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Roberto Chignoli I started playing piano again recently, after a 20 year hiatus. Our 6 year old Brooke started learning, and we suddenly had a keyboard in the house again, so I joined her. It’s been great! I’m playing scales and exercises, diving into Rachmaninoff and Debussy, and working up to tackling Gershwin’s Rhapsody in […]
over a year ago

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More from essay – snarfed.org

Interactive navigation in embedding space

tdjgordon, Pixabay Discussed a fascinating idea for a foundation model tool at lunch today: interactive navigation in embedding space. Right now, you prompt most generative models with human language. That works, but it’s imprecise and coarse. If you’re generating an image of an outside scene, and you want the sunlight ever so slightly brighter, you […]

5 months ago 69 votes
Tech pace layers

I’ve been a fan of Stewart Brand‘s Pace Layering for decades now. Really great framework for thinking about how different ecosystems and emergent forces interact. I’ve been thinking about a tech version of it for the better part of a year, and I finally took advantage of the holiday break to bang out a rough […]

6 months ago 84 votes
Possible futures for Bridgy Fed

Tomorrowland / Walt Disney People regularly ask me whether Bridgy Fed is ready to scale and support more users. It’s a technical question, but their underlying motivation is usually broader: they believe in the social web, and the fediverse(s), and they want them to connect everyone who’s willing, across instances and networks and protocols. Right […]

8 months ago 73 votes
Sleep is so weird

Ian Dyball Our bodies are designed such that we need to lose consciousness, entirely, for a full third of every day. This is evidently necessary for some kind of regular brain maintenance, maybe forming long term memories, who knows what else. If we don’t sleep, we quickly become groggy and non-functional. Really? Evolutionarily, this is […]

a year ago 55 votes
Moderate people, not code

Dixit / Marie Cardouat The scope of the fediverse has been hotly debated recently. Are we a big fedi? Or a small fedi? Are instances just nodes? Or networked communities? Which Camp of Mastodon are we in? How far should our replies travel? How about our blog posts and Bluesky skeets? Should we welcome Threads? […]

a year ago 53 votes

More in startups

The Remarkable Incompetence At The Heart Of Tech

Hello premium subscribers! Today I have the first guest post I've ever commissioned (read: paid) on Where's Your Ed At - Nik Suresh, one of the greatest living business and tech writers, best-known for his piece I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

15 hours ago 5 votes
At least five interesting things: Bad Policy edition (#67)

ICE backlash; progressive bumbling; antisocial Americans; bad inflation data; the Roaring 20s; AI politics; China vs. America

20 hours ago 3 votes
AI and immigration uncertainty threaten Nigeria’s dreams of becoming an outsourcing hot spot

The West African nation wants to become the next global outsourcing hub, but as AI takes over basic tech tasks and U.S. visa hurdles rise, replicating India’s success could be challenging.

20 hours ago 2 votes
Trump is enabling Chinese power

An incompetent, selfish, inwardly focused administration is making America less of an obstacle to China's rise.

3 days ago 6 votes
Fed up with ChatGPT, Latin America is building its own

Dozens of organizations in the region have partnered to develop a large language model that better understands Latin America’s cultural and linguistic nuances.

4 days ago 8 votes