Sunday, April 09, 2023

Elon Musk, Substack

Elon Musk Denies Substack Links Are Blocked On Twitter, A Claim That’s Very Misleading In reality, Twitter has put up numerous roadblocks for anyone trying to visit Substack posts, even displaying a warning that links to Substack may be unsafe. ..... Why is Twitter doing this? Apparently the company is upset that Substack is launching a short form content social media capability called Substack Notes, which Musk sees as a potential competitor. And Musk alleges Substack was trying to download information from Twitter to help build this new feature. ........ “Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted,” Musk tweeted on Saturday. ......... ubstack co-founder Chris Best denied Musk’s version of events on Saturday, writing that while Substack has used Twitter’s API for years, he doesn’t believe they were doing anything that was prohibited....... Major advertisers are even nervous about appearing with the billionaire in public. ....... Twitter responded to emailed questions on Saturday morning with a poop emoji, an automated response set up by Musk. The billionaire is notoriously hostile to media outlets and shut down Twitter’s PR department after he bought the company.

Do Kwon converted illicit funds from LUNA to Bitcoin: S.Korean prosecutors
Putin’s Twitter account resurfaces as Russia comes in from the cold Elon Musk’s social media site lifts restrictions on Kremlin-linked tweets

Introducing Substack Notes Unlocking the power of the subscription network ........ We started Substack in 2017 because we wanted the internet to be better for writers and readers. We were dismayed with the clickbait and content farms, the listicles and liars, the cheap outrage and culture wars. We thought there could be something better if writers and readers were given more control and treated as a higher priority than advertisers, and if culture makers could find financial dignity without needing to sublimate themselves to attention games and corporate marketing budgets. “We believe that what you read matters,” we said, and we meant it. .......... we set about building a system that fosters deep connections and quality over shallow engagement and dopamine hacks . ......... There are more than 35 million active subscriptions to writers on Substack, including more than 2 million paid subscriptions. Readers have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to writers on the platform. There has been a Cambrian explosion of great writing, and writers have been saying (unprompted, we promise) that Substack has changed their lives. Encouraged by this early progress, we’ve become excited by the prospect of pushing the subscription network into new territory. ......... while Recommendations lets writers promote publications, Notes will give them the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links. Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences. ........ While Notes may look like familiar social media feeds, the key difference is in what you don’t see. The Substack network runs on paid subscriptions, not ads. This changes everything. .......... In legacy social networks, people get rewarded for creating content that goes viral within the context of the feed, regardless of whether or not people value it, locking readers in a perpetual scroll. Almost all the attendant financial rewards then go to the owner of the platform. ........ By contrast, the lifeblood of a subscription network is the money paid to people who are doing worthy work within it. Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences. The ultimate goal on this platform is to convert casual readers into paying subscribers. In this system, the vast majority of the financial rewards go to the creators of the content. ......... The goal here is not to create a perfectly sanitized information environment, but to set the conditions for constructive discussion where there is enough common ground to seek understanding while holding onto the worthwhile tension needed for great art and new ideas. It won’t feel like the social media we know today. ......... Many of us have grown so used to talk of hellsites and doomscrolling—while wondering if social media is driving us mad—that we have forgotten that the internet can be good. .......... By changing the rules of engagement—by creating a new media universe with different laws of physics—the internet can be better than it has ever been.



China’s PLA launches simulated precision strikes on Taiwan as ‘Joint Sharp Sword’ drills enter second day Drills come after Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen defied Beijing’s warnings against meeting US House speaker in California Multiple PLA services maintained a posture of advancement while encircling Taiwan in drills directed by the Eastern Theatre Command, CCTV reports ....... The self-declared air defence zones include and extend beyond sovereign airspace. While the PLA sends planes into Taiwan’s ADIZ nearly every day, only some sorties cross the strait median line that marks the halfway point between mainland China and Taiwan. ...... For decades, both sides largely abided by the tacit understanding that neither militaries should cross the median line, but Beijing in 2020 said it did not recognise the line.



Do Kwon converted illicit funds from LUNA to Bitcoin: S.Korean prosecutors
Putin’s Twitter account resurfaces as Russia comes in from the cold Elon Musk’s social media site lifts restrictions on Kremlin-linked tweets .

Barsee

ChatGPT Prompts Cheat Sheet (Hasan Toor)

Dickie Bush, Parker Worth

9: ChatGPT

Made by AI: The Making of Frame-IT . In the last 5 months everything has changed, the whole landscape of developing, designing and creating has changed. It has reached the point where the spark of an idea can be coded, designed, marketed and launched with the help of Artificial Intelligence. ......... I decided to build it myself, using AI from start to finish, from knowing little about Swift, and only as much about AI as my twitter feed is full of and reading articles on site such as The Verge. ........ My first prompt was “Can you write me swift code to take a website, centre it and add the image of a picture frame around it’. The app should work full screen, in landscape mode”. ......... Within 60 seconds, GPT gave me a section of code and then stopped, it turns out there is limit in the amount of characters it can respond with. A quick Google search (ironically) showed me that by typing ‘continue’ Chat GPT will continue the code. .......... within 30 minutes i had my first app running on an iPad, via Xcode. ......... Simply by cutting and pasting and pressing ‘play’. No all things worked out, there were often errors, but error I could cut and paste back into GPT and it would solve them, most of the time. ......... prompts such as “create me a gold Victorian picture frame, it should be photorealistic with minimum reflections and the centre should be cut out” worked amazingly well ....... Two hundred and Twenty Two Lines of code ........ unleashes creativity, opens up the possible to people who would have found writing an app impossible ..........

computer science is no longer king of the apps, the Arts and Humanities are about to take over as that is, arguably, where creativity truly lives and its being set free

......... all the tools i know have changed, from previously using Xcode, Photoshop, Illustrator, Word Press and a lot of Google, this time i used Chat GPT, Looka, Framer, PhotoRoom and Bing.
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U.S. Economy May Be Heading to a Place That Must Not Be Named there is a good chance of a sharp slowdown soon. Their own policies are at least partly responsible for making that happen. ......... If a big slowdown comes, the Fed will have to pivot and cut interest rates. .

A Naïve Reading of the Gospels May Be Just What Christianity Needs In the not-so-distant past when 90 or 95 percent of Americans identified as Christian ...... At both the popular and the academic level, more people will experience the Gospels first as a form of testimony and storytelling that precedes any fully realized set of doctrines or vision of the church. ........ That Jesus is given different genealogies in Luke and Matthew. That timelines and details differ among the authors. That Jesus drives the money changers out of the temple early in his ministry in the Gospel of John and just before his crucifixion in the others. That Jesus in John’s Gospel talks differently, with his long theological discourses, from Jesus in the other narratives. ........... What C.S. Lewis once observed about the Gospel of John is true of all four Gospels: You can say that the narratives represent a form of memoir, or you can say that they’re an ingenious impersonation of personal testimony that would tax the skills of a brilliant 20th-century novelist. But the reader who thinks the narratives read like after-the-fact legend making, Lewis rightly insists, “has simply not learned to read.” .......... came direct from the people who remembered the action, with all the variation that normal memory entails. .......... The Gospel of Mark, by contrast, reads much more like what the earliest Christian traditions claim it was: the memories of the Apostle Peter dictated or transmitted to a younger scribe. ........ read Mark’s Passion side by side with John’s Passion — Peter’s denials more detailed in Mark, more inside information and details about the scene around the cross in John — and note how naturally the two accounts read like the same events narrated from two distinct eyewitness perspectives........ But the way Jesus performs the miracles is so human and un-godlike and complex — at once irritated by and responsive to his mother’s cajolement at Cana, deliberately delaying coming to Lazarus and then weeping at the tomb — that in each case the natural reading is that this is a real remembrance of strange events, the author’s or even Mary’s, the memory more potent than any theological program. .

Putin’s Energy Offensive Has Failed Russia has launched four great offensives. Three were military; the fourth was economic. ....... the fourth was the attempt to blackmail European democracies into dropping their support for Ukraine by cutting off their supplies of natural gas. ........ Russia looks more than ever like a Potemkin superpower, with little behind its impressive facade. Its much vaunted military is far less effective than advertised; now its role as an energy supplier is proving much harder to weaponize than many imagined. ......... democracies are showing, as they have many times in the past, that they are much tougher, much harder to intimidate, than they look. ......... what we’re seeing now is Europe making an energy transition under the worst possible circumstances — sudden, unexpected and drastic — and handling it pretty well. This suggests that a gradual, planned green energy transition would be far easier than pessimists imagine. .