On Articles Size & Twitter

Tweets on Twitter use to be 140 characters max. Later it was increased to 280 characters. Now, apparently, you can post a note with a maximum of 2500 characters.

Now, looking at MacRumors or similar sites, it seems we get shorter and shorter articles, almost the size of a note on Twitter. Isn’t it strange?

People are busy and their attention span has shrunk considerably. Twitter once was very popular and others tried to adjust to its modus operandi. The web is adjusting in unexpected ways.

Feeling Helpless About Climate

Due to Canada’s forest fires and easterly winds, bad air quality is returning to my town for the next few days. With all the bad climate-related news coming up from everywhere on Earth, trying to understand what is happening is essential, so we can better adapt our lifestyle. I like to read many things on a subject that I find interesting, but climate change topic is utterly depressing. The planet is clearly slowly burning. All indicators are going in the wrong direction. How can we not feel helpless? It’s hard to stay informed and keep faith in humanity. Prove me wrong.

We Must Do Something About Meta’s Monopoly

In my mind, every new platforms should start from 0 user base. Meta, just to name that one, have a monopoly of social graph. This is anti-competitive. Should Bluesky sue Meta? Should the open source community sue Meta? Yes. And yes.

Remember Microsoft and Internet Explorer back in the days? Remember Apple and the App Store?

We are not ready to accept this but here we are. Meta is a monopoly in my book. Time for regulation. I casted my vote: no Threads for me.

Thought of the day: blog readers might not like negativity-tinted post or being told the truth they don’t want to read. I published my observations and opinion regarding our hyper-dependency on being connected all the time, so much that we don’t really connect in-person anymore. A few subscribers unsubscribed. 😒 Or maybe they just agree with my take and are looking for ways to regain more time in-person by unsubscribing from my blog? 😂

I guess there is always a positive side of an event. 🙏🏻

Hunting vs ChatGPT

Hunters are not allowed to use drones to locate their prey. It is seen as an anti-competitive measure or an unfair practice. While “real” hunters who chase their future prey for fun aren’t allowed drone usage, what about those who hunt to eat meat because it is their way of living? Is it still forbidden?

Now, let’s do a parallel with LLM-derived tools like ChatGPT. Is it ok for fun but not ok for actual work? When are the lines crossed? Is the content the only determining factor?

Are We Ready for This Dystopian World?

Warning: it’s not about the Apple Vision Pro headset, which many people think will bring a touch of a dystopian future to our life. Something else more serious will.

I read this week somewhere that, to get climate back into the normality zone🌪️ to ensure the sustainability of the human race and life in general, everyone on earth would need to live in an oppressive world where everything would be controlled by laws and government all the time and for decades. From buying food to cars to travelling to entertainment services, we would be under constant quotas, which would bring our quality of life much lower than we currently enjoy. In fact, developed countries’ quality of life would join the much lower quality of life of the vast majority of the earth’s population in less developed countries. This would be the only way to get around this climate crisis. Not convinced? The COVID pandemic brought massive and repetitive confinements that weren’t enough to bend many climate change indicators downwards. It lasted two years, more or less. 😱

Oh, and should we talk about forced birth control everywhere? Because we should, even if this is a taboo subject.

Are we ready for this dystopian world? 😷

I can see a great Vision Pro use case right here where people watch daylong movies about what used to be a much more enjoyable world in 3D. 😒

Here’s a short “life at the office” story. Our VP of sales never stops bragging about how ChatGPT is cool and how it works for him for many use cases. I’m uncomfortable with his stance on ChatGPT & generative AI in general. I think about it each time he sends an email that was obviously created with ChatGPT.

Why is it a problem for me? Who am I to judge him and his “new way of working”? I think I have found the root cause.

First, it’s not the results of his work. It’s the work of something else. He takes something “as is” without adding any value, any personal opinion, or a personal twist. Second, the fundamental problem is that he works in IT but is not a tech guy. He is a salesperson. He’s the type of guy who surfs on buzzwords a lot. Using ChatGPT makes him circumvent his lack of confidence because of a lack of IT knowledge and culture. He probably feels better and more “into the game” like most of my other colleagues, who studied computer science before getting to work in IT.

How many more people lack my colleague do the same, for the same reason?

My Morning So Far

What an intense morning.

I learned about the existence of iTelescope, thanks to this blog post from Christopher Curtis, a service where you can rent astronomical observation time from the comfort of your home.

I read about the Eternal Recurrence, thanks to a post from Gr36. I would be ok with the idea of reliving my life as is. Over and over again.

Thanks to this superb article about Fediverse from Glenn Fleishman for Tidbits, I learned that we could follow anyone on Mastodon using an RSS feed, which we could do with Twitter. I’ll be able to re-add accounts to Inoreader to get news in one place, just as I was doing when I was on Twitter. Cool.

All this because I was searching for ideas to write a few linkposts. I wrote none except this post, but I learned quite a lot. I updated my Digital Garden accordingly.

As reported by Om Malik, automation is the next evolution step for fast food chains. Should I care?

Am I missing anything? I think so, and this is where Rewind could help me a lot.

What about your morning?

On AI & Content Creators — So many Questions — So Few Answers

Should I care if my content is used to train AI models? How is it different than someone who uses part of my content in a citation to write a linkpost, for example? Is it ok for a portion of my content to be used elsewhere as opposed to the full content? Should I be able to opt out of any AI training, just like we can opt out of search engines when posting content online?