notebook from jason

There's no King in No Kings When did we get so fucking polite?

The Computational Web and the Old AI Switcharoo For two grand I can buy a laptop with unfathomable levels of computational power.

Slop is Everywhere For Those With Eyes to See The size of your plate can influence how much food you eat.

Hank Green And The Fantastical Tales of God AIs AI Doomerism is a Decoy: Yet the supposed AI apocalypse remains science fiction.

The bliss of good enough— an ode to my moka pot It's early and unpleasant, and I am woefully uncaffinated.

The future of social media Imagine a world, in the not-so-distant future, where anyone can launch a fully functional social media platform with a few clicks and a credit card.

OpenAI's “Operator” is Facebook's “like” button Remember when Facebook convinced us that our websites needed a "like" button in the late aughts?

The Computational Web This note is a placeholder for a potentially longer, more in-depth essay I hope to publish in the future.

Bluesky may have the juice, but we don't have to drink the Kool-Aid Any marketing guru with a Substack and a Udemy course will tell you that your brand should have a mission and an enemy; make your customer the hero, and you play the role of sherpa.

Meta's Toaster Problem Meta has a toaster problem in that Meta does not sell toasters.

Data Piggy Dear Internet, It has come to my attention that people are calling Venture Capitalists "data piggies,” and I for one am appalled.

Raw dog the open web!

FireChat was a tool for revolution.

Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something Somewhere between the death of our favorite aggregator websites and the world surviving a pandemic, the modern internet was reduced to four companies in a trench coat.

Where have all the websites gone?

Bloktoberfest— Some anticlimactic thoughts on blocking Note: this post is what I consider a note— some light musing that may or may not have a conclusion and may or may not turn into an essay one day.

How do we stop Meta in 2024?

Copy, Acquire, Kill— How Meta could pull off the most extraordinary pivot in tech history Meta's sudden interest in ActivityPub and Mastodon doesn't make much sense.

Posts critical of Threads and Meta missing on Mammoth app There were big chunks of posts missing under the threads hashtag feed.

The medium is the message— Threads isn't a win for the Fediverse Meta needs the Fediverse more than the Fediverse needs Meta.

I got my first blue bubble scam text the other day and I think I know why Beeper Mini is a new Android app that gives Android users a blue bubble when they text iPhone users.

Why it feels like AIs are coming for the artists Each week, a new AI thing goes viral.

The Village Effect of the Greater Web The internet is a vast and open plain.

My precious From Atlantic Staff Writer Charlie Warzel (via Threads): One thing in the OpenAI stuff that feels consistent (based on some internal convos I've had) is that a group of people that are laser focused on the doomer elements of AI and the more ab…

A Frantic Friday Massacre Update: The Verge is reporting that Altman is in talks with the board to come back as CEO, is "ambivalent" about retuning without governing changes to the company.

App defaults Just last night I stumbled on The Small Website Discoverability Crisis post while scrolling Hacker News.

You likely already own the first big AI wearable It's AirPods.

New technology same old people Humane, an AI hardware start-up whose name choice is as transparent as glass, has a "trust" section front-and-center on its website.

Madonna in the 80s?

How to properly peel a pomegranate Pomegranates are delicious, but can be tricky to rip open.

My Indie Web list Note 12/10/2023: I am in thr process of revamping my bookmarks and curation. if you came here hoping for a big list of cool sites, you'll want to come back in a couple days.

Interesting finds: Design articles I still think about This post is officially my first on my newly designed custom blog (if you don't count the colophon).

This event was shot on iPhone and edited on Mac Just finished watching Apple's Scary Fast Event[^1].

Design & art There's a fundamental misunderstanding of what design sets to accomplish.

Meta doesn't hate news, just anything that moves us off the app Meta's vision for social media is a billion lobotomized users engaging with The Hamburglar's new value meal.

Interesting finds, October 10, 2023 A few things I stumbled upon last week.

I guess I'll just pay til I die?

Elon received playbook to kill Twitter From Ben Collins for NBC: Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.”

Interesting finds, Oct 2, 2023 Things I stumbled upon on the internet last week.

Apple is killing the cloud as we know it Hello.

Mind if I search your car Reuters reporting on Meta's AI chatbot and the dataset the company used to train it: Meta also did not use private chats on its messaging services as training data for the model and took steps to filter private details from public

On the old web I stayed up late last night searching for the "old web"— personal homepages, digital gardens, manifestos, guides— the type of stuff FAANG buried under algorithms and shiny interfaces.

When exactly is Email Forgiveness Day?

On digital gardening When I stumbled on the concept of digital gardens, it lit up my brain[1].

Just one more technology bro I promise bro just one more technology and the world will be a better place, bro, for you and for me, bro.

He killed something beautiful You know how when you push down on your feed, it refreshes?