Ah, it seems their AI powered cover letter review system isn't up to scratch.
Readit Newsstog commented on I gave the AI arms and legs then it rejected me grell.dev/blog/ai_rejecti... · Posted by u/serhack_
stog commented on Reading RSS content is a skilled activity doliver.org/articles/rss-... · Posted by u/d0liver
RSS came of age in a very different time, when the world of computing was more, for lack of a better term, workstation-centric. People wanted RSS clients that were similar to email clients, or maybe even integrated directly into the email client, and they had this idea that they should 'catch up' on everything that was published since their last session, almost like it was a job.
Nowadays people have an implicit understanding that the net is vast and infinite, it's beyond the ability of one man to fully catch up, and you're just tuning into a slice of the data stream.
RSS clients never really departed from their roots of showing reverse chronological lists of all the posts, but this UI loses usefulness when the data stream gets too big. Commercial social media saw an opportunity and decided to make the algorithm that arranges the feed totally opaque - with that achieved, they proceeded to auction off each spot in it and get rich. Even worse than the reverse chronological firehose.
What we lack is a presentation that is actually good! I don't have the answer. One thing I want to experiment with, though, is digests. I use a straight reverse chronological UI that aggregates all my items in all my feeds. One thing I noticed is that this ends up wildly biased toward feeds that have lots of posts, like news aggregator websites, or Reddit. Anyone who's foolish enough to work hard and produce wonderful long form content with less frequency, gets lost in the firehose, which may tell us a lot about how the collapse-in-progress of our civilization got started. I have no idea how to solve this and do better than the UIs and algorithms that rule the world today. I do have it on my todo list to try a digest style UI - like perhaps each website gets one entry per day in my feed, and if they made multiple posts on that day, those are represented as multiple small title links in a compact format. Whereas a less frequent poster might even get an excerpt along with their title or something.
> "Nowadays people have an implicit understanding that the net is vast and infinite, it's beyond the ability of one man to fully catch up, and you're just tuning into a slice of the data stream".
This is beautifully written, and condense enough to explain to anyone why we're burnt out with consumption.
Your full comment is spot on, and like you, I don’t have a perfect solution. Digests are a good idea, but there’s always going to be some kind of bias, whether it’s set by you, by an algorithm, or by another human. I think the real challenge is to create a digest that gives you a personal, meaningful view while still leaving the door open to a wider context. But if you lean too far into broadening it, you risk losing that sense of ownership and relevance. It’s a tough balance.
stog commented on Scottish locations given Minecraft makeover in 'world record' bid news.stv.tv/scotland/scot... · Posted by u/stog
Government mapping service Ordnance Survey (OS) are attempting to break a world record by creating the largest real-world place to ever exist in the Minecraft universe, by mapping out locations from across Britain in the popular video game format.
stog commented on Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover standardebooks.org... · Posted by u/tosh
It's thanks to this site that I learned that Kobo uses a really bad renderer for epubs unless converted to their own ebook format (Kepub). It make a huge difference in appearance and performance on a Kobo device.
https://standardebooks.org/help/how-to-use-our-ebooks#kobo-f...
I discovered this too. However, I now use Plato Reader on my Kobo with standard ePub and it’s lovely.
stog commented on Standard Ebooks: liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover standardebooks.org... · Posted by u/tosh
Love this. So many in the archivist community are only interested in preservation and don't care at all about making the material accessible. Love to see a project like this prioritizing the latter.
You’re spot on with this. I recently converted a local history book from 1911 to Markdown, ePub and HTML and tracked the changes on GitHub. Only a handful of copies of this book exist in physical form and it has been photo copied (which is great).
However, I was completely shot down by the local library when I was discussing it with them. They said they already had a photo copy and didn’t need anymore digital editions, I tried to explain the benefits of having it in a machine readable format but they wouldn’t entertain it. I completed the project for me, so I wasn’t too bothered, but thought they might have been interested in archiving it but they weren’t.
My general feeling is that they didn’t like an outsider contributing and touching on a format they didn’t know so got slightly defensive.
stog commented on Scoping a Local-First Image Archive scottishstoater.com/2025/... · Posted by u/stog
I remember a Mac app years ago that had nearly this exact same pitch, but stopped development because it wasn't making enough sales and the developer didn't want to pursue it just as a hobby project.
Just now I found FlowVision which looks like a similar concept, but I don't think that was the one I'm thinking of.
https://github.com/netdcy/FlowVision?tab=readme-ov-file
Anybody know what app I'm trying to remember?
I don't know the project you mentioned first, but it's a shame they stopped developing due to sales.
FlowVision looks brilliant and an almost perfect client for my needs - thanks for sharing. It's a very similar concept to what I'm trying to acheive with my project but with mine I'm trying to focus on having the output suitable for archiving with no dependecies/app installs - all the user would need is a web browser.
The idea is that as long as browsers are about, you (or anyone) can use the viewer. The general idea is that once it's built it would be put on an SSD or something and in years to come can be plugged in and viewed by clicking a .html file. Sticking to plain old HTML and CSS in the output has proved pretty resilent over the last 30 years.
I'll be sticking the code on GitHub shortly under MIT and people can do what they want with it (hopefully make it faster, and more reliable without bloating it).
Deleted Comment