Technology

The Writer’s Web

Dave Winer asks: “What does the writer’s web mean to you?” He’s been working on tools for writing on the web for, oh maybe twenty years, and recently gained some speed and released WordLand, his conception, in early stages, of a writer’s tool.

Well, to begin to answer Dave’s question, I’ll start by saying I’m by no means a voluble person on the web. Elsewhere, yes, I can bloviate with the best of us. And I regularly need to write for my paid employment and volunteer work, and I do quite a lot of editing for other people.

But being voluble’s not a requirement for any writing, or blogging. I have no problem with my sporadic output, though I occasionally want to set some minor production goals, usually to no effect. It’s more natural for me to enjoy the writing as I do it, and having past writing available to read later, sometimes much later. A craft, an intellectual exercise, easily available and easy to pick up.

So, a writer’s web is a larger idea than just my own experience. I’m all for it. More speech is better than less, and we’re at a point of increasing attacks on speech, in the US at least or most notably. We need more writers. As a few of my recent posts show, I’ve been working on providing basic WordPress hosting for an inner circle of friends, so I’m able to directly support a writer’s web.

A big part of that is the writing interface. I’m OK with vanilla Gutenberg in WordPress, with the useful addition of GenerateBlocks from Tom Usborne’s crew. But I’m not sure how good it will be for others. I have a long experience writing with computers and have developed some skills and also some preferences over the years.

Hell, I can write just fine in a desktop publishing program, though I’d rather not. I can write just fine in a text editor, using HTML code. Did it for years. I’ve been interested in Markdown for a long time, but haven’t really put it to use. I see the usefulness of a “no distraction” writing tool. I do a lot of editing of my own work, so the editing part is important – making changes, trying new phrasing or word use.

I can see the usefulness of examining the writing interface, so more later.

One thing I don’t care for is Dave’s tying his tool to WordPress.com. I’ve been avoiding BigCorp, and weaning myself a bit from social media, pivoting to my own website, so I don’t want to use wp.com or Automattic. But I suspect Dave will open it up properly, in keeping with IndieWeb principles, so I’m keeping an open mind and will likely give his latest work a fair shot. I’ve had a wp.com account for years, though I don’t use it.

More later . . .

Don’t Rent, Own

I’m compelled to write something about social media, personal websites, independence. This comes from reading all the bitching about how awful Facebook, Google, Twitter, AI and all the other Big Corp web is. The bitching, plus a longstanding aversion to using BigCorp for communicating.

I agree about the awfulness, but I don’t waste my time bitching about it. I use social media, but understand its limitations. Its basic limitation is, it’s not mine. I don’t own it. Rather, it owns me. Whatever I post at Facebook or other social media platforms is hoovered up by Big Corp so they can build a model of me and relentlessly sell shit to that discorporate model. They also sell my personal information to other Big Corps. They also can just shut me down whenever they feel like it. It’s also designed to be addictive, yay. All one big happy cycle of enshittification.

So, I have a personal website or two (or a dozen). It’s the only way to own my personal presence on the web. I can do pretty much any kind of website thing – blog posts, pages, images, apps, whatever.

www.kevinpadanhayes.com, where you’re reading this right now, or should be reading it, is my primary site, and it’s all mine. It’s almost entirely under my control – the domain name, which is my actual full name, the publishing platform, the web host, everything. Nothing on Big Corp’s servers. Costs me about $100 a year.

I see lots of my creative or small business friends who don’t have any real presence on the web, just a spot on Facebook or Instagram, and think to myself “They could do much better, they need their own place”. I see lots of my politically active friends doing the same and wonder “Why are they advocating for change on Big Corp’s website?”

Having your own place isn’t too hard. Yes, it’s technical, but it doesn’t have to be too technical, and people are available to advise – me being one of those people. It also isn’t free. Remember, if you aren’t paying for a service, you’re not a customer, you’re a product. You’re making money for Big Corp. And BigCorp is my word for those insane billionaires who are fucking everything up right now.

But it also doesn’t have to cost a bunch. I can set people up with their own WordPress website for less than $70 a year. Personal email with your own domain, less than $20/year. Domain name, $20/year. Total, less than $120/year. Simple, secure, performs well. Yes, you can do it cheaper or free, but I don’t advise doing that. You get what you pay for.

Now, I have little bandwidth to do this setting up, but I’m happy to give free advice and will probably write up a guide to doing it yourself. Here’s a work in progress describing the idea in more detail. I’m looking into offering it as a service, to a select group of people. I wouldn’t be making any money on the deal, as I’m not Big Corp and don’t have to relentlessly pursue profit. I also like doing this kind of work, it’s partly a hobby, honed by extensive paid work experience.

Comments are welcome, either emailing me at moc.seyahnadapnivekobfsctd-76b558@nivek or commenting when this post gets posted at Facebook Big Corp. If you’d like me to make you an offer for having your own place on the web or just advise you based on my experience, let me know.

More Later on Free Press

At the end of my Free Press post, I said “More later”, so here’s some more.

Fred Clark talks about using an RSS reader, and links to a journalism site in North Carolina, The Assembly, where the writers tell us they want to to create “new models for state level news”. A wonderful idea, and the site’s full of good in-depth journalism.

We should have more of this. We desperately need it. One way to have more of this is for us to subscribe, pay some money and help them sustain themselves. Of course, if North Carolina’s not of interest or is too far away, find someone local or someone covering topics you find interesting. There are many good journalists out there, in a very discouraging world for journalists. When we find them, let’s support them.

A few words on Fred Clark. He’s a writer of long experience, and a damned good one. He should be getting a living wage from a legitimate publication. Instead, he writes/blogs for Patheos, for what I expect is a pittance. Patheos is a site with a focus on religion (Fred’s a progressive evangelical Christian, with great knowledge and insight to that community).

To feed his family, he works at a big box store – I think Home Depot, but maybe Costco. This is sad, he’s really good at what he does. Nothing wrong with working at Big Box, but our society should support Fred’s talent better. From time to time I send him some money from my meager funds, to show my direct support for his work.

In the post I link to above Fred explains RSS, Really Simple Syndication. An old technology in internet time, but one I use every day with my RSS Reader. As Fred says, it’s a way to bypass BigCorp’s Almighty Algorithm and get articles to read based entirely on what you want to read, not what Mark Zuck’s robots want you to read. I encourage everyone to use an RSS reader, you might like it and it takes the edge off The Algorithm. I have a subscription to The Old Reader.

This post is also a test of syndicating from my personal website to my Bluesky account (@kevinphayes.bsky.social). The idea is to publish here, syndicate elsewhere, such as the social media monster sites. Let’s see how that goes.

It would also be my first Bluesky post, which shows you how much I like that type of web presence. This is an IndieWeb thing, and I love IndieWeb things.

I doubt if I’m the only one who sees “Bluesky” as a last name, perhaps Russian, Ivan Bluesky. I also see it in my head as “Blueski”, maybe someone’s babcia, which I always heard from my Polish-American friends as “botch”. Mrs. Blueski.

More later . . .

Twitter, Bluesky, all that jangly social media shit

I’ve never really used Twitter. I had an account, but it seems Twitter’s approach to publishing, if you can call it that, doesn’t fit with the way my mind works.

It never clicked, not that I tried that hard. I remember thinking, fifteen years ago, “why would anyone want to publish every stray thought?” That’s how I perceived it. Part of it, for me, is I never care to use my phone for anything but voice calls and texts. Anything beyond that is massively difficult, for me anyway, because it’s so goddammed small. I’m a desktop computer user, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Plus, I tend to be guarded and value my privacy, so blipping out my thoughts doesn’t fit in with my usual approach to communication.

I make extensive use of Facebook. As Facebook increases its enshittification pace, the stream of posts is getting cluttered with a lot of robot-produced crap, which I try to knock back with post moderation, to little avail.

The most useful aspects of Facebook are groups. Great ways to discuss specific issues with people having similar interests and experiences. It’s still hobbled by Facebook’s need to monetize as much as they can. The whole “Business” aspect of Facebook is utter crap. I suppose it would get better if we spend money on ads, but I doubt it, the enshittification being as advanced as it is.

My bitches about the business tools are the needless repetition, saying there’s something new when there’s not, and the overall difficulty of finding the thing you need to respond to or work on. It’s a hot mess. I’m not mentioning (as I mention it) that it can bring a bunch of clueless people into my work life, but then it’s part of my job to give clueless people a clue, or at least try. “No, I won’t come get your piano, or your moldy couch (only a little mold, on the bottom, not the seat), or, god forbid, engage with people who don’t have the slightest understanding of the business model of every second hand dealer in the world.

Beyond groups, the promotional features of Facebook are a cheap way to promote the buzz, with some downsides, mostly about me having to engage with clueless people, endlessly explaining why we don’t want their trash and certainly won’t expend any effort to help them with it, even if they paid us, to be honest. I can write about this at length, I think, and may do that, chips fall where they may.

So I closed my Twitter account and opened a Bluesky account at kevinphayes.bsky.social. While the political ambience seems to be better, it’s much the same jangly shit to me. I have enough jangly thoughts in my inattentive head without mainlining it from Twitter or Bluesky or whatever. It’s also no less likely to enshittify than Twitter and Facebook, it’s still venture capital owned and controlled. But it’s healthy to reject Twitter and that insane weirdo Musk.

Mastodon is much more attractive to my Indie Web way of thinking about this sort of thing. Real federation is much better than the existing silos or Bluesky’s proprietary implementation. But I’m no more active at my Mastodon account than anywhere else (see my most recent posts, informing the world about the Buffalo Christmas Blizzard of 2022). It’s still too jangly and nobody’s made a mass exodus as they are doing for Bluesky.

I’m old school, I guess, and am very happy with my RSS reader. Minimal jangle. Still a disciple of Dave Winer and his wise thinking about news, writing and publishing.

Now are you seeing why I write and publish on my own website? It doesn’t belong to anyone but me. I can move it around. Nobody can take it down, at least not yet.

More later . . .

More on AI

I’ve been thinking about LLMs like ChatGPT, which I’m experimenting with right now.

After a hazy recall of a dream last night, it occurred to me, in my experience, LLMs are dreamlike in their oddities and quirks. They put things in that don’t make sense, like in a dream where something out of place is right there, being believed by your sleeping mind.

They’re also stubborn, and seem to have a hard time admitting error.

I’ve definitely been rethinking using my ainimal images for publication or profit. It’s not something I want to do. I expect artificially generated images will take work away from skilled human artists. This is a valid argument. I understand it’s my personal view and also understand others’ use of such images can be justified.

So why is “dreamlike” a good descriptor? It’s the suspension of disbelief LLMs share with the common experience of dreaming. It’s the apparent assumption by the LLM that everything’s fine and correct, when a human can detect it isn’t.

Another thought about the danger of LLMs is simply, we’ve been damaged by technology in many different ways, from the dawn of technology, which is a very long time ago. So the damage being caused by LLMs is just more of the same type of thing. Getting upset by this is a common human experience. It hasn’t been the end of the world up to now. I expect LLMs won’t be the end of the world either.

AI likes the transformer shape, so it puts in extras. And I specified “sparks at the very top of the pole”. It kept putting them in the middle. AI doesn’tunderstand power transmission, at all.

AInimals

I’m experimenting with one of ChatGPT’s image generators. Here are some results. I’ll be writing more about this.

To begin with, it’s not anything close to human intelligence. Kind of dumb, actually, and prone to getting itself stuck in blind alleys. It also has quirks that make it obvious it’s an LLM. Many times I’d ask it to remove a unwanted image part and it would say it did it when it clearly hadn’t.

It’s very plain I’m interacting with just another computer program, a powerful one, of course, but still just a program. It’s quickly clear my input is the most important part of the interaction, needing a lot of thought and careful noting of what the program does with parts of the input prompt.

I went into this experiment to explore ChatGPT’s creative or artistic possibilities. I found it worked well if I simplified a great deal. This isn’t surprising, and fits within my usual aesthetic or design approach of simplify, simplify, simplify. The images here are defined as “image of an animal, 20th century linoleum cut style, contained within a simple circular frame, with lots of white space around the circle, muted colors, only three or four colors maximum, in a square screensize”.

Defining the basic style, such as engraving, lithograph, oil painting etc., gives the program a narrower set of things to choose from when it constructs an image. I’ve been avoiding anything with words, as graphical LLMs have a very hard time, oddly, with words and letters, and can be quite stubborn about insisting it’s spelling or forming letters correctly. It’s good to remember there are humans behind the programming of ChatGPT, who make human decisions based on all kinds of circumstances, such as intellectual property.

Simplification removes some of the quirkiness of LLM, or at least makes the quirks more acceptable. The more complex and realistic renderings tend to have weirdness in the odd place, signs of non-human presence. I’m also not attracted to the discernable AI Style. It’s quite possible I’m just not putting the right words into my prompts.

The program can create some very attractive visual elements, impressively so. Frames, strokes and flourishes are often aesthetically pleasing.

I’m also narrowing down the subject matter, envisioning an “A is for Aardvark” type of sequence. These images appear to be well suited to book or picture form, as well as the web. Children will like them. And everyone likes critters.

More later.

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Later: I’m not going into the social or economic parts of LLM graphical programs. That’s a vast issue by itself, and we’re at the very early stages. We don’t know what real-life impact LLM will have on artists’ fortunes. I’ll write about it at some point, but want for the moment to look at technical and aesthetic aspects of this new thing.

I’m a technologist who’s earned a living in information technology since 1982, so the technical puzzle appeals to my curiosity and I want to see if I can put it to use. I have friends who are very upset at graphical LLMs, coming from an arts professional place. I’m no arts professional, and can be a bit of a money-grubber at times, so it doesn’t feel as dire to me.

P is for Pig

Q is for Quetzal

G is for Gerbil

C is for Cat