F L O T I S S E R I E

Noted: Because I’m using Gemini to find and complete resources related to the earliest blog years, I’m citing a Clancy throughout my project, which the LLM keeps pulling back to center events and articles related to the Clancy trial.

Neither company publishes a timeline, and most of the numbers floating around come from SEO consultants, so treat this as rough.

Grief resources from fellow internet long-hauler Lenée.

🍿 Watched The Craft with the teenager tonight.

Machines and machine learning change the ways we think about humans and humanity.

Reading about personalized LLMs and the risks of the digital twin metaphor.

🎵: Witch Doctor - Erykah Badu and The Alchemist Over the weekend, I asked Gemini to examine the career trajectories of the authors in this 2019 Jezebel article by Soraya Roberts, which covered the ins and outs of the major conflicts that erupted over the…

Noted: I’ve been playing with Copilot, Claude and Gemini in tandem, and Copilot and Gemini are suddenly, curiously outperforming Claude by a lot.

When tech enthusiasts discuss federation today, they usually mean open protocols like ActivityPub or Mastodon.

Recommended: Bike Jerks and the Hodag Country Ramble.

Finished reading: Multipliers by Liz Wiseman 📚

404 Media on Project Lily, the ChatGPT project where humans read users’ prompts – including sensitive and personal information – to better train the product.

Eli Lilly redux: Thinking about the democratization of information and the removal of gatekeepers alongside this story I saw first at Boys’ Club.

The university is back in session, so the city’s lineup of food trucks are back in formation.

This 2013 essay is circulating widely this week.

TechCrunch reports on the problems inherent to AI-generated restaurant advertising - it looks wrong.

Return to markdown?

Finished reading: Suffer a Witch A Memoir by Joy McCullough 📚

Cap Times on Electric Heart, the new EP by Madison songwriter Whitney Mann.

In plain language, this suggests that the way search is reoriented around AI revalued long tail search strings, so there are big incentives to link deeply and widely across the corpus, especially if you have access to an authoritative platform.

Manton on AGI: “As we reach AGI… I’d like to set some ground rules for myself — beliefs that won’t change as technology changes.

Where we’ve been: “Today’s young American women were born into a world of unfinished feminism.

Traditional search favored common keywords, while LLMs favor (extremely) long tail search terms because of the idiosyncratic and conversational way people write to chatbots.

In honor of Gloria Steinem’s passing (rest in power), an article on the business and activist tensions present in, and the long-tail value of, feminist publishing efforts.

This first-person essay from The Baffler is circulating in writerly crowds this week.

For reasons, I was reminded of the list of Geek Social Fallacies that first circulated on Plausibly Deniable, then took root as an entire body of advice at Captain Awkward.

A composition teacher friend shared this paper on social media: Lester Faigley’s “Literacy after the Revolution”, the essay version of his 1996 CCCC Chair’s address.

In honor of Dolly (rest in power), some links: Dolly Parton’s America: This nine-episode podcast offers a deep dive into the Dollyverse, covering Dolly’s biography and lore and her role as an icon within a broader story about American ideals.

Lux Magazine on the return of The Rumpus.

I found out about a hyperlocal newsletter in my neighborhood and had to share.

“Students who spoke to ESPN said that betting is an accepted part of day-to-day life and that they learned about their school’s gambling culture immediately after arriving on campus.

Guerrilla marketing: When someone built a fake deodorant company with a lightweight marketing plan to capture long-tail search results, she found her way into AI recommendation results, showing how brands can gain visibility in emerging discovery systems.

Grose covers how Scandinavians approach AI and ed tech by emphasizing peer review and removing the profit motive.

Reading about yesterday’s Meta settlement, the global movement to get kids off tech, “chopped uncs,” and thinking about the dance between students and our local school system’s IT department during the COVID-19 shutdown, when my then-elementary schooler w…

“We all know that you can get lied to online at any point.

Reading over the $18b Meta settlement over social media harms to children, and while it’s not perfect, it’s something.

Finished reading: Famesick by Lena Dunham 📚