/reader

"Some girl asked me for a coffee chat—" I began. J's eyes widened. "—at work," I finished.

Coffee chat we did have. As those go, it was relatively painless, though she did show up somehow knowing where I went to undergrad and what I studied and where I'd worked before despite not having met me before. Why do you know this, I thought to myself. By way of an answer a LinkedIn request awaited me when I got home, which made me feel like I'd been robbed. Of what? Maybe that someone had fleeced me for my time just to make a connection? I'm reminded of the time one of my brother's friends (who I had never met before) asked us to play soccer and sent me a LinkedIn request afterwards. I declined, of course.

*   *   *

At the gym today someone loaded the bar up with 345 pounds (2 45s, a 35 and a 25) and proceeded to squat it a full three inches. His legs barely bent. (If you want your squat to qualify as a successful lift, your legs have to bend at least past parallel: i.e., bend from 180 (straight) past 90 degrees.) The floor shook when he racked and de-racked the bar.

I watched from the rowing machine where I was sitting and the whole scene saddened me. It makes me sad for the same reason students that use ChatGPT to complete my homework assignments do: they've missed the point. You go to class to learn; you go to the gym to get stronger, not to lift as much weight as possible. Of course, lifting more weight is an easy way to tell if you've gotten stronger, and in that regard it can be a helpful metric for progress, but when you make the metric the goal you do silly things like compromise form and risk injury. Take some weight off and go through the full range of motion with control. There's no shame in lifting less weight.

*   *   *

On the way home the subway doors sandwiched me just as I was running through them. I suppose it happens to everyone eventually, especially if you are like me and continue sprinting when the doors close in the hopes that they will open again. (They often do.) At least in some parts of life, I am an incorrigible optimist.

There is nothing to be done about it.

As an instructor, I am always saddened to read this. The ChatGPT rhetorical style is distinctive enough that I can catch it, but not so distinctive to be worth passing along to an honor council.

But still…

Don’t let a computer write for you! I say this not for reasons of intellectual honesty, or for the spirit of fairness. I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into.

Heck yeah. It’s not blah blah finger waggle that’s cheating, it’s that writing is thinking, feeling, and communicating and where all the value is, particularly at school. What are you trying to be free of?

I love the ending:

I have never seen any form of create generative model output … which I would rather see than the original prompt.

Those students had to type something in, and that would be more interesting to see than the slop.

(via Dave)

 

Late evening in July 1985, on a small seaside town in the North-East of Italy. It was hot, but not as unbearable as it is now. Back then, I used to spend some time each day, usually at dusk, sitting in our courtyard looking at the sky and imagining how it would be to see the missiles flying above us, eager to reach their targets. It strikes me now how I used to think about the possibility of nuclear war: terrified and excited at the same time. Like an inevitability that I should at least have some fun out of it.

I went to bed as usually with no curtains, windows wide open. I was still awake, looking outside, when the room filled with a dense white light for a few seconds. I vividly remember the strong rush of adrenaline, and how petrified I was. In a weirdly scientific way, after the initial scare, I counted the time that I expected needed to pass before a loud bang would come, followed by the inevitable shockwave.

That was it, I was certain, but the boom didn't come. Instead, a distant low-pitched rumble was clearly audible. It took some courage to get out of bed and run to the living room, where my parents were pretending to watch some TV show, while actually dozing on the couch.

— What was that?! — I asked.

Sleepy faces replied with muffled sounds. I explained about the dense light, and went outside, on the balcony. Everything looked normal, but the drone sound was louder than before. No 24-hour news broadcast back then, but the local equivalent of the BBC's Ceefax, called Televideo, churned out a 'breaking news' about a tiny meteorite that apprently passed very close above our hometown to end up in the sea.

Almost disappointed that I missed a chance to stare at a mushroom cloud in the distance, I went back to bed. Those were the mid 1980s for me: Let's Dance, Live to Tell, Declaration by The Alarm, and waiting for the bomb.

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Thinking of it in this way has really cleared the Micro.blog fog in my mind. People can visit the front-end of the site to see my microblog posts (you can also see them on the notes section here), but if I want to interact with the other blogs on Micro.blog, or accounts on the fedi, I need to use the back-end CMS for that. It’s pretty obvious, really and works in a similar way to Ghost’s ActivityPub implementation - website at the front, “social feed” at the back in the CMS.

Blogs as the foundation for a new kind of platform has been our north star since the beginning. Social media can be a mess — there’s no single fix for that — and yet we can chip away at the edges of the problem, hopefully encouraging a quieter, less exhausting timeline.

More from Kev:

I also like that there’s no in-your-face notifications. There’s a place where I can check where I’ve been mentioned, but there’s no bubbles when I login, so I do it when I want to, rather than when the software wants me to.

Micro.blog must be the only social platform that doesn’t have any unread badges for notifications. That bothers some people, because they miss replies until later. That’s okay. Very few things on the web are actually urgent. The blog posts and mentions will be here when you get back.

(We have talked recently about an opt-in email summary once a week for replies you might have missed. Assuming we can do that in the least-Facebook-y way possible.)

In the end, Kev’s post is also a testament to the work the Mastodon team has done on account portability. You can easily imagine a future where it will be fairly normal to switch between Micro.blog, Mastodon, Ghost, and WordPress, with your identity and content intact. And that means each platform can lean into what makes it unique.