Explaining Myself.
| Impulse Publishing Platform |
Why the Hell Am I Settling On X
11/19/2025
Yes, it's literally taken the past 3 or 5 years now for me to finally settle on the one social media platform, or what I refer to as an impulse publishing platform, to work in tandem with this WWW repository.
It's X.
Why X? Because it is simply the best singular impulse publishing platform that meets these personal requirements:
It is singular.
It can host the usual text quips, pictures, video, and livestreaming and can do it from a mobile device or the desktop. I had previously settled on Meta's platform which technically accommodates all of this too but redundantly across three platforms (Facebook itself, Threads, and Instagram). There was way too much anxiety picking which one to use during any given impulse publish, and leaving any out left me feeling "incomplete" - even with its generous cross posting options. Those options actually made things even more uncomfortable because I always found myself checking to make sure that content published evenly and properly across the multiple outputs. Way too much to manage.
I can buy it.
I want an impulse publishing host, not a system whereby my content is considered an advertising exchange agreement. Or in short, something where I am not "the product" - as the saying goes. I like handing over a relative small sum of money to have my service and business, and publishing, taken at least somewhat seriously, and for whatever nuttiness the current owner of it introduces into the system, X positions itself, increasingly, as this type of service. I don't look at my impulse publishing platform as a "community" - it's not a giant message forum where I have to consider the other users of it and their ideologies. To me it's less all that and more a microblogging platform only.
X Stayed the Place
Despite objections over Elon Musk's crazy politics and his political associations that have enraged half of Twitter's userbase, there never really was a "terminating exodus" from it. X is still the place where prominent people, brands, and media houses all still maintain their primary presence. I am not important under any of those categories, but, I'm one to always add "yet" to that. In any case, even in my irrelevance, I still want to be where the heavy hitters play, and X is still that place, amazingly, despite everything.
I suspect the reason that people stuck with it is because it is in fact just a great microblogging product. That greatness was built under its former framework, yes, but once people bought into it cementing critical mass, the idiosyncrasies of its new owner were not as bothersome to people as first advertised online and in the MSM media. See my point below on my own ambivalence on Elon.
Those are my primary reasons of the hour.
Holding My Nose
Not that I am wholly satisfied.
For example, the private ownership model has proven somewhat problematic in that the current "owner' has decided that X should be exactly the service framework that I describe above, transitioning it away from a general unified public platform in favor of a subscriber one. And that transition has led to some brokenness here and there.
For example, one of my X accounts, when one is not logged into X already, tells visitors to its profile that there are "no posts" when in fact there are several hundred. It's a blatant bug or worse a blatant "owner whim" to frustrate the account. And X has no path to resolution for that, even as a paying subscriber.
It's less about those problems that I have a concern though than it is the root cause which is that there an owner, period. Just one guy right now decides things for better or worse. Say what you will of corporate overlords, the previous Twitter iteration of the platform was at least subject to a governance.
I've also made a big deal about the "open web" which is one reason I picked Meta before this change. Posting to Threads meant posting to the fediverse which meant open exposure, which to me is crucial. However, I see that component of my publishing resolved because I maintain an independent WWW page - the very place you're at right now. Ideally any content I care about is synchronized here, meaning I don't have to care whether my impulse publishing/microblogging platform is so open after all. The twist of this point is that I see the fact that X is paywalled as creating "open scarcity" which in turn motivates me to produce WWW content. We'll see if that's more just wishful thinking than effective writer's strategy or not in time.
Anyway, there it is. Today's decision and my rationale for it. I am not leaving any of my other platforms as they all stand as great secondary community engagement devices (literally a fancy way of saying they are old-fashioned market, message and group forums -- in today's web form) but if one were interested in actually following me, it is this web page and my X account to do it with.
Glad to have this finally settled.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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AI Will Make You Dumb (If It's the Last Thing 'They' Do)
11/16/2025
Take note of this scene from Hellen Keller where the world opens up to Helen in a second of enlightenment.
Now imagine AI as a metaphor to that where people discovering AI for the first time are suddenly "aware."
Suddenly know.
That's going to be a problem.
There is NO way institutions are going to allow equal unobstructed access to "understanding things" that, already, simple prompt-based AI allows for.
Power and gatekeepers both broadly speaking but right down to individuals too, rely on obfuscation and re-processing of the simple into the complex, to control understanding for "reasons." But those reasons are mainly that it keeps the powerful, powerful.
When we want to predict the unbearable stress points on this evolving tech, those areas where powerful institutions feel they need to clamp down to keep people stupid, disorganized, and consuming/working, we can generally keep an eye on China and similar totalitarian societies for their shameless straightforward measures to clamp down, which will eventually be copied albeit "laundered for Western principle" in more liberal societies like ours. Think things like, people can't freely interconnect on the open web now because studies link that free interaction with "depression in teens" (or whatever), so "clamp down measures" on the open web are implemented in the name of public health virtue. As if there were no other way than to "lock and limit" the potential evil than to allow its full power.
Don't laugh, it's a perspective - and it's accurate.
There is ZERO chance, and I mean none, you as Joe Doe are going to be handed the power to, as examples, organize or win lawsuits against institutions, political or practical - that AI will precisely allow for.
There is this brief window therein but give it time. AI will be as en-shitified and commodified as a simple web page for cake recipes is now as to block any reasonable use of it. And that will be by design, period.
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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Makes Sense My Joke Would Be 'SNL Good'
11/16/2025
Just a few days before it hit late-night TV, I was making the case about the absurdity of the penny.
I called into the WOR 710 "Talk Back Line" last Thursday, November 13, during the Mendte in the Morning Show to drop that very observation using what I felt was a very original joke.
But!, proving that great minds (and comedians) think alike, last night Michael Che came up with the same bit on SNL. Though - I gotta say - I feel like my delivery of it made more "sense!"
By Dave for Personal Blog.
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