/reader

View this post on the web, subscribe to the newsletter, or reply via email.

 

This weeknotes is 2 days late
I have been under the weather

• Just Like Stuff
• On The Blog
• Photo 365
• The Ministry Of My Own Labour
• Terminal Access
• Dipping the Stacks
• Reading
• Music
• Remember Kids:

Just Like Stuff

I’ve written a lot on here about Attention. What we do with it, where we put it, how it gets siphoned away online. As part of that current, I’ve been thinking more and more about taste. Where it comes from, how you cultivate it, how you hold on to it Tracy Durnell has been exploring similar territory, so credit where it’s due.

Over on Substack, for the last week or so , my notes feed has been dominated by the seasonal online debate about how genre fiction or sci-fi/fantasy “isn’t real literature” and huge comment threads about what is and isn’t ‘literary fiction’. These arguments and the behaviour of the people conducting them is of course entirely about engagement farming.

I’ve had a hard rule for almost twenty years, related to, but separate from, not posting negative things on the internet: I don’t argue with people about anything on the internet.

I grew up in the late 90’s and early 00’s on phpBB forums. At university I was immersed in the blast furnace of 4chan for days at a time. Maybe it’s the Gen-X hangover I carry as a Gen-Y geriatric millennial, but I realised in my early 20’s that I just don’t care enough. I spent whole days, whole summers even when I was younger, lost to endless back-and-forth about whether a band sold out, what sci-fi books were overrated, or particular egregiously on my side, what choice of operating system or KDE vs GNOME proved you were secretly a poser. My mind boggles at it all now, the thought of spending my youth in a permanent trial by forum post. I saw the pattern in my self, how it was making me feel and how permanently warfare online was effecting other people so I opted out.

The times I have argued about something on the internet as an adult, have all resulted from a lapse in judgement, and without exception left me feeling guilty and full of shame. Not because of what others might have thought about the argument, but because I had wasted my energy and got emotionally involved in something that just… didn’t matter.

The ad-driven narrative economy of social media has been built around using this behaviour as fuel. Flame wars, quote tweets etc juice engagement and dwell time for networks. All day long people are on the internet arguing about pointless shit. Because otherwise how else are people going to spend long enough logged in to see all the adverts?

Now, I get it, I totally do. I understand that when ones identity has been so completely ‘formatted’ by social platforms and consumer capitalism that an attack on a media property, tv show, album, podcast, game, book, football team or whatever, feels like an attack on your own identity as a person. One can’t help feel the need to go to war, to protect yourself. You aren’t the media you consume, and media properties aren’t your friends. Why argue or care about if genre fiction “is real literature” or not? I suspect its because people feel like they need validation for their choice of media diet? Validation for the amount of time and energy one has spent putting ones attention towards a certain interest. This need for validation results in people expressing their taste online, not by sharing what they love, but by fighting with someone who doesn’t.

This is why people feel the need to back up every preference with a bibliography or stats. There’s so much ablative language used online. People prefacing their joy with “I know this is cringe but” as if they need to apologise before voicing their opinion. Building shields out of caveats.

But for what? and for whom?

Mostly it’s all done to placate the opinions of people that they’ll never meet.

This is a trap. The rhetorical game that keeps the whole engine of user generated content networks humming. But you don’t actually need to play the game.

Just like stuff. That’s all.

There is a fundamental truth about the internet, and it also applies to building/having an audience: 99.9% of opinions on the internet don’t matter. You don’t know these people, and they don’t know you. Other peoples approval won’t keep you warm but the perceived lack of it will keep you awake at night. Their disapproval also shouldn’t stop you from loving the thing. You don’t need anyones approval to post on the internet, you can just do things, and like stuff.

The only people whose opinions really matter in this world are the ones expressed from across the table. From your family and friends over dinner. The people in your life who’ll ask your recommendations because they know that your taste is your own.

If your position or thoughts on something emerge from a practice of discernment, and become an actual expression of your taste, then you don’t owe anyone an explanation about why you like (or don’t like) something.

You don’t need to defend what you like to people whose opinions shouldn’t mean anything to you.

On The Blog

Talking Cultural Fracking and World Running on Neomania

I was recently a guest on Lance “it’s ya boi” Robotson‘s alt-futures discussion podcast Neomania.

It’s one of my favourite shows, so it was a real pleasure to join him on air. Lance has interviewed a whole cluster of online weirdos recently, and I think the pod will become a fascinating record of where a certain current of people find themselves intellectually in the mid-2020s.

Across 100 minutes we covered many of the usual hits from this blog: Solarpunk, Cultural Fracking, and the importance of Worlds as a lens. We also touched on AI in the present moment, blogging, and making podcasts, and in an unguarded aside I think I shared some spicier opinions about copyright.

August 2025 | Photo 365

Photo 365 2025. Year 4 Month 8.
Photo-a-day for the month of Aug 2025.

BYENNE

My 100 notes on storydwelling continues over on my leaftlet pub.

BYENNE

A leaflet about storydwelling. Byenne is what’s left. After the storm. After the telling.

by Jay Springett @thejaymo.net

Subscribe with Bluesky

Start Select Reset 📑

Subscribing to SSRZ supports my writing, podcasts, and creative projects.
As a thank you, I’ll send you a hand-made zine four times a year, just like it’s 1994.

Get the Zine!
£5/month 💌

No spam. No email. Just ink on paper, four times a year.

Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• More writing on SLOP MACHINES
• Recorded and started editing a new episode of Experience.Computer
• Several Meetings and Calls
• Wrote all the press and marketing copy for the game i’ve been working on. More to do
• Long call / workshop about next 18-24months. On device inference and what capabilities it we might see.

The ink stamp for Family of Giants logo arrived. Unfortunately my ink pad was at the end of its life, but you get the idea:

Terminal Access

‘White People Spicy’. This recent piece in Vittles mag on how the regulation of spicy food feeds racial anxieties is really interesting!

The danger invoked by Buldak’s spiciness functioned as a proxy for many other anxieties: the xenophobia that finds public salience in questions of food and eating; fears about children’s online media consumption and the ways that the internet can encourage stupid, painful and risk-taking behaviour; and the racial disgust and desire that coalesce around spicy food products. And in doing so, the Buldak ban awakened anxieties of my own: that Asian food products, no matter how popular they become, might never escape their status as spectacle.

Dipping the Stacks

What Can a Cell Remember? | Quanta Magazine

Part of the reason that science has been hesitant to embrace cellular-scale memory is sociological, Gunawardena said. The findings of early researchers such as Jennings and Gelber were memory-holed because they didn’t resonate with the prevailing theories of their time: Jennings’ discovery of memory in Stentor went against the dogma of “tropisms,” which inspired the behaviorist psychology dominant in Gelber’s day. Both of these views presumed a living world populated by biological automata, cycling through preprogrammed responses. Cells that can learn and adapt didn’t figure into such models.

How Social Media Shortens Your Life

your social media feed resists emplotment because it’s the opposite of a story. It’s a chronological maze. It has no beginning, middle, or end, and each post is unrelated to the next, so that scrolling is like trying to read a book in a windstorm, the pages constantly flapping, abruptly switching the current scene with an unrelated one, so you can never connect the dots into a coherent and memorable narrative.

Is low turnout undermining growth?

“The new development in the twenty-first century is the rise of an almost post-economic voting block: the retired and those nearing retirement who are insulated from the day to day gyrations of the economic cycle by guaranteed pensions and asset ownership. And what is more is that they are a group whose share of the population is rising and who are much more likely to vote”.

» Bullfrog in the Dungeon The Digital Antiquarian

The Dungeon Keeper story didn’t end with the original game. Late in 1997, Bullfrog and EA released a rather lazy expansion pack called The Deeper Dungeons, a collection of leftover scenarios that hadn’t made the cut the first time around, with no new campaign to connect them. Far more impressive is Dungeon Keeper 2, which arrived in the middle of 1999.

How OpenAI Misled You on RLHF

Putting it all together, when a model is a Reliable Instruction Follower, then that means it always reads its instructions and provides a useful response based on them. Simple as that.

Reading

This week I read and finished Family Wealth–Keeping It in the Family: How Family Members and Their Advisers Preserve Human, Intellectual, and Financial Assets for Generations by James E. Hughes Jr.

Started reading The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America by David Whyte. Still reading The Universal Christ: How a Forgotten Reality Can Change Everything We See, Hope For and Believe by Richard Rohr 

Music

Spotify Playlist

• Spotify

Emergence – AM sin

Just got round to listening to the new AM sin record, which came out a few weeks ago. I’ve been waiting for a full length feature and this does not disappoint. It’s a real breath of noisy air next to all the lo-fi rock i’ve also been listening to this week. My favourite track is the remix of their previous single The Abyss by Sakr. After finishing the album I immediately went and listened to the newest Sakr album which like this track is all fat distorted kicks and snares. love it all.

Remember Kids:

Newsletter 📨

Subscribe to the mailing list and get my weeknotes and latest podcast episodes, sent directly to your inbox

Subscribe Now 📥

The post Just Like Stuff appeared first on thejaymo.

Happy Ninth of Bleptember, Internet!

📰 Using a feed reader is the best way to read my blog posts. How clever you are to know that! 🚀

WWND. What Would Navalny Do? Think about it.#

The Dems are terrible at politics. They should be running ads on TV saying that no workers in the fields means food prices soaring as we'll have to import food because all the American crops are dead because there was no one to harvest them. It's true. Why didn't anyone see this coming? Well we did see it coming, but the Dems were too dumb to do anything about it. They're supposed to be the "woke" party, isn't it funny that they're so un-woke about something like keeping Americans fed!#

Bullet points from yesterday's podcast#

• I asked ChatGPT to provide bullet points for yesterday's podcast. I thought this time it did a really good job. It did misunderstand some things I said, I just deleted those, below.#
• Blogging lost to Twitter because Twitter had one-click subscribe.#
• Subscribing in feed readers required too many steps: copying URLs, menus, pasting, confirming.#
• This friction discouraged adoption compared to Twitter's simplicity.#
• Feed reader developers (2002-2006) competed instead of cooperating, creating cluttered subscription buttons.#
• Twitter succeeded because it eliminated that friction.#
• FeedLand solves this with one-click subscribe and checkboxes next to feeds.#
• Users can see others' subscriptions, similar to Twitter, Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads, Facebook.#
• Private feeds are possible but niche; public following is standard and expected.#
• Emphasis on factoring UI: reduce steps, as with "Edit This Page" in 1999.#
• Rebooting the blogosphere requires cooperation and a universal "follow" button.#
• FeedLand's checkboxes make subscribing or filtering feeds simple.#
• Introduces "Radio WordLand" release with advanced checkbox features.#
• FeedLand timelines can be filtered live using checkboxes tied to feeds.#
• Example feeds: Daves WordPress blog, Great Art feed from Bluesky, linkblog, Scripting News, podcast, WordCamp Canada 2025 feed.#
• WordCamp Canada keynote in Ottawa, Oct 16-17, 2025.#
• WordLand integrates categories for organizing feeds.#
• Commitment to "Edit This Page" feature: too valuable to abandon.#
• Broader goal: restore writer-friendly features Twitter removed (links, styling, no character limits).#
• Criticism of Bluesky/Twitter/Threads for perpetuating character limits and stripped-down writing.#
• Aim: build software that forces platforms to support the web by user demand.#
• Automatic/WordPress bringing ActivityPub to blogs is "heroic" bridging web and Mastodon.#
• WordPress posts in Mastodon retain titles, styling, links, and images -- better than Twitter/Bluesky.#
• Believes competition will pressure other networks to drop artificial limits.#
• Concludes with confidence: momentum is building, new features will roll out soon.#

Gabe Rivera started this experiment working as a developer at Intel in the early aughts. He launched it as a full-time project 20 years ago this week – September 12, 2005.  Initially he called it tech.meme orandum. By March 1, 2006 it officially became what everyone was already calling it, Techmeme. I’m always looking for new and better ways to consume news. I was hooked the moment I saw it sometime late in 2005 or early 2006. I still am.  

“It chews through thousands of blogs in minutes and tells you what’s important. It does this every few minutes. It is dramatically faster than I could ever be. It’s all machine based. No humans involved,” said Robert Scoble when he broke the story back in 2005. He worked at Microsoft then and had one of the most influential blogs on the internet at the time, 

Ebay acquiring Skype was the top story the day Techmeme launched. It also listed commentary from half a dozen tech blogs including this “SkypeBay done for $4.1 Billion” from my partner Om Malik. Yes, both of us have been writing about tech for a long time. 

I’m telling you all this not just because Techmeme’s 20th birthday is on Friday, but because of how anomalous Techmeme has become among news websites. Very little about the way tech news – and all news, for that matter – is reported, edited, distributed, paid for and consumed bears any resemblance to the way it was in the fall of 2005. 

I now read almost everything on my smartphone. And instead of only reading specific publications that arrive on my doorstep or my mailbox, I subscribe to the digital versions. I read a few via their apps. But for most I allow a half-dozen social media channels along with Google News and Apple News to surface interesting stories.

I also subscribe to newsletters like someone with addiction issues. Om, my partner, thinks that we’re already living in a world where websites of any kind are irrelevant. 

But Techmeme looks and works exactly the same way as it always has. And it has never been more popular. Traffic is up 25 percent this year, likely driven by the explosion of interest in AI,  Rivera says.

Both he and I believe that what it does as an aggregator has never been more important given the explosion in sources of news and commentary online.

And while technically Rivera’s crawlers and algorithms don’t fit into the modern definitions of an AI system, journalism could learn a lot from what he’s created. Practically he’s been doing for 20 years what journalism outfits are only experimenting to do now with AI.  

It’s actually because of this consistency that it and its sister websites Mediagazer and Memeorandum remain one of the top three sources I look at every morning. (Rivera also publishes a celebrity news site called WeSmirch.) The only other website I can think of that has changed so little is Craigslist. 

Bill Gurley, the famous venture capitalist at Benchmark, perfectly described why he – and I – find it so valuable in a YouTube video with Tim Ferriss back in 2023. He said he uses Techmeme and Twitter together as a giant information funnel where they become a guide to all the important stories of the day “ Everything (how I read the news) has been inverted,  where (instead of starting with specific publications) the aggregators of Twitter and Techmeme are funneling what I find. Then I go read those things.”  

This is exactly why Rivera created Techmeme. ”I’ve always read a lot of news, and as a software person, I really found it cool that you could write crawlers to aggregate and mix the news in various ways. So when the blogosphere took off around 2002 it was really exciting for me because it created this real-time and opinionated layer on top of the rest of the news. And so what seemed like an obvious idea popped out to me at the time, which is just crawl a bunch of blogs, and then rank and surface what they’re linking to.”

One of the features that has always existed, but that I just learned about from talking to Rivera is that all 7303 days of Techmeme are easily accessible just by clicking on the date at the top. It brings up a box where you can enter the date you want to see and immediately displays that day’s top Techmeme headlines.  It’s a gold mine for Silicon Valley historians. I wish every news site had this feature.  

The site didn’t look like much in 2005. And it really looks dated today. There are no photos, videos, or graphics or sound. You get about 30 ocean-colored headline links and black subheds all against white background. Clickable arrows hide the most trafficked conversations on all the big social media networks about each headline.

Rivera, who is 52, said he picked the design entirely for readability and distinctiveness. It’s worked. Is there any other website out there that uses blue/gray/green as their primary color palette? “I probably wanted it bluish but also something distinctive and ended up there.”

It was designed for what he calls “information density,” not to be pretty. The goal is for it to load quickly on any device over any connection and be used quickly by busy people. 

“There’s a hierarchy of headlines. There are related headlines. They’re related social posts. We want it to be readable, scannable and we want it to also provide a visualization of the news where a bigger cluster is a bigger story. And we want to have both importance ranked and have there be a time sorted column of the newest stories on the right. So as long as we want to have those characteristics we’re locked into a certain type of design,” he said.

He said he gets asked all the time about when he’s going to add photos, graphics, podcasts and videos. He still gives the same answer: Techmeme is about what’s going on right now, and visitors need to be able to read it fast. That means every medium other than text slows things down. ”Either that kind of content is not timely or if it is timely, it’s not high density enough,” he said. 

Rivera hasn’t gotten rich doing Techmeme. But it hasn’t made him poor either.  “In a particularly strong advertising year I feel almost like a well paid media person,” he said. And it’s his. He hasn’t needed to borrow a dime or take a cent of venture capital to build it. 

Some of his operation’s longevity is because he still runs the technology on a shoestring budget. While most other websites and apps of substance have long since adopted cloud computing offerings from Amazon, Google or Microsoft, Rivera still runs Techmeme and the other three sites he publishes off two servers located in a single hosting facility. He said all the newsletters and a newer business for corporations generate between $1 million and $5 million a year.

Initially, it was just him running it out of his two bedroom apartment off Castro Street in downtown Mountain View. (He’s based in New York City now.) Back then the headlines were written and sorted entirely by software running on a server in his closet. He actually started the political version of Techmeme, Memeorandum, first while he was at Intel.  WeSmirch, the celebrity site, started in March 2006.

By 2007 he’d hired Omer Horvitz, a friend from grad school at the University of Maryland. By the end of 2008 he’d hired his first part time editor for Techmeme, Megan McCarthy, realizing that letting the technology do everything led to too many mistakes.  By March 2010 he’d launched Mediagazer, a headline site about the media business.

Now the software finds and ranks the stories. But the editors write the headlines. When stories are generated by corporate press releases/announcements, they choose which media outlet’s story is driving the most interesting social media conversations. The software also chews on the API feeds from the big social networks to come up with a list of the most useful conversations. Editors approve all those, however, to prevent duplication. 

He said Memeorandum and WeSmirch don’t get as much attention or traffic because they have no editors and because he hasn’t promoted them as heavily. He said he’s found it much harder to make money from them. 

Today the only full time employees besides him are Horvitz and two full time editors. The rest of the staff – a book keeper and the remaining 23 editors – are part time working remotely in enough different time zones to supply Techmeme and Mediagazer with near 24×7 coverage. 

Most of the revenue is advertising. But it now also includes fee-for-service revenue from companies, an offering that launched in 2020. Rivera describes it as news filtering and organization services for corporate customers. This often includes a custom Techmeme page customized for each company only with headlines relevant to them, their competitors or their industry.

It sounds like a more modern version of a clipping service, even though Rivera doesn’t think that’s the best term. Companies used to pay public relations firms or employees to constantly find and supply a list of stories being written about them and competitors.  “I shouldn’t comment on the number of customers. But it’s meaningful for us and the trends are positive,” he said.

He said because Techmeme is an aggregator rather than a content site of its own, it hasn’t needed referral traffic from Google. It’s therefore not been hammered by AI’s impact on publisher referral traffic. But he also knows that online advertising generally is in flux. It’s made him wonder sometimes if in the future he might offer subscriptions or develop other revenue streams. 

Like everyone he’s paying close attention to the AI boom. “We’ve only scratched the surface so far, mainly integrating LLMs to assist our editors with headline-writing. By carefully introducing intelligence at various points across the software system that handles our curation, I think our processes will get smarter and faster. And I would predict AI can especially improve the verticals with no editors on them like Memeorandum.”

Does Rivera worry that AI will eventually get good enough to simply supplant what he does, where all of us everyday will soon just be asking our favorite chatbot to list the top linked stories in our worlds? “ I can think of a lot of potential reasons they’ll come up short in the near term,” he said. That’s provably true. Ask ChatGPT to list the most linked to tech stories and all its sources are … Techmeme.

Rivera says that he’s not naive about the long term, however, “given the astonishing rate of improvement in AI capabilities we’ve seen. So we just have to improve our own stuff. And a major part of that will be adopting AI ourselves.”

Despite all this the basic approach of the original Techmeme algorithm remains the same, he said. “What are the most linked blog posts and news articles from this set of blogs? And once they reach a certain threshold, they’re featured on the site,” he said.

Maybe there’s a lesson here for the rest of the media world. I and every writer and mid level editor I know has stories about design changes to publications that made us groan. They seemed more in service of a new editor or design chief marking their territory like a dog or cat, than in service of actually making their publication easier to read.

Yes, it’s hard to do nothing. And yes, sometimes the best changes come from following the urge to tinker. But we can also learn this from Rivera’s two decades: More often than not, less is more.