Numeric Citizen Blog

Following the release of Ghost's new "Recommendations" feature this week, I set up my recommendations list. Some here might recognize themselves! 👀

2023-11-02 ∞

I wish Inoreader offered some form of article summarization via AI for some of my feeds…

2023-11-02 ∞

In Search of Augmented Capabilities Using AI

I want to augment my creative capabilities¹. I'm considering the best way to pay for Augmented Intelligence (AI) services². I'm currently subscribing to MidJourney for imagery. ChatGPT with GPT-4 is not cheap at 20 $US a month, but I get Dall.E 3. Raycast enables GPT-4 for 8 $US on top of my 8 $US, totalling 16 $US monthly, but I don't get Dall.E 3. I prefer MidJourney over Dall.E 3 as it seems to allow more diversity in requests. And there is the ChatGPT client to consider. Raycast is one of them. MacGPT is another one. Even Grammarly and Craft are ChatGPT clients³. I need to continue my analysis. Ideas? Suggestions?

2023-11-03 ∞

💡 Thought of the moment: owning my own Pixelfed instance would be cool¹. But how much work does this imply? 🤔

2023-11-04 ∞

👉🏻 I'm thinking about parking my "numericcitizen" name on Threads. Just in case¹. 😳 But, then, after doing a quick research, I was reminded pretty quickly that I need an Instagram account. It was at this exact moment that I thought that I should move on to something else².

2023-11-05 ∞

Apple’s scary event: a B-team production | Ken Segall

Ouch.

2023-11-05 ∞

For those who are curious, I just updated "my Micro-Workflows Explained" page to list all my ChatGPT and AI use cases. I'm not shy to expose when I'm using AI in my creative work¹. The list of use cases is growing and reflects the relative invasion of AI in our digital landscape.

2023-11-05 ∞

And here is the next edition (2023/44) of my weekly creative summary. The newsletter edition is coming out later today by email! Enjoy. 😅

2023-11-05 ∞

Ok, I may be late to the Mac automation party, but Keyboard Maestro is really nice and powerful. And approachable. It's an almost instant buy me! ¹ It's super handy to automate portions of my newsletter creation and many tasks in Craft, too!

2023-11-05 ∞

NSUserDefaults defaults = [NSUserDefaults NumericCitizenDefaults];

Following the episode (#097) of Hemispheric Views, it’s my turn, I guess, with a little twist for the post title. 😜

• ✉️ Mail Client: HEY mail
• 📨 Mail Server: HEY mail + iCloud Custom Email Domain
• 📝 Notes: Craft + Apple Notes
• ✅ To-Do: Things 3
• 📷 iPhone Photo Shooting: Camera.app + Halide.app (for travel)
• 📚 Photo Management: Photos.app + Adobe Cloud
• 🗓️ Calendar: Calendar.app (Personal Life) + Fantastical.app (Work Life)
• 🗄️ Cloud file storage: iCloud
• 📰 RSS: Reeder connected to Inoreader
• 📇 Contacts: Contacts
• 🕸️ Browser: Safari (more and more using Kagi for searching)
• 💬 Chat: iMessage (WhatsApp when abroad)
• 🔖 Bookmarks: AnyBox
• 👓 Read It Later: Omnivore
• 📜 Word Processing: Ulysses
• 📊 Spreadsheets: Numbers
• 🛝 Presentations: Keynote
• 🛒 Shopping Lists: Reminders
• 🧑‍🍳 Meal Planning: None
• 💰 Budgeting & Personal Finance: Numbers
• 🗞️ News: La Presse (Apple News for English news)
• 🎶 Music: Apple Music
• 🎧 Podcasts: PocketCast
• 🔐 Password Management: iCloud Keychain (also 1Password, I should merge with default)

2023-11-06 ∞

👉🏻 One quick question for my followers or readers: for those using AI (often or not), did you think of any usage rules that could form your ethical view on AI in your work or personal life? Would you mind sharing those rules with me? I'll start with one of mine: Use AI on non-controversial subjects.

2023-11-06 ∞

These Are My Entry Points to AI Usage

I'm working on something related to using AI in my creative work. I came up with this. AI is used through these front-end clients within my creative workflows:

- ChatGPT website
- Raycast AI Chat
- MidJourney
- Whisper
- Micro.blog podcast episode transcription
- Audio Hijack Transcription block
- Kagi Summarize Results, Summary Document, Ask Questions
- Craft Assistant
- Grammarly 

And I expect this list to grow in the coming months.

2023-11-08 ∞

My theory about what happened at Humane…

Founders pitch investors on a hand laser thing when it’s a napkin sketch. They raise too much money, hire too many people.

They build a prototype, but too late. Turns out the laser UI sucks and eats too much battery.

“Hmm. Investors are shopping for AI companies now… voice uses less power… pivot to AI!”

Suddenly tech has a downturn. Can’t raise another round of funding. They launch an alpha.

They know it’s doomed. It’s an advertisement for acquirers.

Sounds like a plan.

2023-11-10 ∞

What Happened to the Shortcuts Editor?

I've been working with Apple Shortcuts editor recently¹, on my iPhone and on my iPad, and boy, what a shocking experience! This editor is nearly unworkable, thanks to scrolling sluggishness, object ordering bugs, object variables becoming empty, constant freezes, keyboard masking input fields, changes not being saved and plain and simple editor crashes. 😤 What is happening with this, Apple?² I can't believe Viticci is able to endure this for all his work around shortcuts.

2023-11-11 ∞

One of my first-gen HomePods is slowly dying.¹😔

2023-11-11 ∞

I started subscribing to ChatGPT today so that I could experiment with Dall-E and GPT-4. I'll probably cancel my MidJourney account if all goes well with ChatGPT. I like the idea of having one place to do many things.

2023-11-12 ∞

It's Sunday😃, and it's time for my new edition of my Weekly Creative Summary, the 2023/45 edition! Mail version coming out later today for my website subscribers!¹

2023-11-12 ∞

Musing of the day: Which is worse from an environmental point of view, burning the planet with NFTs / blockchains s*** or with AI with LLM models training and queries to ChatGPT?¹ 🤔

2023-11-13 ∞

I don't know about you guys, but watchOS 10.1.1 is still killing battery life… 😔

2023-11-13 ∞

This:

Foreseeably, the next step in AI integration will happen on an OS level.

In the mean time, your app will always run an inferior version compared to whatever Microsoft's sells. If having ChatGPT is your sales point, you have no sales point. You only have a very volatile, very expensive ticking time bomb dependency.

On top of that, you corner yourself into dishonesty if you sell ChatGPT as your own AI. It's bullshit and you know it.

The proliferation of ChatGPT entry points. The race to some sort of singularity? 2023-11-14 ∞

Raycast is cool. I'm cool. And because we're cool, here is a rebate. One month free of the Raycast Pro. ¹

2023-11-15 ∞

Apple’s Siri, AI and Next’s Year’s OS Releases

I don’t know if Apple is working on LLM stuff; they probably do, they probably do work on improving Siri, too, if such a thing is possible in the current incarnation of its fundamentals. But, judging by the rapidity of other companies introducing AI features mainly based on LLM models, I don’t expect it would be so hard for Apple to do the same with Siri. But only if Apple accepts to work with CharGPT-back end for a short-term solution. This could be a transitory path in my mind. Because Apple being Apple, they probably would want to put their twist on this: better privacy protection, for example. They like to control the whole stack. That’s perhaps why they are, apparently, investing massively in their one training infrastructure, which would be they accept the fact that on-device training is too limited, even with powerful Apple silicon. It could prove to be a long journey. I don’t expect too much for next year’s OSes. It will be interesting to see where Apple is headed with this AI thing next year.

Meanwhile, when I’m asking Siri queries today, I cannot help but feel the tech is antiquated compared to what we can do with Whisper and the like today.

Image: Dall-E.

2023-11-16 ∞

According to Grammarly, ChatGPT is really bad at English.¹

2023-11-16 ∞

I made this. It is very handy to write an ALT description for an image posted on Pixelfed.

2023-11-16 ∞

The more testing and experimenting I do with ChatGPT, the more I feel we are at an inflection point like Netscape or the iPhone was. We live in exciting and challenging times.

2023-11-16 ∞

The Danger of POSSE

A recently published article on The Verge discusses POSSE and the Fediverse: "Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere." This content strategy emphasizes the importance of owning the content you create by publishing it on your own platform, like a personal blog or website, and then syndicating or sharing that content on other platforms, such as social media or content aggregators.

The main idea behind POSSE is to ensure that creators maintain control over their content. By publishing first on their own platform, creators can establish a primary source for their work that remains under their control. They can then share or syndicate this content to other platforms to reach a wider audience, drive traffic back to their own site, and engage with communities on those platforms.

This strategy is particularly relevant in the digital age, where content creators often face the dilemma of reaching large audiences on popular platforms (like social media networks) while also wanting to maintain ownership and control over their work. POSSE offers a balanced approach, allowing creators to leverage larger platforms’ reach without sacrificing their own site’s autonomy.

I’m practicing POSSE myself; all my online setup is built around it. I depend on two publishing poles: Micro.blog and Ghost¹. Some find this setup time-consuming and don’t want to be held responsible for replying or engaging on each branch (Mastodon, Bluesky, etc.). My take on this is yes, it might be time-consuming, but I like to engage on each platform because each brings a different type of community. I find it a bit frustrating to reply to someone who systematically shares content from his blog with Mastodon without any reply or acknowledgment. I understand that some posters are very popular and can’t reply to everyone. You can see if someone is replying from time to time. It’s a good idea to check before judging. The danger here is to act like bots if there is no engagement at all.

2023-11-18 ∞

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen! 😀 Today is the day of the new edition of my weekly creative summary! Enjoy! While this early release provides the best visual experience (thanks to Craft's shared documents), the newsletter edition will come out soon to my subscribers.

2023-11-19 ∞

Which story is worse or more shattering? Steve Jobs fired in 1985, or OpenAI fired one of its founders? I think the latter creates more uncertainty. The former is easier to dismiss because we know what happened to Apple after Jobs left the company. 🤔 ¹

2023-11-21 ∞

I can't stress enough how Apple's Freeform is a joy to use. Is this a sleeper hit? If you don't use it, do yourself a favour and try it. It's the most intuitive, frictionless diagramming app out there on the Mac. And the iPad.

2023-11-21 ∞

Dropshare Cloud is being… dropped¹. Too bad. I'll need to redo my custom-made file share space.

2023-11-22 ∞

A follow-up to my previous post about Dropshare: Are any users of Backblaze over here? Thoughts? Which service do you use? S3-compatible storage or client (Mac) backup to the cloud?¹ 🤔

2023-11-22 ∞

I should visit the Micro.blog Discover section more often… there are some gems over there from time to time.

2023-11-22 ∞

I created my Backblaze account earlier this week to replace Dropshare Cloud. Today, I discovered that Cloudflare offers S3-compatible storage too, with a similar free tier (10 GB). Since CF is my domain name registrar, maybe I should have created my S3 bucket with them instead?¹ 🤔

2023-11-23 ∞

It's my most "successful" image ever on Pixelfed, by far. 😊 Testing MarsEdit Micropost feature (again).

2023-11-23 ∞

Today it's time for an update to my creative and blogger workflow¹. You can get an overview in this diagram, and the changelog here on my metablog. Any questions? 😅

2023-11-24 ∞

A new goal: about security: migrating my two-factor authentication from Authy to Apple's Keychain / iCloud Passwords. Signing into any service when using Apple's solution is too cool and efficient to pass.

2023-11-24 ∞

If you don't know me, but especially the places where I'm sharing and for what purpose, that is the video to watch.

{{< youtube "Rc0j5jBuXZM" >}}

2023-11-27 ∞

I'm generally unfazed by black Friday sales... I buy things when I need them, not because of any deals. But, this morning, I bought a Kodak slides scanner because I have hundreds of old family slides sitting in boxes. I feel sad not to spend the time to put a new life in those memories. So there you go, a new slide scanner. I'll probably write an extensive review of it.

2023-11-27 ∞

While on my desk, I want to use my iPad Pro over Ethernet @ 1 GbE (much faster than wifi) while keeping it charging. Also, it seems that it's not possible to prioritize Ethernet over Wireless (like we can on the Mac)¹. Am I missing something? Am I the only one on earth who prefers Ethernet? Any suggestion?

2023-11-27 ∞

I finished watching this video today while waiting for my car at the garage. Andrej Karpathy gives a great talk explaining Gen AI and how the whole process works, and then some more explanations about the possible future around AI. It's a must-see.

{{< youtube "zjkBMFhNj_g" >}}

2023-11-28 ∞

Happy with Ulysses. 😊 #iawriter7

2023-12-01 ∞