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.

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

  1. What a shitty series of events. And we aren’t done with it yet. ↩︎

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.

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.

  1. Micro.blog is responsible for the cross-posting magic. ↩︎

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.