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The Medium Mirage
Medium seems to suffer from another problem: AI-generated content and fake account for fake engagement to generate revenues. According to their recent article (Paywall might be enforced to read this), many accounts under the Partner Program were suspended recently to stop this fraud.
I’ve returned to Medium last fall (read my comments about the reading and writing experience over there) and found that content quality has gone down compared to what we used to read there. The revenue program is much less generous than it used to be. I published 18 stories since my return and earned less than a dollar! We don’t know how these revenues are calculated, but it is a bit insulting or at least discouraging. At this rate, I won’t recover the Partner Program subscription cost in the first year which makes my presence there questionable. This should have been a no-cost journey which it’s not. Still seven months to go…
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Putting Something Out There
I’m about to start a recording session for my next video about Craft and the PARA method. I wonder: why am I doing this? Is it because it might help Craft users to better take advantage of the app features? Is it because I just like being in a creative process? Is it because I love working on the Mac using different apps together to put something out there? Is it all the reasons above? Or is it simply because it provides a subtle reminder of being human is being creative and putting something out there? Maybe I’m asking myself too many questions.
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The first edition of 2025 of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter is out. I’m curious if some of you look into these. Let me know.
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I’m always positively surprised to read my Bluesky replies here on Micro.blog. I mean, this is the modern and open where that we should continue to promote and defend. For me, and I wish it was the case for more people, it is priceless, but the value is not as tangible as I would like.
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Since moving into our temporary apartment, we’ve been relying entirely on the Apple TV for our “TV content” consumption. One takeaway is the realization that more than ever the TV experience is utterly fragmented, hence de proliferation of “TV” apps.
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Can you figure out what’s this? It’s a macro photo of an old maple syrup bottle where we could see those crystals forming at the bottom. Shot on the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Fascinating.
Update: for some reason, the original post didn’t include the actual image.
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I NEVER take and share pictures of cats… but this one living in the building where I’m currently staying for a few months 🤩… worth enough to push to Pixelfed, too!
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Why do I have the impression that we talk too much about facts checking and not enough (far not enough) about algorithm-based timelines, reality and people manipulation through these algorithms? Who’s checking Facebook or Meta in general?
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Hell On Earth - Los Angeles & Ukraine
I don’t want to offend anyone here, but what is happening right now in Los Angeles is certainly devastating. It’s really looking like hell on earth. At the same time, we can easily find the exact same hell in Ukraine and many more people are displaced or killed by a totalitarian and evil regime. It’s hard to fight climate change, but we can and must fight what Russia1 in its current form and to for what it brings to this world. Two images, two tragedies.
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the US does a lot already, but sadly that is not enough bot in money and speed. ↩︎
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After finding an old document in Notion where my text highlights from Matter were saved, I was curious about Matter, the reader-later service that I once used a while back before trying Omnivore. Their website still refers to “Twitter”, not “X”, their last post on their X account dates back to 2023. I cannot find a Mastodon account. KI can’t find a changelog either. Is this thing still alive?
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Dear David (aka DHH), I fully disagree with you, and your blog post, again.
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How long before we see something like this on LinkedIn “Prompt Engineer with 15 years of experience”?
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Who's Right? Apple Intelligence or Grammarly
While working on the next edition of the Ephemeral Scrapbook newsletter, I wanted to proofread and rewrite some text portions. I first started with Apple Intelligence Writing Tools then pasted the results into Craft. Grammarly instantly took the ball and verified the pasted text, highlighting everything wrong that needed some attention. Is Apple Writing Tools sloppy or Grammarly too picky? Writing in English is not an easy thing for me to do. And it’s not easy for generative AI either, apparently. From what I understand, Grammarly tries to be less wordy and is very iterative in its text proofing execution.
Here is the final tweaked version:
1️⃣ First and foremost, I want to extend my warmest wishes for a prosperous and fulfilling new year. I genuinely hope you find success and happiness in your professional and personal endeavors. 2️⃣ Secondly, this marks the inaugural edition of this newsletter for 2025, and I’ve decided to introduce a few changes. Firstly, I’ve decided to eliminate the summary at the beginning of each newsletter. This section provided an overview of the number of blog posts, photos, and other content I’ve shared since the previous edition. While I appreciate the interest in these statistics, I believe it’s unnecessary to brag about them, and it takes a significant amount of time to maintain and update this information. I’ve also officially decided to retire the podcasts section from my newsletter. While I enjoy podcasts, I don’t find them particularly relevant to my current content creation schedule, and I believe it’s not worth dedicating time and resources to them.
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The LG UltraFine 6K: this is such a nice-looking monitor. Perfect for a M4 Mac mini. Look at me, no bezels! 🤩
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Returning to work this morning is really hard and cumbersome after two weeks of intense personal life. I really disconnected from work. So, I mostly forgot about my passwords, my pending items when I left back in late December. Is this what we call “work & life balance”?
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Microsoft is putting the “Copilot” tag everywhere… even on Microsoft 365 which will become Microsoft 365 Copilot. It’s fascinating to see a company like to playing with the branding of its services.
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Tips on Using LLMs (AI) Effectively for Text
the longer and more detailed you prompt, the higher quality the output will be (that was from Claude 3.5 Sonnet). But you start to run into diminishing returns, because if you are spending so much time writing a detailed prompt, couldn’t you write the email yourself? I think so.
We should give a name to this inflection point.
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Dear Mr. Siegler, I don’t buy it either. This is beyond ridiculous. One question: who is stupid here, people looking to build relationships with AI bots or advertisers willing to pay for ads placement in this crappy digital world? 🤦🏻♂️
