I have found voice input to be super helpful. I use it entirely for prose: notes, tasks, and reminders. I **don't** use it to make the machine "do things" or for coding (but that's just me ... you do you; and also, I don't use it for coding **yet**).

I currently use two tools:

* Spokenly (phone + laptop)
* Just Press Record (watch + phone)

Each has advantages. Both produce transcriptions which I then "route" to the appropriate place (Things, Obsidian, Fantastical) with Sharing.

Just Press Record also runs on my watch, so I can use it while driving or other situations where the phone is inconvenient, illegal, or unavailable. I can later look at a list and handle them one at a time or in bulk.

Spokenly is significantly more accurate. You pick the underlying model, so you can decide if you want local-only (as I do, so no fees of any kind), size (controls memory used and speed of translation, at the cost of accuracy), and what spoken languages it knows. You can switch at will; and you don't have to have the same model on your phone as on your laptop. You typically handle results in Spokenly immediately (for a while I thought this was the only choice), but they are saved and you can look at them all in History and deal with them from there.

I'm still playing with which models are the best balance of speed and accuracy for my use case. On my phone I'm using "Distil-Whisper Small (English Only)". On my Mac, the same but "Medium".

This doesn't **sound** like a huge win. I certainly didn't expect much when I decided to try it. But it turns out to punch far above its weight.

#VoiceInput #Spokenly #JustPressRecord #Things #Obsidian #Fantastical #Productivity

Open letter from employees of Google and OpenAI in support of Anthropic:

"They’re trying to divide each company with fear that the other will give in. That strategy only works if none of us know where the others stand. This letter serves to create shared understanding and solidarity in the face of this pressure from the Department of War."

The leadership of all the AI companies is fascinating to me. Dario Amodei perhaps the most so. I thought his essay Machines of Loving Grace was excellent, but I’ve watched many interviews with him and I sometimes come away kind of depressed about the future.

Kann man machen, finde ich sogar gut. Dann aber bitte wie bei Software: public money, public art – also freie Nutzung unter freier Lizenz!

Der Meinung bin ich übrigens auch bei durch Subventionen, Abgaben oder Steuern finanzierten Medien.

Irland zahlt Künstlerinnen und Künstlern 325 Euro Grundeinkommen pro Woche

https://www.spiegel.de/kultur/kunst-in-irland-325-euro-pro-woche-dauerhaftes-grundeinkommen-vom-staat-a-2dcb2294-f7c8-4c34-a7de-d3ab82c709b6

#BGE #Irland #copyleft

Make or Buy Decision: should you build it yourself or buy it?

Applies to software, businesses, and life. Time is your scarcest resource. Spend it wisely.

And with AI, this game changed a lot.

https://concepts.dsebastien.net/concept/make-or-buy-decision

Notes for FediForum meetup

The FediForum home page says "the Open Social Web still has only a tiny fraction of the users of the closed social media platforms, and growing that number significantly has turned out harder than expected." This is the premise of their next conference, on March 2, a little over a month from now.

Why don't people switch to Mastodon?

• It's hard to use.
• Twitter beat RSS because it was so damned hard to subscribe to a feed in RSS, and with Twitter it was a single click. Mastodon has the same problem. You might want to think of coming up with a Mastodon Lite that trades off some of the decentralization for ease of use. Not sure how that would work. But I promise you — you all are having the same problems we had with RSS. People wouldn't work together, Twitter blew right through that.
• If you want to get an idea why adoption is slow for Mastodon, take a typical task, responding to a post, and write down the actual steps you have to go through. It'll be a long list, and every one of those steps is a reason someone will give up and go back to Bluesky or Twitter.

Does it matter if people use Bluesky?

• What are you actually accomplishing by using Bluesky?
• It's not decentralized. Bluesky could shut down any developer or all developers any time they want.
• It's not replaceable. Pretty sure it never will be.
• People get confused because they have an API. Twitter has had an API since inception. It broke when Musk took over, but it works again. Bluesky breaks developers too, and if they want to be part of the "open web" why didn't they just use the existing standards of the web.
• Bluesky at some point decided to clone Twitter, which is fine — it's actually a better twitter than Twitter is. But once they did that, it becaume impossible for it to be federated, because Twitter has features that can't be federated, that depend on it being centralized. Again the realities of software kick in, you can't do what's impossible.

Start over

• The only way imho to achieve your goal is to start over.
• Start with a simple to install server and make it peer-to-peer at the server level from the beginning.
• No features go in that don't work in that mode. Now see what you can make that's social.

Who owns Bluesky?

• You have to start thinking about who is behind these companies.
• Mastodon I believe is what it appears to be. I don't think you have to worry about anyone breaking developers there.
• But Bluesky appears to be a pretty normal tech startup, except we know much less about its backers than we usually do.
• They disclosed a $15 million investment two years ago. Have they raised more money? No idea. Do we know who their original backers are? We know who the founders of the Blockchain Capital fund are, but that's all that's publicly known, as far as I can tell.

Open social web

• You should leave out the "open" part — because it's implied by "web."
• And imho neither of the products is connected to the web.
• There's more to being on the web than being able to use the product in a web browser.

Why do I keep saying this stuff?

• Because I think a social web wouldn't just be nice to have, I think we need it, last year, not next year. (Actually we needed it twenty years ago.)
• You guys have been wandering.
• And the biggest flaw in your culture is that you don't listen.
• If you want to bootstrap something of significance, you should always be looking for clues of things that will work.
• Just coming out with something that's a labor of love basically what you have now does not help you find the magic spot where it grows virally on its own.
• I speak from decades of experience trying to do products that do what you say you want, sometimes with success. Sometimes with huge success. I know what it's like to find the sweet spot at the right time.
• But I say things you don't want to hear. Like this — you have not found the answer from a product standpoint.
• When we look back at this I want to be sure people know I tried.
• And ultimately I think we will succeed and I think some of you folk could help. 🙂

A pair of good rules

• Things that can be decentralized should be.
• Things that should be centralized should be.

Want to comment?

• I recommend using the Mastodon version of this post.

• Mastodon.

• WordPress

• RSS feed.

• My blog.

Growing the Open Social Web, an un-workshop from the FediForum folks with a new format:

"Prior to the un-workshop, we invite participants to submit a short post or position paper that summarizes their own perspectives on the subject. […] In advance of the event, we distribute a (lightly curated) set of these position papers to other participants of the un-workshop for preparation."

I like this. I’m traveling that day so might miss it, but maybe some Micro.blog people would like to participate.

"A single blackout day in Minnesota wasn’t enough. It would need to be nationwide, and more like a week or even a month, of no discretionary spending. A complete freeze of the citizenry’s pocketbooks for anything other than pure survival. Put off that iPhone upgrade. Cancel subscriptions, especially tech subscriptions such as GenAI. Don’t go out to eat. Don’t shop. Don’t buy online. Don’t support any businesses. Eat and pay the bills. Nothing else."

https://www.davidtoddmccarty.com/the-second-american-civil-war-has-begun/

#democracy