Ward Geene

I started out a bit skeptical listening to the All-In podcast, but I really like the in-depth expertise in different areas this group has.

While it’s at times a bit too upper class and disconnected for my taste, the insights are great. I also love how they explain things to each other.

Some insights I took from the episode with Sam Altman from OpenAI:

• There are two ways people want AI to develop. One is to replace themselves and act as their entity. The other is to be a separate entity like a senior employee that can reason or object to objectives given.

• A graphical interface is important for a system where AI and humans coexist. If an AI does something for you, you may want to follow its actions on a screen or have visual overviews of options to choose from in a process. Fully conversational and audio interactions do not work for every use case, and visual interfaces (like screens) will remain important.

Today I managed to connect a custom domain to my micro blog. This means that my posts now show up on wardgeene.com and wardgeene.nl

While listening to the All-in podcast episode 179 about the new Open AI’s GPT-4o model there was an interesting insight.

It covered the need for a product developer to think about where an AI model ends and where your product begins. With the rate new models enter the market, you don’t want to throw away you products when the models change. And it could be better to open source certain things that are expensive to maintain.

It made me think about protocols as well. Where does a protocol end and a product begin? It seems to me that instead of silo’s, the web is starting to be more modular as it will be to expensive to maintain and develop everything as a company.

While it is something separate from this discussion, for me this also connects with livestream platform Twitch moving the encoding for AV1 to the user instead of doing it themselves. It’s just to expensive. But if you want it, you can do it.

Being more modular, like with ActivityPub, makes is possible to caters to much more different needs. Instead of trying to be the one size fits all.

I hope these upcoming changes help to diversify culture again instead of the unifying effect the big centralized platforms are enforcing.

At the start this micro blog is going to be a bit of a scribble pad for me. Just to write and at the same time publish. To stretch my legs. Find a rhythm and a structure. It will not be coherent, but it has to be this way to become something else. The practice of writing and publishing is the first step to take.

It was 3 years ago I first came in contact with the concept of a digital garden. Since then I wanted to create a public place for myself to create. Short notes and longer posts. Not with the interest of viewership, but for self expression.

From digital garden I fell into the rabbit hole of the zettelkasten system. I tried Roam Research and Obsidian. I entered the world of the second brain and I still use the PARA methode actively. But I also lost my pleasure for reading and note taking. As it felt like I did not take enough notes and stored away my new found knowledge incorrectly.

And now via the Fediverse I stumbled upon the indie web. And also on this concept of POSSE. And I feel that after 3 years something has come full circle.

I’ve been trying to change the DNS records of a custom domain so it shows my micro.blog at that domain, but no luck yet. Hopefully it’s just the time it takes for the DNS records to change. If not, I’ll give it another try tomorrow.

It has been a blast reading up on the fediverse. It revitalized my need to publish. Not on a ‘walled garden’ platform, but on my own terms.

This research brought me in contact with so much more. Like the indieweb and the idea of POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I heard of it on the Dot Social episode with Molly White.

So I decided to try it out. Make an account on micro.blog and post everything from there and syndicate where I want what post to go.

Hello World!