27 Comments

Yay she's back

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Yes, please use this newsletters as your new twitter feed :)

I am hoping the decline of social media brings back the vibrant ecosystem of blogs we used to have that search engines and big tech mostly destroyed.

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I like the newsletter, and I like it as a place where you write about things you're motivated enough about to write slowly on. I like your Mastodon feed as your new Twitter feed; I like the newsletter as place for humanist takes on technology. I'm not that into LinkedIn, but don't let that stop you. Post as the spirit moves you.

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From your post about getting better at keeping up with research papers - how exactly did you fine tune the LinkedIn feed? I’d love to make that a more useful tool!

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This was a tricky and long-invovled process! Basically I became SUPER active on LinkedIn and started liking the few ML posts on my feed. When I saw a particularly thoughtful post, I went to that person's page and followed them. LinkedIn's feed is very strong in followed signals and soon I was getting good content, and the content that those people liked, too. I also joined ML-related groups, where posts and people's feeds also came up.

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Love seeing this burst of insight amidst the darkening social media fog and increasing noise. I'm reverting to substack and LinkedIn for those I follow. Too many podcasts now although an AI/ML-powered digest of podcast content might generate something of interest if headline summaries of the transcripts (and translations) could be generated as a quickly-scannable TOC. Appreciate the time you put into this for us on the fringe of Normcore Tech.

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LinkedIn and Substack sound directionally right to me too. I've been dabbling in transcribing podcasts with Whisper and it works surprisingly well - I wouldn't be surprised if there was already a startup out there working on aggregation. https://gist.github.com/veekaybee/3cd4f7f417f8eb83a40eecaeed1fd83a

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Thank you for the link to Whisper podcast transcription. I hope there is a start-up working on aggregation of it.

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This newsletter is the only thing that gives me comfort in this crazy internet world, aside from coffee. Also TikTok is clearly in decline too. It seems they have to bend and break their nearly perfect recommendation algorithm to fit the laws and politics of each country they are present and it's totally killing the vibe. TikTok in Thailand is incredibly stupid and boring.

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Yes please more newsletters!

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as usual, you tap into what's going on in my head. Cal Newport has been talking about social breaking into niche apps rather than mass apps like fb, the bird, etc - which is what seems to be happening now. have to admit that i like mastodon because the browser ui and the geekiness of it reminds me of elm.

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It was an interesting experiment for me but seems like the initial wave has waned

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I find your newsletter posts thoughtful, memorable and valuable. The tweets are (usually) lost in the ether amidst all the other content and forgotten quickly. But I'm an elder millennial so that's how I consume media.

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I look forward to reading your thoughts on ShitStack Chat. The best place for shit posting (from top sites for shitposting Feb 2023).

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Damn didn’t realize Meta was branching out

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We can be the Meta it always needed to be. Without the freaky avatars

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See you on openTwang!

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Actually I'm on nnk3.0 now, openTwang started charging for premium features

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...but I like being a Twang Insider (Elite!)

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I think we need to bring back WUPHF https://youtu.be/yL1z1ZHD0K4

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I can't believe this is the first time I'm seeing this

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have you seen the Office episode on it? one of my favs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WUPHF.com

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I suggest a Normcore Tech Podcast!

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Tyler you are trying to kill me

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Another thought I have is that maybe this is an opportunity to work on a side project: an RSS feed aggregator, recommender, and search engine, exclusively for blogs. No big corporate sites. Just blogs.

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Doesn't sound like it would take long at all 😭

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I miss the old RSS readers and services like Bloglines or Google Reader. I used Feedly for awhile but it was too expensive to use all the features and it wasn’t that good from UX perspective.

Maybe time to write my own!

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