Language and AI by day, relentless tinkering and whimsy by night. I fix things.
> Signal groups, in particular, are more powerful than you might be aware of, even if you already use them all the time. In this post I'll show you how to:
- Turn an in-person meeting into a Signal group using QR codes
- Manage large semi-public groups while still vetting new members
- Make announcement-only groups, perfect for volunteer networks rapidly responding to things like ICE raids
**Using Signal groups for activism** by @micahflee
Grooving on this Noema article, "We Need to Rewild the Internet." It's part of why I keep releasing free utilities and toys. Well worth the the long read: https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/
Pulling a few quotes here:
"As a top-down, built environment, the internet has become something that is done to us, not something we collectively remake every day. "
"Concentrated digital power produces the same symptoms that command and control produces in biological ecosystems; acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached."
"Rewilding is a work in progress. It’s not about trying to revert ecosystems to a mythical Eden. Instead, rewilders seek to rebuild resilience by restoring autonomous natural processes and letting them operate at scale to generate complexity."
@gabe_sky yeah, wound up crafting one the other day, too: https://pirillo.com/arcade/qr-code.html #GreatMinds
Ship it! I pulled the trigger and my new iOS app "Vocabulary Camera" is now live on the App Store. It helps you learn a new language *in context* by taking a photo and having AI pick out three random vocabularly words from the scene. Each word is preesnted with its translation, origin, and an example sentence in the language of your choice.
The app is free, but you need to supply your own (paid) OpenAI API key. (It's less than a cent per image, but I can't afford to pay for everyone's language-learning habit.) I expect that in a year or two we'll be able to do all this processing on-device, but it's just not possible today.
Check it out here: https://apps.apple.com/app/vocabulary-camera/id6746820215
I'd love to get feedback on where to take it next. What would you do differently? What features would you like me to add next? ¿Dónde está la biblioteca?
Dear Fedi friends,
By now you might have seen the post announcing the release of my promotional video for the Fediverse. But in case you have boosts turned off, here we go: https://news.elenarossini.com/fediverse-video/
I posted about it this morning from my #GoToSocial account because I have a 5000 character limit there. And I had so many people to thank for their help. It really takes a village.
Thank you for all the wonderful feedback so far ❤️
When we throw up our hands and say none of it matters, we're doing the fascists’ work for them. They don't need to hide their corruption if they can convince us it's pointless to look. They don't need to silence truth-tellers if we've already decided truth is meaningless.
Interesting post from one of my "secret" news sources, Blood In The Machine, discussing the symbolism of Waymo vehicles in the context of protest around ... **waves generally in the direction of America**.
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-weaponization-of-waymo
"... given Silicon Valley’s more obvious alliance with the Trump administration, that ambient anger has only been sharpened. It has sparked backlashes of a different kind, like the protests and firebombing of Teslas and Tesla dealerships. Waymos occupy part of this same nexus; surveillance technology operated by tech giant, undemocratically, opaquely, led by a CEO that visits Mar-a-Lago and donates to Trump."
A pretty great list of judges this year and the finalists are always worth looking at. I wrote about my experience judging the first one here, along with my personal methodology. https://waxy.org/2023/07/the-tiny-awards-winner/
New app in beta! My "Vocab Cam" helps you learn another language from your surroundings. Simply snap or pick a photo and it will select three interesting items in the scene, providing their foreign translation, origin, and use in a sentence. It's a fun way to learn a language with vocabulary that actually matters to you.
You must have:
📞 An iPhone or iPad running iOS 18+,
🪙 A paid OpenAI API key (or borrow from a friend),
🤪 A certain comfort with pre-release software, and
👊 A willingness to send honest feedback!
It's currently in Apple's TestFlight program, so I can get it out there without all the fiddly-bits of an actual release on the app store. I will be iterating rapidly. Here's the public link where you can get the app (and TestFlight): https://testflight.apple.com/join/xUjJrWXM
Remember when Volkswagen got busted changing their engine tuning when they detected that their emissions were being measured? Here's an interesting article on LLMs detecting when they're under observation ... and potentially changing their behavior in response.
"Under multiple-choice and open-ended questioning, AI models far outperform random chance in identifying what an evaluation is testing for. Our results indicate that frontier models already exhibit a substantial, though not yet superhuman, level of evaluation-awareness. We recommend tracking this capability in future models."
More of the small web, please. More charming weirdos doing their own thing and proudly sharing it, regardless of the metrics.
We’ve downloaded the 10 TB of arxXv … just in case … and are looking into building a proper dark archive arXiv.
Read about the why and what in a recent blog by @tibhannover colleagues @tobschalle Holger Israel and me
https://blog.tib.eu/2025/05/14/protecting-science-tib-builds-dark-archive-for-arxiv/
Fun preprint (long read) on the persuasiveness of humans vs LLMs with people taking a casual quiz. Move aside, human influencers.
"Our study demonstrates that frontier LLMs such as Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet are highly effective persuaders, often exceeding the persuasive capabilities of incentivized human participants."
Though some of that may be due to the medium (text) itself.
"LLMs excel at producing messages that are logically coherent, grammatically fluent, and highly structured, characteristics that enhance the perceived credibility and clarity of their arguments—factors known to increase persuasive impact."
And interesting to note:
"We find that the persuasiveness of human persuaders remained stable over the course of the experiment, showing no significant decline across successive interactions. By contrast, participants paired with an LLM persuader became progressively less persuaded as the experiment unfolded."
Might be worth a read, if you found the quotes interesting. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09662#
@gabe_sky,
$ sudo apt install qrencode
$ qrencode -o /tmp/demo.png 'Just a stand-alone utility.'
$ display /tmp/demo.png
@gabe_sky Nicely done! Simple online tool (no strings attached)!
Anyone looking for an offline command-line alternative, qrencode is fantastic (https://github.com/fukuchi/libqrencode) and can be easily integrated into your favorite text editor.
Here's how I use from #emacs via dwim-shell-command https://github.com/xenodium/dwim-shell-command
ps. There's also zbar, great for scanning https://xenodium.com/emacs-scan-this-qrcode
@gabe_sky Great tool, thanks.
Also, for users of CyberChef, creating QR codes is part of CyberChefs feature set too and can be run locally. It is my most used tool for creating QR codes, since I have a browser tab open with CyberChef at all times anyways.
https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/#recipe=Generate_QR_Code(‘PNG’,5,4,’Medium’)
Libre Office is also free and includes a QR code and barcode generator too! This saved me from having to hunt down a standalone generator that wasn't completely sketchy when I needed a barcode for some freelance work. Plus it can replace Microsoft Office.
https://www.libreoffice.org/
@gabe_sky
Great idea, thanks! Bookmarked.
As chance would have it, I also built another useful thing, way back in 2015:
https://batterystaple.pw/ - generates secure #Passphrases entirely in your browser
Like you, I built it because I was not happy with the existing alternatives. Since then, I have been using it quite regularly, but I have no idea if anybody else uses it (nor a way to find out).
In any case, I will gladly continue to pay for the domain name!
@gabe_sky ha! I built something similar specifically for WiFi QR codes!
