Saturday, July 5, 2025
It occurred to me that we don‘t currently have very good ways of describing what it's like to use these new AI tools. In yesterday's blog post about VSCode and exoskeletons, I used an image of an futuristic soldier wearing an exoskeleton brandishing a huge machine gun. It looks cool, but on reflection it‘s not such a good analogy for AI tools. It probably wouldn‘t be on my mind so much, if there weren‘t escalating conflicts seemingly all over the world. I don't like that at all, we shouldn‘t be fighting each other.
I am reminded of Eisenhower's Farewell Address (1961), and his warning seems ever more prescient these days, everywhere I look the war machine appears to be gearing up on an enormous sales drive. Anyway all to say that we need better ways to describe these tools, because though defense is important, there are a lot of other reasons people build things. #
Mentioned on recent Rabbit Hole Recap Ep#363, Primal will be adding inbound and maybe outbound RSS [1:12:52] to their media publishing tool. Might be of interest if you are into RSS and the open web. I'm not sure it's exactly what some RSS enthusiasts have been pushing for, and they do shill their bags a bit, but if you get past that, the added RSS support is kinda cool, and there's a lot of synergy of underlying values between Nostr and RSS / the open web. It would be great if inbound and outbound RSS turned into a trend on social media platforms. I've been talking about it for a while now. #
Matt ODell [1:13:50]: “Yeah so Primal Studio the idea is let's make a first class publishing tool that competes with the big guys. Meta, X, Tick Tock, Substack [...] and open standards are awesome, people are posting to Substack, people are posting on Ghost, people are posting on their own websites, but it would be really great for them to have native Nostr long form posts that people can Zap and interact with that are signed and have all the other benefits in terms of verifiability that Nostr posts have. How do we make it as easy as possible for them? So on Primal Studio you can go in and you can important an RSS feed. So all of these things use the open standard called RSS. You import the RSS feed, as new posts are sent onto your RSS feed, through Substack or Ghost or whatever, they appear in your Primal Studio dashboard and they are automatically magically formatted for Nostr to the best of our ability, and we will get better at that over time. You go through it, you make sure everything looks good, and you can either post immediately or schedule a post [...] and because Nostr is an open platform it’s relatively easy to create RSS feeds automatically from Nostr feeds [...] and we will be adding the classic OAuth signin flow for things like Substack or X, so you can go into Primal Studio and you can do one post and it can go out to all your platforms.” #
Minister tells Turing AI institute to focus on defence - Really feels like it‘s the end of quarter rush to secure military contracts at the minute. The politicians are basically the sales guys. It‘s crazy. bbc.com #
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he's 'politically homeless' in July 4 post bashing Democrats - Interesting thing for him to say right after the very public issues with politics Elon has been having. It‘s like Musk went into the lion‘s den, confirmed that politics really is a terribly dirty game, and now nobody knows what to do. cnbc.com #
Elon Musk confirms xAI is buying an overseas power plant and shipping the whole thing to the U.S. to power its new data center - It‘s all about power, and the numbers are mindboggling. I keep hearing that China is bringing online the equivalent of an entire USA‘s power capacity every 18 months. tomshardware.com #
Ilya Sutskever takes command of Safe Superintelligence as Gross jumps ship to Meta - The AI sector at the minute is like what happens at the edges of coral reefs and the deep ocean. Twice a day as the tides change, there is a massive feeding frenzy from tiny plankton all the way up to enormouns whales. It‘s really quit something to see. cryptopolitan.com #
Michael Madsen, 'Reservoir Dogs' and 'Kill Bill' actor, dies at 67 - I saw this yesterday. All the people I grew up watching just keep dying everywhere. It sucks. abcnews.go.com #