PDF to Brainrot | MemenomeLM
converts a pdf of information into a tiktok explainer video with casual explnations over ADHD stimulation runner videos
Putting the “Person” in “Personal Website”
Writing about the big beautiful mess that is making things for the world wide web.
I believe everyone could benefit from a personal website. Its form encourages you to look inward, whereas every social platform on the internet encourages you to look outward.
A personal website has affordances which encourage you to create something that you couldn’t otherwise create anywhere else, like YouTube or Reddit or Facebook or Twitter or even Mastodon. Why? Because the context of those environments is outward looking. It’s not personal, but social. The medium shapes the message.
Additionally, a personal website and a social platform are two different environments: one I’ve cultivated, the other I’ve been granted.
Like dancing or singing, you don’t have to be skilled to do them. Personal websites should be the same. They’re for everyone. Like dancing and singing, their expression can be as varied as every individual human.
Why ‘chronically online’ memes will destroy the internet
Our feeds are filling up with illegible content, and every day it gets harder to find common ground. Is social media in a death spiral? And if so, what comes next?
Blessed and emoji-pilled: why language online is so absurd
AI: This article explores the evolution of online language and communication, highlighting the increasing absurdity and surrealism in digital discourse. It discusses how traditional language is being replaced by memes, emojis, and seemingly nonsensical phrases, reflecting the influence of social media platforms and algorithms on our communication styles. The piece examines the implications of this shift, touching on themes of information overload, AI-like speech patterns, and the potential consequences of this new form of digital dialect.
Layers upon layers of references are stacked together in a single post, while the posts themselves fly by faster than ever in our feeds. To someone who isn’t “chronically online” a few dislocated images or words may trigger a flash of recognition – a member of the royal family, a beloved cartoon character – but their relationship with each other is impossible to unpick. Add the absurdist language of online culture and the impenetrable algorithms that decide what we see in our feeds, and it seems like all hope is lost when it comes to making sense of the internet.
Forget words! Don’t think! In today’s digitally-mediated landscape, there’s no need for knowledge or understanding, just information. Scroll the feed and you’ll find countless video clips and posts advocating this smooth-brained agenda: lobotomy chic, sludge content, silly girl summer.
“With memes, images are converging more on the linguistic, becoming flattened into something more like symbols/hieroglyphs/words,” says writer Olivia Kan-Sperling, who specialises in programming language critique. For the meme-fluent, the form isn’t important, but rather the message it carries. “A meme is lower-resolution in terms of its aesthetic affordances than a normal pic because you barely have to look at it to know what it’s ‘doing’,” she expands. “For the literate, its full meaning unfolds at a glance.” To understand this way of “speaking writing posting” means we must embrace the malleability of language, the ambiguities and interpretations – and free it from ‘real-world’ rules.
Hey guys, I just got an order in from Sephora – here’s everything that I got. Get ready with me for a boat day in Miami. Come and spend the day with me – starting off with coffee. TikTok influencers engage in a high-pitched and breathless way of speaking that over-emphasises keywords in a youthful, singsong cadence. For the Attention Economy, it’s the sort of algorithm-friendly repetition that’s quantified by clicks and likes, monetised by engagement for short attention spans. “Now, we have to speak machine with machines that were trained on humans,” says Basar, who refers to this algorithm-led style as promptcore.
As algorithms digest our online behaviour into data, we resemble a swarm, a hivemind. We are beginning to think and speak like machines, in UI-friendly keywords and emoji-pilled phrases.
Maven
Maven is a new social network platform that aims to provide a different experience from traditional social media.
- It does not have features like likes or follower counts, focusing instead on users following "interests" rather than individual accounts.
- Content is surfaced based on relevance to the interests a user follows, curated by AI, rather than popularity metrics.
- The goal is to minimize self-promotion and popularity contests, instead prioritizing valuable information and serendipitous discovery of new ideas and perspectives.
- The author has been using Maven and finds it a slower, deeper experience compared to other social media, though unsure if it will become a regular timesink.
- Overall, Maven presents an intriguing alternative model for social networking centered around interests and expanding horizons, rather than following individuals or chasing popularity.
Rewilding your attention
To find truly interesting ideas, step away from the algorithmic feeds of Big Tech.
our truly quirky dimensions are never really grasped by these recommendation algorithms. They have all the dullness of a Demographics 101 curriculum; they sketch our personalities with the crudity of crime-scene chalk-outlines. They’re not wrong about us; but they’re woefully incomplete.
The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.
For me, it’s meant slowly — over the last few years — building up a big, rangy collection of RSS feeds, that let me check up on hundreds of electic blogs and publications and people. (I use Feedly.) I’ve also started using Fraidycat, a niftily quixotic feed-reader that lets you sort sources into buckets by “how often should I check this source”, which is a cool heuristic; some people/sites you want to check every day, and others, twice a year.
Other times I spend an hour or two simply prospecting — I pick a subject almost at random, then check to see if there’s a hobbyist or interest-group discussion-board devoted to it. (There usually is, running on free warez like phpBB). Then I’ll just trawl through the forum, to find out what does this community care about?
The Revenge of the Home Page
As social networks become less reliable distributors of the news, consumers of digital journalism are seeking out an older form of online real estate.
This is what an unmoderated internet looks like
Read to the end for the full power of the constrictor knot
Pluralistic - The disenshittified internet starts with loyal “user agents”
A web browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a web-page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.
For example, the user agent might judge that you'd like it to block ads. More than half of all web users have installed ad-blockers, constituting the largest consumer boycott in human history
The user agent is loyal to you. Even when you want something the page's creator didn't consider – even when you want something the page's creator violently objects to – your user agent acts on your behalf and delivers your desires, as best as it can.
A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. Most non-browser tools are designed for treachery.
By design, apps and in-app browsers seek to thwart your preferences regarding surveillance and tracking. An app will even try to figure out if you're using a VPN to obscure your location from its maker, and snitch you out with its guess about your true location.
A canny tech company can design their products so that any modification that puts the user's interests above its shareholders is illegal, a violation of its copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrets, contracts, terms of service, nondisclosure, noncompete, most favored nation, or anticircumvention rights. Wrap your product in the right mix of IP, and its faithless betrayals acquire the force of law.
The shift to platforms dominated by treacherous user agents – apps, mobile ecosystems, walled gardens – weakens or removes that constraint. As your ability to discipline your agent so that it serves you wanes, the temptation to turn your user agent against you grows, and enshittification follows.
We keep making it harder for bank customers to make large transfers, but so long as it is possible to make such a transfer, the scammers have the means, motive and opportunity to discover how the process works, and they will go on to trick their victims into invoking that process.
Beyond a certain point, making it harder for bank depositors to harm themselves creates a world in which people who aren't being scammed find it nearly impossible to draw out a lot of cash for an emergency and where scam artists know exactly how to manage the trick. After all, non-scammers only rarely experience emergencies and thus have no opportunity to become practiced in navigating all the anti-fraud checks, while the fraudster gets to run through them several times per day, until they know them even better than the bank staff do.
additional security measures are trivially surmounted hurdles for dedicated bad actors and as nearly insurmountable hurdles for their victims
when a company can override your choices, it will be irresistibly tempted to do so for its own benefit, and to your detriment.
Social Attention: a modest prototype in shared presence
Posted on Monday 22 Mar 2021. 1,055 words, 5 links. By Matt Webb.
Taking an Internet Walk
analogies between the internet and physical exploration—hyperlinks as portals which skip the freeways, handmade websites as subculture, reverse image search and direct site searches as alternative path systems
The first hyperlinks pointed within their own domain, like the doors separating the rooms in your home. However, with the world wide web, the doors became portals, and pioneers mapped out site directories to guide internet travelers to the frontier of development. Reject modern interstates and embody Tarzan, Jane, or the chimpanzee to swing from link to link, blue to purple.
if you like handmade websites, you should visit Gossips Web or Brutalist Websites. These are the digital equivalent to the jazz bar, punk record store, or other physical places where subcultures gather. There’s likely one made by a devotee whatever your interest, like cyberfeminism, tiny internet sites, cozy websites, niche museums, list of lists, LA sandwiches, and much more.