Notices by Thomas Vander Wal (vanderwal@mastodon.social)

The weekly newsletters the past 5 or 6 weeks from @inevernu have been exceptionally good and deeply appreciated. They become Sunday's and early parts of the week's deep reading. Sometimes they turn into serious deep dives down rabbit holes of learning, discovery, and thinking.

To find it yourself, this week's posting: https://sentiers.media/not-my-problem-the-radical-optimism-of-david-graeber-on-transitioning-to-a-regenerative-mindset-no332/

If you like it subscribe as it will help having informed discussions.

@anildash Are you coming to DC Tuesday? If so, there with you.

I signed-up to attend the Kamala Harris speech and rally on the DC mall on Tuesday to stand with her and all supporting her as I do.

More than 1.5 million people signed up before I did.

@band Thank you!

I haven't been able to get my Threads account to show up here yet, but I am following 2 of my other 4 ActivityPub / Mastodon connected accounts.

@band interesting! I missed this.

This evening I started following myself on other instances in the fediverse. I hope I don't see myself as “creepy”.

I couldn't find one of my instances so I don't know what to think of that discovery. I may have to think about it in the other instances and see if something resonates there.

(I really wanted to follow my Threads instance. Also would be nice to federate with BlueSky, but they only federate with themself).

@evan We both have O’Reilly subscriptions (his is part of tuition), but also pointed him to the virtual launch to take part.

This weekend my son calls and asks if I know about Mastodon as he is leading the tech side of a new product that made its way into the university's venture club (it is a grad school project) and the MBA students behind want to use Mastodon and potentially #activitypub for a small slice of what they are doing.

I said yes, and that parked the conversation for now. I pointed him to @evan's book for the following discussion.

I wasn't expecting that conversation.

@thomasfuchs Eurovision is incredibly political and I'm not sure it hasn't always been. Russia has been banned for the last two years.

The non-European entries are always curious (Australia and Isreal) to me, but I’m an outside looking in.

@thomasfuchs I'm just starting to pay attention to the Eurovision happenings of the week.

I through the event had started, as I hadn't sorted out the time yet, but I know it is normally an 20h British start time and 21h European start. I always things are going to change and I'm going to miss it. I've watched / followed it for about 18 year now (after being in Amsterdam in 2006 and wondered why it was empty after a dinner with friends. I had it explained to me and shown.

@thomasfuchs How are you watching? I'm looking for a non US version.

@evan Not often you see a Christian Brother's habit in a social media feed.

Interesting story. Thanks!

This NPR segment was interesting, but I don't know that it was fully new. I caught it in the car and hoped for find a trascript, but nope…

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/18/1232301993/a-new-study-finds-the-memory-systems-that-give-trivia-champions-an-edge

The part that was interesting is people remembering trivia well and other don't. There are patterns that work for people who are prone to this type of recall, but the patterns don't seem to work for others.

@band This is one of the things I need to work through.

I'm catching up on podcasts as back in the kitchen making rather than grabbing.

Last evening started on the FLOSS Weekly with @dsearls interviewing @evan about ActivityPub and more. - https://twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/episodes/759?autostart=false

I haven't heard Evan in a while, but this last year or two been listening to David J. Malen on Harvard's CS50 courses and couldn't sort out who I knew that sounded incredibly similar to him. Connection made.

Both FLOSS Weekly w/ Evan and CS50 are worth your time to at least investigate.

@band Then there is sorting out a digital garden, which may be semi-collaborative with something like Massive Wiki.

@band Using side notes on both sides (if side doesn’t have importance) could give space with alternating paragraphs so not getting overlapping notes in the margins.

Yesterday catching up on notes in Obsidian I pulled in a transcript of a talk and finally used @TfTHacker ’s Cornell Notes to add quick annotations.

I used it on a multi-column interface with 3 columns and the left panel open, so things are a little narrow, but yet it still worked well.

@band This is part of all of this that draws attention to many vastly conflicting tensions.

The early-ish OpenAI of safety and a good path forward that drew my interest years back I had assumed had been fully shelved and caution kicked to the curb for commercial success.

When Microsoft made their deal and dumped much of their internal efforts and their ethics teams, I figured old OAI was long gone. Seems it was in just frozen in carbon and now thawed.

@band The safety vs. commerce conflict seems like it ran / runs deep. It runs squarely at some questions and concerns I’ve had. There seems to have been two very much opposing understandings of reality at play.

Oddly, it seems the commercial push was also at odds with itself in a few places, which is really odd, but not surprising.

How it was handled is really nuts.