Multilitteratus Incognitus

With the US elections now settled, and a second Trump term being a reality, I guess many (most?) of the remaining hold outs on Twitter are finally migrating.  I decided to keep my personal account, for now, and just promote pro-union, pro-education, pro-left, and anti-war messages, while posting my regular content on Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon.  I am also in the process of shutting down my department's Twitter account for good. This new wave of migration has brought a few people out of the woodwork, both on Mastodon and on the Mastodon subreddit, asking why people are moving to Bluesky (or even threads) and not to Mastodon. They also get on their high horse about it, but let's talk about that later. I think that Mastodon had a major  advantage in 2022 when Musk bought Twitter.  They were really the only game in town. There was no Threads, there was no Bluesky.  There were some weird Crypto-based microblogs, like Nostr; or blasts from the past like Plurk. I'm...

All right!  With all that pondering and throat-clearing done (see my previous series of posts), I was wondering what piques my interest in this LLM-hyped world from a practical side . I've been somewhat active in critiquing this whole thing over the past two years, but beyond creating AI images for the blog (or to amuse myself), or using ChatGPT to make silly little genre-busting poems (again amusement and play), and or using ChatGPT to give me a boilerplate letter that I can then tweak (marginal utility, but I guess if organization ask for things that can be boilerplated, they get something that is boilerplate).  I don't mean to dismiss the value of experimentation or play, they are valuable and low-stress ways to get to know a tool and then you may get an AHA!!! moment of a sort. I've been thinking of something more structured.  I was listening to a relatively recent episode (it was recent when I started writing this darned post!_ of the Vergecast , titled  The Ch...