my main LLM use case thus far has definitely been thesaurus. it's fun to be able to describe the sense of the word i want, not just spider a graph from some related word as with conventional thesauri. and it's nice to be able to ask for more options providing more hints about what i'm after. but it hasn't been a miracle. it only occasionally offers good candidate words i haven't already considered. most are inevitably bad choices or words i've considered. still, on net it's been helpful.

@franktaber@mas.to @marick i guess you'd like to think noting characteristics of the conveyance would be part of their standard process. but you'd like to think a lot of things, or i would.

@franktaber@mas.to @marick i feel like shelling out ~$5 for certified mail should signal costly genuine interest. but i guess there do exist some very wealthy astroturfers.

@Alon how would you characterize Mastodon?

@design_law hypothesis: if everyone learns swedish we will have better economic policy.

N=1, but it's an undeniable empirical regularity.

i was never an active facebook user, so the comparison is hard for me. i did find twitter a place for interaction with communities of common interest. i find here to be that too, but only some, a particular subset, of my interests seem common. and many of the particular people i used to interact with remain divided between bluesky and twitter. my community here is mostly (not entirely!) new.

we use "visitation" to describe what ghosts do to mortals, and what the unincarcerated do to the incarcerated.

there is perhaps something hopeful in the analogy.

does the Department of Homeland Security (or the Department of Defense for that matter) pay a lot of attention to targets like GitHub or Sonatype?

It’s frustrating, what of my old policy-centric conversation does not remain with economists-who-don’t-give-a-fuck still on Twitter has mostly migrated to BlueSky rather than Mastodon. But I don’t know that I trust BlueSky not just to be Twitter with a make-over yet. And it's hard for me to track / decide where to post over multiple microblogospheres, so if I ever do jump into BlueSky, I expect to feel torn, friction, confusion, as I do like the community I've found here.

@dougjballoon this is my favorite random post in a while. may your COVID be a blessing, so mild it doesn't matter except for the amazing Scooby-themed creativity and memory for you and your kid.

"If it has to query a backend to load it will one day die." @Chronotope https://aramzs.xyz/essays/the-internet-is-a-series-of-webs/

@grmpyprogrammer after the war, before Canada, was he in Germany or Romania? (lots of Romanian Transylvania is Saxon in architecture and history, but much of that population was displaced by/after the war.)

it used to be that when you write to your senator or congressional representative, you’d always get a response.

usually just a dumb, barely responsive form-letter precomposed about whatever issue you addressed. but still. something.

nowadays i find it is usually nothing. there is just no response, whether the communication is by submitting an online form, or sending certified postal mail.

i know. i am old.

@lauren new logo will be a shiny 3D apple with a bit of surface cut out revealing cranial tissue beneath.

@soc it’s just a place we still live. a nice place! we like it here!

this post could have been a meeting.

[new draft post] Authority minimization https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2024/06/09/authority-minimization/index.html

@scott i mean i would, look at us.

but i think yours is a fine intervention and a criticism well made!

and i sure hope that nobody's skin is thin enough to block you.

@scott (thanks for letting me know. i'll try to write a response to that response soon. but yours will be better!)

@scott i have great confidence that it would.