Latest newsletter yakcollective.substack.com/p/yak-trails-2
and are iterating on a really cool way to scrape and semi-auto-compile our Discord activity into an update newsletter.
Conversation
It’s a fascinating challenge since newsletters are generally thought of as marketing and the discord streams are more like the inner life of a group that will make no sense to outsiders. So the project is about taking a relatively legible state snapshot.
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It’s more like an MRI than a photograph. I suspect this kind of content will increase in the world as automation improves. Reading it is closer to radiology than literacy.
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But this is a feature not a bug IMO. The world is increasingly awash in packaged marketing that’s easy to grok and says little. But TextOps as a scanning tech is both new and promising, given that machine learning nlp tech is coming down the pipeline.
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I’m not directly involved in this project, though as an active discord member I often end up featured in it. But it intrigues me as an an alternative to directly competing for scarce attention and engagement with increasingly desperate and sophisticated persuasion techniques.
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One reason I’m meh on the “ermahgad they’re hacking our attention with super-sophisticated hacks” moral panic crowd is that it doesn’t actually work on anyone whose attention is worth having. For people doing interesting things, their goals are strong filters.
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Packaging crap persuasively is not a particularly important problem for interesting producers, and filtering it out is not hard for interesting audiences. It’s sort of a 101 problem of learning to be Very Online .
tldr: get an interesting life and you’ll be fine.
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But the rapid growth of oceans of information that IS worth the attention of people but hard to package, is a real problem. It’s hard to present for producers, hard to consume for audiences.
Automation for semantic summarization can help on both ends, but it’s very challenging.
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Btw if you’re into API plumbing tech, web dev with Jam stack, Python etc., we have a very active infrastructure dev project going with lots of ways to contribute
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Correction, third tag in OT should be @nathan_acks … necopinus is his discord handle.
Nathan and lead our infrastructure dev on the web/api plumbing side and Python-based Discord automation side respectively. Between them they’re inventing a kind of TextOps.
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In a world where the optimum strategies for self-enrichment are basically variants of information arbitrage, the optimal price point for a supply of information will be one that ensures possession of that information is the minority position.
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Have you played with SIP?
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