playing around with embedding video on 🔗 john.philpin.com. I cracked it a while back - but the process of creating the clip had a lot of friction because of the app I was using.
Fixed that - thanks to learning that the podcast app I use every day (Overcast) has had audio clipping since 2019. Seriously!
So friction to creating the clip removed, but still stuck on how a visitor would know the app was ‘playable’ (no little ‘play’ arrow) and even when they did - up popped another window …
As @Miraz wrote …
It’s not clear that it’s an audio clip
… and as @pratik wrote
I wish it started playing in-page.
💯❗️
I am not a developer, coder, programmer … by any stretch of the imagination - hell - I don’t even play one on TV. I impressed myself to even manage to embed the video - to play in line? Time for a chat.
I know how much time I spend googling css / html stuff to copy and paste into the site - find it doesn’t work - spending more time to find the right structure - repeat - until it finally works. I looked at Google with significant trepidation.
Enter ChatGPT that I have played around with to better understand capabilities, but never with a view to creating something ‘production ready’.
From opening ChatGPT to getting a finished result took me about two minutes - half of which was waiting for my web site page to flush out the old and refresh the new - twice (as the chat below makes clear).
For posterity - my conversation is below.
Oh - and this was using ChatGPT-3.
🔗 This is the finished post in action.
🔗 Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification in Calfornia
If you are working in or around this program in California - would love to hear from you.
Harry Belafonte ‘managing’ his audience singing the Banana Boat song. 🔗 You know why it is here.
Same song - from the extraordinary Stan Freberg (we don’t hear much about him these days ) - in 1957 - with his (I think very funny) parody of the same song).
🎙️ Turns Out I Don't Need Snipd Afterall ...
I have had three actions in ‘Things’ now for weeks. They were there to remind me to post a snippet from three podcasts that I wanted to share. The actual snipping and posting is not that hard - so why did I need to set a reminder?
BECAUSE
I use Overcast to listen to Podcasts and I had no intention of moving my listening experience over to Snipd. Earlier in the year I had been playing with Snipd. and even posted a couple … 🔗 here and 🔗 here, but the friction on the adhoc process in the workflow - not so easy.
Snipd is a good app for extracting a slice and posting. BUT I listen to Podcasts in Overcast, so when I wanted to snip something, I had to;
- make a mental note of where in the podcast I was
- go to Snipd
- find the podcast
- find the episode
- get to the part I want to snip …
… and only then could I start the process.
Clumsy - at best - and lots of friction - so I just made a note in Things - which you now know I never got round to!
I might be blind, ignorant or stupid - but tonight I discovered that Overcast offers very similar (identical?) functionality. Is that new? Am I really that slow?
Anyway, just tried out the Overcast mechanism - and very nice, sitting right there in front of me.
Snipd account deleted.
In that 🔗 last post Siri tried to spell ‘Heroes’ … ‘Herpes’
🔗 NZ Tech Podcast: Skills shortage slows fibre installs, satellite woes, ChatGPT cheats from @billbennettnz
“Musk plans a less biased AI”
… and we clearly all believe that Musk is capable of removing bias from social media don’t we?