Alan Jacobs

I’ve often written in praise of RSS — see the tag — as a Better Way to read stuff online than any social media platform could possibly be. There are a thousand ways to use RSS, but if you happen to have a Mac an especially good one is NetNewsWire, the app that, many years ago, introduced me to RSS reading. NetNewsWire is free, and here’s a post from its developer Brent Simmons explaining why. I also like the document on NetNewsWire’s Github page — it’s open-source — explaining what you can do to support the app, since you can’t pay money for it. Excerpt:

Write a blog instead of posting to Twitter or Facebook. (You can always re-post to those places if you want to extend your reach.) Micro.blog is one good place to get going, but it’s not the only one.

Use an RSS reader even if it’s not NetNewsWire. (There are a bunch of good ones!)

Teach other people to use RSS readers. Blog about RSS readers. And about other open web technologies and apps.

Suggest apps for macopenweb.com.

Write Mac and iOS apps that promote use of the open web.

Donate to charities that promote literacy.

Tell other people about cool blogs and feeds you’ve found.

Support indie podcast apps.

For Chat-Based AI, We Are All Once Again Tech Companies’ Guinea Pigs - WSJ:

Celeste Kidd, a professor of psychology at University of California, Berkeley, studies how people acquire knowledge. Her research has shown that people learning about new things have a narrow window in which they form a lasting opinion. Seeing misinformation during this critical initial period of exposure to a new concept—such as the kind of misinformation that chat-based AIs can confidently dispense—can do lasting harm, she says.

Dr. Kidd likens OpenAI’s experimentation with AI to exposing the public to possibly dangerous chemicals. “Imagine you put something carcinogenic in the drinking water and you were like, ‘We’ll see if it’s carcinogenic.’ After, you can’t take it back—people have cancer now,” she says.

Charlie Stross:

The thing I find most suspicious/fishy/smelly about the current hype surrounding Stable Diffusion, ChatGPT, and other AI applications is that it is almost exactly six months since the bottom dropped out of the cryptocurrency scam bubble.

This is not a coincidence.