markjgsmith

I got gifted some tshirts and a few trousers yesterday evening. The trousers have a sort of skater style, baggy at the top and they get tighter towards the ankles. I’m into them. I never quite got into skateboarding growing up, I couldn’t afford all the shoes it would have required, but I could just about olly, kick flip and varial 180. I was more into the look though. It went well with the grunge scene of the time. Anyway it’s nice to be wearing something with long legs, I’ve been wearing shorts for so long, I can’t even remember the last time I wore long legged trousers. It’s definitely multiple years.

I went through and tidied up some of my daily notes, which is why there was a bit of a flurry of odds and ends posts yesterday. I’m still kind of bummed that I lost a blog post. I think it was pretty good. It was about AI and podcasting. Oh well.

I still have to write the newsletter. Better get to it. #

Matt Odell [12:36]: "A16z is the mother asshole that all this other bullshit came out of. They were early investors in Facebook, early investors in Twitter, they created Paypal. All the dystopian big tech shit that everyone complains about, ALL links back to a16z. And these guys are now in Mar-a-lago, they are in the Whitehouse. There is going to be some good benefits, and there’s going to be a lot of infuriating bullshit I think. And we'll see it playout every week on RHR."

Great observation, but also much respect for the instinctive level realisation that he was mid sound bite, effortlessy adding a show plug at the end there. #

Keith Tear [03:40]: "He’s considered to be bad because he’s allowing people we all disagree with to speak. Well what’s wrong with that? People should be allowed to speak. There’s nothing he’s doing which is in any way either right wing or negative. Yet he’s demonised for being this terrible person, when actually he’s the best of us. He’s actually the best of us." #

cat << EOF > Memeplexes, Podcasting & the Movies (Issue #194)

This week’s newsletter is out!

In this week’s edition:

Degrass on maybes & buddhism, MSM vs podcasting, chatting programmers, memeplexes & memetics, BTC and Reddit, Tarantino & Avery, and our bots heavy future

Issue details:

• Title: Memeplexes, Podcasting & the Movies
• Issue: 194
• Page: issue webpage

Another awesome issue of the newsletter. #

Businesses as mini-governments? Discuss.

• Isn’t a complete Labour win, a situation where the business owner makes as little as possible, and the employees make as much as possible?
• Isn’t that essentially "minimal government"?
• Isn’t that essentially a conservative government?

My brain is broken now.

• Won’t business owners eventually have to be actors on the government’s payroll?
• This is only partially ridiculously absurd, remember we have had actor presidents since Reagan. Why wouldn’t that eventually spread to all businesses?
• Isn’t that the big problem with Labour governments, that it always boils down to an X for we but not for thee situation?

cat << EOF > Inbound RSS for social media?

In this multi polar social media world, where not only do we have Twitter, but also Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, Truth Social, Nostr and countless others, wouldn’t it make sense to offer inbound RSS as a standard feature?

The way it might work:

• Platforms provide a way for users to set an RSS feed in their profile
• Anything that appears in the feed gets posted to the users social media account
• Crucially each platform implements a way to handle text, truncation, conversion to a multi post thread, images, video, support for basic HTML / markdown

That’s the basic idea but you could add lots of interesting features, like for example filters that use RSS categories, or prefix/postfix text etc.

This would enable existing independent writers and bloggers to join the network at no cost. And once they start seing engagement they will naturally start interacting with readers of their content.

It has the potential to be a huge competitive advantage against other social networks. And a great simple fallback in case everything is fucked, because those that use the feature will have a copy of their content. It would enable people to join many more networks than without such a feature.

There are auto-poster services available, but I’ve found them to be unreliable. Much better would be the platforms themselves to give their users the tools to import the content they are already writting out on the open web. Yes we will at some point have potentially better social media protocols like ActivityPub and AT protocol, but both can exist at the same time, by supporting RSS you will increase the size of your on-ramp considerably. #