Gabriel 🧱🚧🌐

"I would prefer not to"

~ Herman Melville

In our culture, convenience and frictionlessness are seen as virtues, but I think inconvenience and friction are much more virtuous and generative.

"We speak often about ideas as brainchildren. What we do not realize is that brainchildren, like all babies, should not be dragged from the creative womb prematurely. We must learn to wait for an idea to hatch." — Julia Cameron

My take is that Meta and Threads have played the game well. They immediately capitalised on the moment in 2023 when decentralisation and Twitter-alternatives got large-scale attention, and knew how to say the right buzzwords to ride the wave. It got them in the right light for regulators, and gave them something tangible to point out to say ‘hey we’re doing interoperability now!’. The fediverse turned out to be highly vulnerable to such a strategy, a sitting duck for Big Tech companies to pluck some good PR from. That it turned the fediverse against itself, resulting in vicious and endless arguments about whether servers should block Threads, and whether Threads joining the fediverse validated the movement, was only a nice bonus. By slowly rolling out an implementation over the years Threads built their own positive-PR machine, every slight update worthy of a new article that put ‘Meta’ and ‘Interoperability’ in the headlines again. That nobody ever really used the integration between Threads and the fediverse never really seemed to matter, only the hypothetical future mattered. Nor did the press seem particularly interested in reporting on the fact that marginally few people seemed to be using the connection between the fediverse and Threads. Still, the company found itself a place at the table for protocol conversations about ActivityPub, which might pay dividend in the future if the need arises. GGWP to Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Mosseri, for the skillful execution that helped Meta significantly, nestled themselves into the fediverse were it ever to become useful again, and taking some of the wind out of Bluesky’s sails as well as a bonus.

Threads is effectively shelving their fediverse integration, after it saw marginally little use

Zuck has played the game well, harming both open protocol movements while growing his platform, getting good PR and distracting regulators

connectedplaces.online/reports/fedi...

What if instead of at the file system level, it was one step lower at the data level?

Venture Commons would be nice.

But the whole "venture" thing predicates risk for a potential asymmetric fortune.

But investing in a commons predicates risk for symmetric collective flourishing.

The 'risk' is still there, but the 'fortune' needs to shift from 'cashing out' to 'living in/with'.

They do in Finding Nemo

YouTube video by Sensemaking Scenius Making Sense of Open-Source: Ideals, Reality, and What's on the Horizon

Full recording of the event here:
youtu.be/ZhHeEU-78CU

I tried to stream a YouTube playlist of mine on loop but YouTube seems to blur out video screen recorded by OBS 💀

I'll probably have to loop a video locally on VLC. I've got a good one for that actually.

What coding with an LLM feels like sometimes.

Sorry I had to kill the stream, I was having audio and feedback issues with OBS and didn't have the bandwidth to figure it out while also moderating.

I will git gud at OBS before next time...

@gabriel-export.bsky.social is 🔴LIVE on stream.place! Making Sense of Open-Source: Ideals, Reality, and What's on the Horizon

🔴 LIVE https://stream.place/gabriel-export.bsky.social Making Sense of Open-Source: Ideals, Reality, and What's on the Horizon

There is an ongoing war for the soul of "Open-Source". We lost the battle, but we don't have to lose the war.

On Dec 3rd, @kpaxle.bsky.social and I are co-hosting a discussion with members of @scenius.bsky.social: @ranganaut.bsky.social, @erlend.sh, and Regis Chapman.

RSVP here!
luma.com/z9ivf64k

YouTube video by Louis Rossmann Change your profile picture to clippy. I'm serious

This simple non-violent protest was started by Louis Rossmann.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_Dt...

Tired of corporations abusing your brain, extracting your money, data, time, ownership, and privacy, and enforcing hidden agendas through censorship?

Make your pfp a Clippy to recall a bygone era of software that was genuine, helpful, and not evil.

#ClippyClipsBack

Trump take egg

As in, other than ChatGPT?

Bluesky needs to support hashtags.

The fact that we all unknowingly became a distributed LLM model trainer due to being required to fill out captchas in order to do anything online. 🫥👌
#digitallabortheory

Once again:

WAR SHOULD NOT BE TREATED AS A SPORT IN WHICH WE WAVE OUR FLAGS AND ROOT FOR OUR TEAM.

THE ONLY WINNER IS PEACE.

Everyone and everything else loses.

Is loss.

Is lost.

Stumbled upon this foundational academic work about AI written in 1994 at a used book store.

That underline...how far we've come. Imaginations are now reality. #GPT #AI #linguistics #LLMs

Why does every Oregon gas station have the shittiest UX? It's unreal how bad it is.

Collateral knowledge

The owner of the laundromat is tailoring the music based on his perception of what people like.

He noticed people liked "Beat It" by MJ and now we're in an MJ playlist and people are dancing. 😂

Get yourself to a damn laundromat.

Laundromats are so underrated; they're one of the living pulses of a community.

Talk with the locals, check out the community boards, take life slow for a few minutes.

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." - Yogi Berra

"Things are in the saddle
And ride mankind."
- Emerson

What if they don't rent? What if the community co-owns the land they live on?

Maybe the payment doesn't have to be financial. Mutual aid and alternative forms of value exchange have a lot to teach us I think

Super excited to attend DWebCamp2023 this year!

If you're interested in / want to discuss the idea of community-driven collaborative design, I'll be facilitating a book discussion of "The Timeless Way of Building" by Christopher Alexander on Thursday the 22nd!