Excursions

A wonderful essay on what’s “obvious” to human and how the fallacy that “obviousness is driven by human bias”, which in itself is error prone, can lead to ungrounded, optimistic euphoria, especially around AI.

Knowing what to observe, what might be relevant and what data to gather in the first place is not a computational task — it’s a human one. The present AI orthodoxy neglects the question- and theory-driven nature of observation and perception. The scientific method illustrates this well. And so does the history of science. After all, many of the most significant scientific discoveries resulted not from reams of data or large amounts of computational power, but from a question or theory. (…)

Computers can be programmed to recognise and attend to certain features of the world — which need to be clearly specified and programmed a priori. But they cannot be programmed to make new observations, to ask novel questions or to meaningfully adjust to changing circumstances. The human ability to ask new questions, to generate hypotheses, and to identify and find novelty is unique and not programmable. No statistical procedure allows one to somehow see a mundane, taken-for-granted observation in a radically different and new way. That’s where humans come in.

The essay is loaded with astute observations and arguments, made me thing. A must read.

Update on Micro.threads User Discovery section. Rolled out some performance improvements. Added some context around the user recommendations.

I was seriously considering buying a domain name in my daughter’s name today, who is still 5. I do not know if I plan to use it now, but I think if she ever needs one, she may not have it available. But then I also do not want to push my choice on her. I am being too crazy?

I just carried out my customary buy on Amazon Prime Day. And of course it is for an Amazon device. That’s the only stuff with good deals.

h/t Daniel Goldsmith

A nice post. Early this year, I too followed a similar path to take my web and social presence Indie - something that I control. The journal section on my website became the primary destination for microposts. I (selectively) route to Twitter via Micro.blog cross-posting feature. I receive and display all the interactions on the posts from different platforms using webmentions.

I make Hugo process and render such microposts differently. It’s custom now, and may follow any solution in future. But the intention would be my microposts would exist here.

This structure has also lent me the flexibility of the posting interface. My posts, social and long ones, originate from the app that’s convenient and relevant at the time of posting. Some originate at Micro.blog iOS app, some at quill, most replies and likes directly from Microsub clients (like this one from Monocle) and at times in text editor of my choice (iA Writer, Drafts). And that in itself is a huge benefit.

I like ring of “social” subdomain that Dan uses, especially for the reason that it can always act as the destination for my microposts, irrespective of what hosts them. I may explore that.

I dreamt a horror movie today. I think if produced it can be one of the best horror movies ever made. It sent shivers down my spine. 😧

I had recently started working on updating Micro.threads application to focus on discovery, specifically user discovery. My social interactions on the internet have never been dull or frustrated since I joined Micro.blog. And it can largely be attributed to the extremely fine community of users that exists on the platform.

However, I had also realised that there were a lot many threads, many interactions that I was missing on, because finding new users was still not easy. Discover section exists, but it helped primarily to get new, interesting posts. There was a major section of the platform which could assist me to ease this problem. And that is people I follow and their posts in my stream.

Manton had recently updated the default behaviour of a user profile’s “Following” section to display only “a list of who someone is following that you aren’t following already”. That itself is a huge improvement in identifying new users. But, for me, that too was a bit troublesome. I wanted to focus not just on the follow status, but the interactions; not just focus on whom someone I already follow, follows, but rather whom they interact with frequently.

So it was only just to build a system, first of all for myself that will discover more amazing users that I can follow, that I can interact with and learn from. And so I did.

I have been playing around with the user discovery section of Micro.threads. And I think it will help others too. Just head over to the Micro.threads -> Discover section and give the application a try. You may find it helpful. You may not. But I think the feedback you share would be useful for me, and hopefully to the community too.

I believe this just acts as a placeholder until such discovery features are available in the official app itself. Till then, this would be a playground to identify more ways to discover interesting profiles and threads on Micro.blog.

I have made some key considerations at this point while developing and rolling this out.

1. You will have to sign in with your Micro.blog user id and an app token, which is discarded the moment you log out. I have no intention to maintain any accounts or credentials. I plan to use the /account/signin API from micro.blog in future; for now, app token is the quickest, officially supported way to get going.
2. I haven’t optimised the performance of discover algorithm to the fullest. I plan to get that done that gradually.
3. I am inclined to keep the information shown itself improving, and also add more ways to unearth user profiles and threads.This is just a first version that I was satisfied with and could roll out. I am already working on the threads parsing and discovery which I think will get done this weekend itself.
4. I do not think I can get this perfect or can stay focused without the feedback from you all. So, any and every feedback is welcome.

Interesting, thank you Ryan for sharing that. I for sure want to explore it more, just for the reason that it attempts to bring Microsub and regular feed readers together.