markjgsmith

2023/11/23 #

• Gruber and Rivera - Just listenned to the latest Talk Show episode, John talks with Gave Rivera who built and runs Techmeme, which has been probably the most influential tech news aggregator site for the past 15 years. In this age of AI wizardry maybe social media seems a bit dull and boring, but I found the conversation to be very interesting. There's a lot of movement in social media and online news at the minute, and Techmeme has been at the centre of it all for over a decade.

  Loads of interesting topics including the story of Techmeme, early web, technorati, advertising, how the web has changed, RSS and Google Reader, HTML and web crawling, the rise of paywalls and hostile sites, the decline of blogs, the rise of Twitter, reducing friction in UIs, linkblogging / linkposting, Twitter killing blog comments, Threads/Mastodon/Bluesky, selling out vs being an indie publisher, Twitter’s character constraint, social media variety and fragmentation fatigue, federation and ActivityPub, Threads and APIs, Elon Musk breaking Twitter, the rename to X, and our AI future. #

Today’s links:

• HTML Web Components - Chris Ferdinandi comments on Jeremy Keith's HTML Web Components piece from earlier in the week. He's got a great example of how they can be used to enhance existing HTML, massively reducing the amount of code needed in a recent Nasa project he's been working on. Pretty cool. gomakethings.com #

• Welcome to the Next Era of Loom - I haven't used this product but the feature descriptions sound awesone. It's an AI that watches your videos and automatically does tedious things you normally have to do yourself like creating a title and description, but it can also summarize discussion points, aggregate tasks and even create chapters for easy navigation. It's really impressive, I could imagine that these sorts of tools will make working with video really attractive for teams. I'd love to have some of these features in my static site generator. www.loom.com #

• Sam Altman to return as CEO of OpenAI - It would be interesting to compare the complexity of these big tech events over time. Similar to how in code you can measure cyclic complexity, it seems the blow ups are ever more complex and over shorter and shorter timescales. Eventually...I'm not sure, do all our heads explode? Or perhaps a massively distributed never ending race condition, like a star-trek-phazers-on-stun-appocalypse? www.theverge.com #

• Everything is a file - "Everything is a file" describes one of the defining features of Unix, and its derivatives--that a wide range of input/output resources such as documents, directories, hard-drives, modems, keyboards, printers and even some inter-process and network communications are simple streams of bytes exposed through the filesystem name space. en.wikipedia.org #