My first weblog to tweet storm automation went well enough. It did not translate to any new weblog traffic of any kind, but it was sort of fun to see the post get broken up via automation and sent out a series of linked tweets in thread form. For the most part this went like most tweets it was nothing more than an utterance in the grand public commons that went without notice or observation. It happened and that is about all that needs to be said about it at this time. I’m going to keep using this method to post content and see how it goes for the next few days. It does require a little bit more work at the time of posting, but it is sort of fun to see it populate the tweets at the time of publication. It is interesting how much automation is being built out to cross post and to share content across a multitude of platforms. It is probably an artifact of the thinning level of attention each application or forum has within the grand context of the public mind. In the aggregate the attention of the people has been diluted to a point where getting a message out to the vast majority of people is actually really difficult to achieve in practice. To that end the use of automation to reshare and send content flying from platform to platform is probably going to only increase the level of dilution as the sharing increases in velocity.
One of the things that I truly fear is that models like GPT-3 and others will be used to create so much content within the stream that everything else will be drowned out. It is entirely possible that the classical method of news reporting could be overwhelmed by bad actors using a firehouse of near real content created by GPT-3 to simply make finding the signal within the noise an impossible act. That is a fear shared by other NLP and machine learning researchers who know that the use of language models to turn out endless streams of content could overwhelm our current channels of communication. That thought should probably end up in a Substack newsletter instead of a weblog post, but I’m still struggling with the mechanics of doing both of those things at the same time. Sometimes my start of the day writing sessions are going to be more geared toward that type of content instead of pure stream of consciousness. It is entirely possible that my thoughts of the moment will drift into the production of more technical and content driven areas. When you go where your whims will take you it could be toward more academic writing or it could be toward the passions of the moment. That is the nature of that type of writing effort.
I am still sitting down and trying to fill up one blank page of content in the morning at the very start of the day. It is pretty easy to just open up Google Docs and start writing from the top of the document and watch the content fill up the screen. I did end up getting a Kensington Duo Gel Keyboard Wrist Rest to go with my 60% size K65 Corsair mechanical keyboard. Typing for a long stretch without the wrist pad was not very comfortable and just adding the gel wrist rest was enough to make things feel much more comfortable when typing. That probably has something to do with ergonomics and the mechanics of proper tying, but my explanation is grounded in the practice of knowing one way was uncomfortable and the other allows me to type for longer stretches of time. This post will go online here shortly, but it needs to be read and revised before that happens. The word count on this batch of prose is well over 500 so it was a good start to my planned daily writing activities.
Leave a Reply