One thing I love about having left the US is not having to stress out about crippling medical bills and struggling to get insurance companies to pay for my health care. The NZ system isn’t perfect but it works a hell of a lot better than the American system. https://www.reddit.com/r/newzealand/s/6I8zIZoUPE Ambulance, 10 days in the hospital, surgery, etc… $98.

OpenCollective is changing. The current “non-profit as a service” platform is being handed off to a new non-profit and the company is focusing back on creating new organizational forms and models for supporting open source.

Open Collective

The Open Collective Platform is moving to a community governed non-profit!

A group of fiscal hosts representing thousands of collectives have created a new independent, community-governed, non-profit organization and have ...

IMF study and Stanford Economics Prof research shows that Working from Home has caused a large productivity boost to companies that have adopted it. The biggest boost is for fully remote organizations because it shifts who can do work, and increases happiness due to avoiding commute times.

IMF

Working From Home Is Powering Productivity

A fivefold increase in remote work since the pandemic could boost economic growth and bring wider benefits

Went for a walk on a sunny windy spring day.

Substack’s getting more traction and moving beyond text and newsletters.

Substack wants to do more than just newsletters

The newsletter platform is trying to position itself as something more: a way to pay creators of all kinds.

What’s most interesting is why people are moving to or sticking with substack. It’s traffic generation. They’re taking a 10% cut of revenue but they are able to use the platform and network to drive 50% of new subscribers and 30% of new paid subscribers to each substack creator. Sure, creators also need to build traffic, but the power is in the network which grows an audience. If we are going to see Nostr as a protocol for creators who run a business, we need to make it easier for them to build an audience. That can be algorithims, but it could also be making it easier to recommend good content, share lists, etc… The other issue we face with creators is that subscriptions are much more valuable to a creator than one off payments. With NWC and wallets we CAN do subscriptions, but we haven’t made it easy and nostr connected the way zaps are.

The cross posting service is open source but unfortunately it costs $100 a month for the developer account on the Twitter side so it’s a bit hard for people to run for personal use. For folks who want more features we welcome pull requests.

GitHub

GitHub - planetary-social/nos-crossposting-service: A service which takes your nostr notes and posts them to Twitter.

A service which takes your nostr notes and posts them to Twitter. - planetary-social/nos-crossposting-service

View quoted note →

Any nostr user, regardless of what apps you use, can setup automatic cross posting to Twitter / X for free using connect.nos.social and use that to draw your twitter audience to Nostr. It posts using njump.me links which neutrally provides links to open the content in many different nostr apps. View quoted note →

Don’t abandon and delete your social media accounts elsewhere. Use those accounts to bring your audience to Nostr. That’s the way we grow, by bringing people over. If you delete your account and never post elsewhere it’s like you’ve gone dark to most people and that doesn’t help.

Google’s released a standalone tool that we saw in NotebookLM… it’s called Illuminate and it’s pretty nifty. We’re about to see ten million customized personalized podcasts… Some of it can be great, but it’s also going to be a big problem. Podcasts are hard to produce, so creating spam of podcasts wasn’t easy before, now it is. Anyway, check it out, mind blowing how good it is. Other than recognizing some of the cadence and voices, it would never know it’s an entirely AI generated podcast.

Illuminate | Learn Your Way

Transform research papers into AI-generated audio summaries with Illuminate, your Gen AI tool for understanding complex content faster.

There’s tons of drama going on over in WordPress land. Private equity Silverlake has bought up and is running WP Engine. They’re apparently not contributing back to the WordPress Foundation as much as the foundation people think is fair. That much seems fine, but Mullenweg also seems to be wanting to completely destroy WP Engine to the point where his company Automatic can buy them up for pennies on the dollar. Getting companies to contribute to the open source the use seems good, but weaponizing trademark to try and destroy another company in the ecosystem seems really questionable. It’s interesting to think about because we don’t have a Nostr foundation or trademark. How would we handle if private equity came in to the Nostr ecosystem and didn’t contribute? We don’t have clear expectations of the role of companies in the Nostr space, nor do we have a central company or foundation the way Word Press does. I think it’s worth thinking about the best way to set up Nostr to handle this going forward. Many people here know the saga around Craig Wright and the struggle to define who and what bitcoin is… That feels somewhat similar as well. What do people think is the best way to handle this?

The Repository

Mullenweg threatens corporate takeover of WP Engine

WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg says an 8% licensing deal is no longer on the table.

Meta has decided that users have been posting too much AI generated slop content and their solution is pretty unique. Not something I thought they’d do. They’re going to start posting their own AI generated content in your feed remixing everything they’ve seen you post. How about pictures and videos of fishing trips with your friends that you never took? Who cares if you actually got tickets to the NBA final because Meta will generate content showing you court side! This is worse than them spending billions on a leg less VR world. https://www.axios.com/2024/09/27/meta-ai-posts-facebook-instagram

Anybody else see how Twitter has added reddit / nostr style groups? I’m not sure how to create them, i think this one was a list that somehow got converted. I don’t mind being in it, but i don’t remember joining. I got added to a list and now it’s a group with moderators and rules for the group.

This airtable of proposed, rejected, and accepted new emojis is awesome. https://airtable.com/appD88rpPmpf4V5zF/shrQ5SB6FPP5UlLJu/tblFdzu4kZYAgkvPF?viewControls=on

This republican candidate for governor of North Carolina has some pretty crazy ideas. He hates trans women but loves watching trans porn. He’s a self described “black nazi” who wants to reinstate slavery. How did someone like this get elected as lieutenant governor and nominated by the republicans for governor?

Mark Robinson (American politician) - Wikipedia

The push to control teen access to social media is really a push to require KYC on all apps and websites. @Taylor Lorenz has a great interview about why this is all so problematic.

If your brand is all about luxury environmentalism then having out outspoken right wing troll of a CEO is a problem. Tesla has become fundamentally uncool amongst the people who used to be their biggest fans.

Tesla Robotaxi Rumors Fueling Hollywood Anger at Elon Musk

As Tesla is reportedly planning a reveal of its new self-driving robotaxi at Warner Bros, amid widespread anger at CEO Elon Musk.

GM

These spam reply bots REALLY like using emojis more than the real people I follow.

Armenian nutmeg cake by candlelight

What lovely people we have on Nostr, so open and welcoming. View quoted note →