It feels strange to say that you miss someone that you've never met, but the internet is a strange place. When it constantly provides updates, articles and books from someone like David Graeber, it follows that there's a huge sense of loss now that he is no longer with us.
Out of all of his amazing writing, the article that has stuck most with me is a piece he wrote for The Baffler. It is a beautiful and profound discussion on what may be the origins of consciousness. I thought of it again today after reading an article in The Guardian, which was written by a piece of software called GPT-3.
These two articles might not seem related at first glance, but I would still have loved to have heard David's thoughts on the latter. What can we say about GPT-3 based on the writing it's currently able to produce? If it keeps getting better, will we eventually say that it's "self aware"? It feels like the same "jump" to consciousness that David was talking about.
What if there are no jumps? Emergence is a continuum. AI is the result of yet another layer of complex social behaviours, namely the work of the software developers who built it combined with the work of countless people who provided data for it by openly sharing on the internet. Do we dare ask GPT-3 how it knows that it knows? That question itself may be the proof that Zhuangzi was alluding to at the end of David's piece.
Know someone who's not quite ready to purchase their own domain name? This is an easy way to try building your own website and it's free to get started!
Head over to no.haza.website and pick a subdomain, then provide your email address and you will receive a login code when your website is ready.
This year QLD has had the largest number of Ross River Fever cases since 2015. A QLD public pharmaceutical company could make a vaccine, save Qld Health money & stop people getting sick. Our health shouldn't be left up to the whim of the private market: greens.org.au/qld/publicphar…
I decided to work my way through Jeremy Keith's book, Going Offline, which is about learning to write service workers in modern browsers. It's a great little book which I read last year, but wanted to work through the code examples. But before I could get started I found I didn't have service worker support turned on in my browser. That's because I was using Firefox 68, which I use because I run Debian stable on my laptop.
After switching the flag on and getting into the code, my laptop fan started whirring while debugging... this is about the only process monitor I use these days! So next up is upgrading Firefox to a more recent version with better service worker support, which means turning on unstable packages in Debian. It all works fine of course, because people are amazing at putting together all these packages that work together... but computers don't often remind you that it's strange that they work at all.
Update: ah adding unstable to your sources list turns out to be a bad idea. It seems the best way to run a newer version of firefox is by using flatpak.
I've wanted to have a look at the Twitter API ever since the untimely demise of twitter-atom.appspot.com. This is still a great service from @Ryan Barrett but unfortunately it's no longer possible to sign up thanks to Twitter developer account changes.
When I was working on i.haza.website I was hoping to make that part of the platform, so I've had a go at my own instead. What I ended up with was a Twitter home timeline to h-feed converter that I could drop in as a replacement. I needed a hub that can sign up as a Twitter app, and then produce feeds for each authorized user, so I set that up using my reader at unicyclic.com. You can sign in there with a regular account or via IndieAuth, and if you authorize your Twitter account it will create a feed for you.
The other way it works is via Microsub on your own website. That's how I'm using it now, so authorizing my Twitter account from my reader on my own site subscribes me to my Twitter timeline. This works because my site was configured to use unicyclic.com as a Microsub server when it was created on i.haza.website. (You can use it as a server from your own site too!) That's getting pretty jargony so here's some pictures of how it works:
Either from your own website or via an account on unicyclic.com, there are some new options under Manage Feeds. Clicking the Authorize button will take you to Twitter.
Twitter shows you what Unicyclic has access to, at the moment it's just reading your home timeline. Having access to the Twitter API in the reader does allow for some interesting new features though, for instance I would like to be able to follow people who are retweeted from inside my reader.
Once you authorize the app, the callback takes you to unicyclic.com. You don't need to be logged in, there's enough information provided to add the feed to your account. If you started the process from your own website it offers to take you back there.
Once back at your reader you should see the new feed subscription. It won't have a channel set, I usually have the default set to 'silos' because I don't check it that often. My favourite part of the reader is being able to set the channel per author. It's like creating Twitter lists from your own website, except you can mix them in with other feeds if you want.
Authors have hovercards in the reader which lets you change the channel. At the end of the day it all pretty much works the same as before! I'm not sure if this app will be allowed to exist forever, so it is a case of use at your own risk. (I will also be holding on to my old API key for twitter-atom.appspot.com just in case.)
Switch on the ABC? News Corp personality. Country radio? The same. Writers’ festival? Guess who. Policy announcement? You heard it there first. Now even official archives releases. The cancer is everywhere.
David Fricker, who led the failed @naagovau's 4-year effort to stop us seeing #palaceletters, now turns it into a publicity stunt and we have a Murdoch journo given advanced access posting copies of the stuff all over Twitter before official release. What a splendid organisation.
sad that IndieWeb summit isn't happening this year, but enjoying catching up on all the recordings from the online event over the weekend! Thanks to everyone for the great discussions and the organisers for making the content available.
What is consciousness? and missing David Graeber
Out of all of his amazing writing, the article that has stuck most with me is a piece he wrote for The Baffler. It is a beautiful and profound discussion on what may be the origins of consciousness. I thought of it again today after reading an article in The Guardian, which was written by a piece of software called GPT-3.
These two articles might not seem related at first glance, but I would still have loved to have heard David's thoughts on the latter. What can we say about GPT-3 based on the writing it's currently able to produce? If it keeps getting better, will we eventually say that it's "self aware"? It feels like the same "jump" to consciousness that David was talking about.
What if there are no jumps? Emergence is a continuum. AI is the result of yet another layer of complex social behaviours, namely the work of the software developers who built it combined with the work of countless people who provided data for it by openly sharing on the internet. Do we dare ask GPT-3 how it knows that it knows? That question itself may be the proof that Zhuangzi was alluding to at the end of David's piece.
Subdomains now available on i.haza.website
Know someone who's not quite ready to purchase their own domain name? This is an easy way to try building your own website and it's free to get started!
Head over to no.haza.website and pick a subdomain, then provide your email address and you will receive a login code when your website is ready.
After switching the flag on and getting into the code, my laptop fan started whirring while debugging... this is about the only process monitor I use these days! So next up is upgrading Firefox to a more recent version with better service worker support, which means turning on unstable packages in Debian. It all works fine of course, because people are amazing at putting together all these packages that work together... but computers don't often remind you that it's strange that they work at all.
Update: ah adding unstable to your sources list turns out to be a bad idea. It seems the best way to run a newer version of firefox is by using flatpak.
Subscribe to your Twitter feed
When I was working on i.haza.website I was hoping to make that part of the platform, so I've had a go at my own instead. What I ended up with was a Twitter home timeline to h-feed converter that I could drop in as a replacement. I needed a hub that can sign up as a Twitter app, and then produce feeds for each authorized user, so I set that up using my reader at unicyclic.com. You can sign in there with a regular account or via IndieAuth, and if you authorize your Twitter account it will create a feed for you.
The other way it works is via Microsub on your own website. That's how I'm using it now, so authorizing my Twitter account from my reader on my own site subscribes me to my Twitter timeline. This works because my site was configured to use unicyclic.com as a Microsub server when it was created on i.haza.website. (You can use it as a server from your own site too!) That's getting pretty jargony so here's some pictures of how it works:
Either from your own website or via an account on unicyclic.com, there are some new options under Manage Feeds. Clicking the Authorize button will take you to Twitter.
Twitter shows you what Unicyclic has access to, at the moment it's just reading your home timeline. Having access to the Twitter API in the reader does allow for some interesting new features though, for instance I would like to be able to follow people who are retweeted from inside my reader.
Once you authorize the app, the callback takes you to unicyclic.com. You don't need to be logged in, there's enough information provided to add the feed to your account. If you started the process from your own website it offers to take you back there.
Once back at your reader you should see the new feed subscription. It won't have a channel set, I usually have the default set to 'silos' because I don't check it that often. My favourite part of the reader is being able to set the channel per author. It's like creating Twitter lists from your own website, except you can mix them in with other feeds if you want.
Authors have hovercards in the reader which lets you change the channel. At the end of the day it all pretty much works the same as before! I'm not sure if this app will be allowed to exist forever, so it is a case of use at your own risk. (I will also be holding on to my old API key for twitter-atom.appspot.com just in case.)
https://twitter.com/JasonOverstreet/status/1286731672453394433
https://twitter.com/rgcooke/status/1282857577160663040