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  • January 10, 2025 10:37am
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Photography

    Misc

    Personal

    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!

  • January 9, 2025 10:57pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Apps & Services

    Newsletter

    Starting Up… RealMac software Elements beta. I paid for it, to show support for the team. I have three websites that I want to build with this thing eventually. Stay tuned. It’s a 2025 and beyond adventure1.


    1. I always need something new to try and experiment with. ↩︎

  • January 9, 2025 3:30pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Food for thought

    Newsletter

    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?

  • Hell On Earth - Los Angeles & Ukraine

    January 9, 2025 12:27pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Photography

    Longer posts

    UkraineWar

    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. A scene from Ukraine A scene from Los Angeles


    1. the US does a lot already, but sadly that is not enough bot in money and speed. ↩︎

  • January 8, 2025 3:18pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Apps & Services

    Newsletter

    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?

  • January 7, 2025 4:22pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Food for thought

    Newsletter

    Dear David (aka DHH), I fully disagree with you, and your blog post, again.

  • January 7, 2025 2:39pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Food for thought

    Newsletter

    How long before we see something like this on LinkedIn “Prompt Engineer with 15 years of experience”?

  • Who's Right? Apple Intelligence or Grammarly

    January 7, 2025 8:19am
    Reading Time: 2 minutes
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Photography

    Longer posts

    Apps & Services

    Newsletter

    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.

  • January 6, 2025 4:16pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Apple & Tech

    Newsletter

    The LG UltraFine 6K: this is such a nice-looking monitor. Perfect for a M4 Mac mini. Look at me, no bezels! 🤩

  • January 6, 2025 10:06am
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Personal

    Newsletter

    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”?

  • January 6, 2025 9:57am
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Apple & Tech

    Photography

    Newsletter

    Work

    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.

  • January 6, 2025 8:40am
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Food for thought

    Newsletter

    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.

  • January 5, 2025 10:37pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Apple & Tech

    Food for thought

    Newsletter

    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? 🤦🏻‍♂️

  • On Posting Images to Pixelfed from Micro.blog

    January 5, 2025 10:39am
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Photography

    My brief testing of posting images to Pixelfed from Micro.blog is positive (image1, image2). My blog visual theme (Tiny Cards) supports image posts without being too fancy. The only thing is the lack of image collection selection when posting from Micro.blog. This has to be done after posting. Might come later, if we call @manton attention! Posting from Micro.blog app is similar to Pixelfed app. The nice thing is that Micro.blog automatically generate an image description, something that is done manually with Pixelfed.

    For 2025, I’ll use this workflow and see how it goes. I created a new image collection for the occasion: Travel.

    A serene sunset casts a warm glow over a tranquil lake with a silhouette of distant hills.A serene lake reflects the clear blue sky with distant hills on the horizon.A vibrant sunset casts warm orange and yellow hues over a calm body of water with silhouettes of distant trees and a serene sky.A computer screen displays a photo management program with multiple black-and-white thumbnail images of various historic buildings and landmarks, organized in a grid layout.A glass of rosé wine sits on a wooden table overlooking a serene seascape, with a hat and camera nearby.A building illuminated with colorful neon lights displays the sign Tropicana Suites alongside a flamingo graphic.A stylish lamp with three spherical lights hangs above a Marshall speaker on a light green background.A large screen displays the message This Display is unable to connect to the server. Thank you, in a room with some flags visible in the background.A mural of a woman with outstretched hand is painted around a window with blue shutters on a wooden wall, above a bar sign.A window display featuring a large cartoonish head is reflected alongside an ice cream cone and a person taking a photo, creating a layered urban scene.A serene seascape captures the sun setting over calm waters, with clouds scattered across the sky and distant mountains on the horizon.A building facade features three vertical sections painted in red, white, and blue, with black fire escape stairs.A vast, open field stretches beneath a sky filled with scattered, fluffy clouds.A car drives down an open highway under a blue sky with fluffy clouds.A serene seascape is visible with a distant horizon, a few boats, and the bow of a larger ship entering the frame from the bottom right.Colorful drawings and paintings of various characters are displayed on strings over a cobblestone street in front of a pink building.Rocky cliffs border a calm, clear body of water under a cloudy sky.A sleek, modern storefront with a large glass structure stands in a bustling urban setting, surrounded by classical architecture and people sitting on steps.The image depicts a traditional interior space with ornate arches, lanterns, and a cozy seating area.A user interface displays a map with network connections alongside a list of apps and services on the left panel.
  • January 5, 2025 9:22am
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Photography

    Two years ago in Buenos Aires. #travel #Argentina

    Woman in a window is tending her hand. She seems to say « come in »!
  • January 5, 2025 8:56am
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Photography

    A somewhat old photo of me in front of a coffee shop somewhere in Brazil. I’m also testing cross-posting to Pixelfed.

  • I’m Getting Old Apparently

    January 4, 2025 6:12pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Food for thought

    Longer posts

    Personal

    Newsletter

    I old enough to be one of those who witnessed the birth of MTV and music videos… but I rarely watch those these days… but today, I decided to spend some time watching what’s « hot ». A few observations are in order: video duration is short (less than 3 min), hyper-short scenes abuse (less than two seconds in duration), 4:3 screen ratio is strange (is this a thing now?)… I barely can stand this shit now. I’m getting old, I guess.

  • January 4, 2025 3:22pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Personal

    Newsletter

    The cool thing about our new (and temporary) apartment is that, both my wife and me, have the feeling of being traveling somewhere in the world1. We stay right beside a beautiful park with a lot of mature trees. I already see myself going out to do some photography. Too bad it’s winter time, though. 🤷🏻‍♂️

    We often travel to places, rent an Airbnb for a week, so that we can feel being part of a small community. It’s really a nice feeling making the whole thing more bearable.


    1. We are 1km from our house! ↩︎

  • Where The Social Web Fails

    January 4, 2025 2:12pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Photography

    Longer posts

    Apps & Services

    Newsletter

    Dislike buttons on YouTube, or elsewhere for that matter, should come with a mandatory “here’s why I don’t like this” explanation text field. In this specific case, 2 people out of 18 didn’t like my video. Why? How can I improve myself if you don’t tell me what’s wrong? This is the part of social web that I feel doesn’t work.

  • January 4, 2025 1:58pm
    Numeric Citizen Numeric Citizen

    Photography

    Personal

    Newsletter

    My new home office for the next three months. Not bad at all. My temporary home office while my house is being renovated.

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