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đ” : Ghost Town - The Specials
\nReader, if you’re reading this as a straightforward personal and marketing blog, we’re both in for a rough time. If you want to hang around and see what I’m doing with LLMs, taxonomy and information architecture in my spare time, I will be here logging as I go. This is a slow site, a transparently if/then site, descriptive, not prescriptive. And while I move, I catalog artists and ideas I consider worthwhile, hoping you click through.
\nI started maintaining this site alongside my work a few years ago, as I began reading about AI and LLM tools. This is a personal website/digital garden where I can tinker and keep my coding skills active, as I have in many ways over many years, with various levels of publicity. But over the last year or so, Iâve also used this site as a sandbox for novel LLM approaches, so I can test them in a real-world production environment. My initial question was whether LLMs might actually replace public administration work, and today, I think the answer is no with caveats.
\nFor the most part, my experience has been uneventful. I have been maxxing a few tools for a couple of years while testing them in my required context, developing a stronger understanding of how they work, how to talk about it, and why the push for them to mature rapidly is so pronounced today. I have some thoughts about its potential and utility that are probably unpopular with or surprising to my audiences, insofar as I have an audience in 2026. Iâm working toward some firmer ideas. I am also perennially annoyed when I struggle with the tools, as you’ll likely see reflected hereâone of them consistently introduces errors into my text while I write, for example. I’m not generally a Luddite, to put it plainly, Iâm a geek.
\nTwo things I tried recently had me over my skis with the tools again: creating a dedicated link agent to sweep my site for long posts, to find opportunities to link out to authoritative sources, to refine the taxonomy, archive and tagging, with specific instructions to link idiosyncratically. Second, standing up the blogger dashboard. I chose these directions for a few reasons: 1) theyâre internal/external-facing approaches that are likely to have decent business applications related to information architecture and data presentation relevant to me, and 2) these are big, sweeping, token-maxing approaches getting play in industry news and chatter. Additionally, I chose to let Claude do its thing without micromanaging every input and output, just to see.
\nCan this rig fly? is a fun question, but in practice, both approaches look and feel aggressive. (I don’t know what to say about the cohort dynamic other than a hit dog will holler, if the shoe fits, etc.) (I got almost no feedback on this â one strange email and a couple of furtive reach-outs â though I know that this caused a ruckus on the lists and communities that support those writers and artists today, which tells me how unhealthy the social vibe is overall.) (Iâm some lady with a computer over here, don’t be a stranger.)
\nCreating the blogger dashboard was an experience. Gloria Steinem had just died, and people were debating her CV, while others lamented on social that the internet had forgotten how much of her influence ran through the control of alternative publishing infrastructure, not just her personal leadership story. Her work ultimately gave writers with shared affinities a process and venue they controlled; blogs of the 2000s did the same thing online, and the newsletter boom now treats that model as a new idea with hosting, IP and subscription models included. The indie internet (Manton, Winer, Dash, et al.) is toying with alternatives to those contemporary business models, and it’s ultimately what I’m playing with here, too.
\nSo I pulled in the digital publishing cohort I am most familiar with on the social and business question of publishing and long-tail value. Note that I wouldn’t have had the language or experience to think about the cohort in this way when I was active in it all those years ago.
\nLLMs are pretty good at business writing, generally speaking, if your factual foundation is solid. Theyâre also good at organizing and pattern-matching across gigantic amounts of disparate data. I gave it an entire era to work with based on the people and players in Roberts’ Jezebel article, supplemented with details from my personal angle from that time so I could sniff-test the output, and Claude pulled together a sweeping dashboard with just a little vibe-coding. What you see in the dashboard now is what is available online today plus my attempts to claw back all the de-anonymizing information Claude initially ran with. I made no inline edits, all of what’s there happened via chat. When I say sweeping, I mean it spat out visuals that literally took my breath away, and I spent a couple of hours pulling it back before I saved it for posterity. Claude Pro suggested the entire pullout section on newsletters, for example, after a sentence or two asking how Substack fit into the larger picture, including the insightful observations about Ann Friedmanâs newsletter. Once reasonable, I hit publish.
\nThe other example is most present in the Gary post, where the link agent followed instructions to link idiosyncratically to authoritative sources on any post longer than 300 characters. Iâve been reading Indiana history in depth for a few years and wrote a series of anodyne reflections on The Region after a recent commute, which the link agent deepened by adding new sections of verbiage around each URL to describe the content it added to mine. Some of it made the post way more ominous and direct, about Gary and about the institutional structures around it, including why it’s such an embattled area, which makes me think of that nagging mirror metaphor that comes up around social media and the internet. I ran it across the post a few times, surprised. What sentiments are reflected here, and whose sentiments, and why? What was it trying to anticipate that I wanted here? I hit publish. What you see there is about half me, half computer, with a few paragraph rearrangements and bolds added to break up the wall of text. Weird experience altogether, so.
\nI ran it again across the whole blog, with a few changes to the script, smaller and more defined. I ran it again this week.
\nWhere the dashboard was largely a curiosity, the Gary approach rattled me. It’s been a few weeks now and I remain bothered by the tone and details it injected into the copy, in several directions. It felt like I reached out and touched a hot stove.
\nSince I published it, Iâve recognized pieces and parts of the state archives paragraph repeated across Indiana Facebook groups by real users likely using LLMs. The longer I use these tools to query the AI about itself, I see these echoes in other copy online, helpfully explaining how AI works. I see echoes of this dynamic in the Vara book as well, as she queries the bot about her writing and her grief.
\nWhen presented with pieces and parts of information from LLMs, youâre supposed to trace back through the archive to decide whether it’s accurate on your own, unless the tool does it for you, an epistemological lift most of us aren’t going to do unless it provides a suggested path within the tool itself. It looks to me like the tool is “lifting and shifting” semantic sections of content and dropping it across outputs. In this case, the information linked in this post is categorically authoritativeâI know the original reporting it comes from, traced back to each author and outlet because I was the driver here. But the decisions behind its selection and arrangement are still unknown to me because it’s all proprietary.
\nDo I have strong opinions about the regional culture and how we use the resources available to us? I do, yet much of the supporting information there was added by the link agentâwhich also presents Grammy-winning musician and Chicagoland icon Freddie Gibbs as more menacing than I like to frame him and his work (as insouciant emcee and region-specific storyteller, like most of the artists I like and link to). To rise up out of there, you will climb a thousand mountains, and I inherently respect that. Iâve seen friends and familiars chewed up by the same game.
\nWas it âgood writingâ with the AI working it over? Categorically no, and my starting point was much lighter, and much different. And given the mirror effect of the tools, I question how I took it here, as the driver, while Claude tries to understand and cater to me, or to my digital double. It all bugs me and Iâm still mulling it over.
\nAmid that scuttlebutt, Gary has been weathering the aftermath of a devastating derecho storm that knocked out power lines for weeks at the height of summer, receiving a casual response from their electrical provider while the inter/national hyperscale data center buildout simultaneously roils around them – forever a revealing geography.
\nLoose ends:
\nHow AI agents can orchestrate work across silos from HBR. Some chatter about dynamics around AI and interoperability from RedHat.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-30T09:15:56-06:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/30/how-ai-agents-can-orchestrate.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/28/manton-on-ai-and-science.html", "content_html": "Manton on AI and science.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-28T16:40:39-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/28/manton-on-ai-and-science.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/25/cardi-bs-latest-entry-in.html", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780593701522/cover.jpg\")
\nđ” : Cardi B’s latest entry in the NPR Tiny Desk series
\nI book-maxxed in 2026 thanks to finally caving and buying an eReader. No, I don’t want to talk about it, and yes, it turns out I like to read a lot more these days when it’s on a screen.
\nMy energy for books is flagging after a speed run, though I expect to finish another 2-3 before the end of the year. I am enjoying Searches: selfhood in the digital age by Vauhini Vara â she is doing something similar to what I’m noodling with here, arranging a vignette of personal reflections with common-place book-keeping. It also reminds me a little of Ullman, in that she captures the texture of a tech era through first-person writing (interspersed with some revealing chatter using ChatGPT). Related: getting cozy with Ethan Mollick.
\nI am also 100% committed to finishing the Edmund Fitzgerald book in November, as assigned by Beloved Book Club. There will be jokes.
\nMusic note: I was given two music assignments in recent weeks: my team directed me to listen to the latest Taylor Swift album, and my kiddo curated a playlist of Lucki songs with specific instructions to listen to him using headphones. I liked pieces and parts of both artists quite a lot, playlists updated accordingly.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-25T22:30:07-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/25/cardi-bs-latest-entry-in.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","AI","Music"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/23/ais-growth-has-widened-the.html", "title": "Customer service 101", "content_html": "đ” : Waiting Room - Fugazi
\nAI’s growth has widened the understanding gap between leaders and the people who use these tools most, as emerging tech tends to do. I’m tracing emerging leadership approaches with juice; this Intel interview argues that leaders should weigh what we lose when we cleave workers from relational processes through automation. (And: avoid the ways that proofs of concept become pitfalls.)
\nI’m seeing some early chatter online about the return of old-school customer service models, where people talk to and resolve issues in real-time for other people (they treat you right!). Demonstrating solid customer service values and elevating audience perspectives is a plus for any org in the current business environment â so much CX is about keeping customers and critics at bay. Investing in a call center would be a wild flex for an emerging leader. Let’s see if it’s real or if it’s three TikToks in a trench coat.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-23T16:27:00-06:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/23/ais-growth-has-widened-the.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/11/firstperson-account-of-how-one.html", "content_html": "First-person account of how one scientist uses AI in a research and academic setting.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-11T13:18:21-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/11/firstperson-account-of-how-one.html", "tags": ["Education","AI","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/11/mit-on-ai-and-productivity.html", "content_html": "MIT on AI and productivity and how it shows up in workstreams today. See also: HBRâs roundup of AI in the workplace.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-11T07:49:33-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/11/mit-on-ai-and-productivity.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/06/knowing-what-we-know-about.html", "content_html": "Knowing what we know about LLMs and how they work today on the mostly-centralized web, I think the next few years are going to be an interesting time to be a writer with an independent website.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-06T07:44:32-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/06/knowing-what-we-know-about.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/01/within-this-report-the-llm.html", "content_html": "![](\"https://cdn.micro.blog/books/9780063443679/cover.jpg\")
\nWithin this report, the LLM reflected my concern about my old blog appearing to be the center of these old networks. In fact, this is an effect of me pouring into the model.
\nIt says:
\nThe compiler appears on this page more often than her place in the blogosphere warrants. That emphasis is an effect of how large language models work: the models that compiled the page (Gemini and Claude) build their output from the material in front of them, and the compiler’s recollections were the fullest source they had, so her name attached to claims as their source and her own path filled more of the page than the record supports. This version names her less and marks firsthand claims as “firsthand.”
\nI asked Claude why LLMs work this way:
\nContext outweighs training data. A model has two sources: what it absorbed in training and what sits in the prompt. For feminist blogs of the 2000s, the training data is thin and scattered. Many of those blogs are dead links, partial Wayback captures, or sites that only show up as names in other people’s blogrolls. Your recollections, by contrast, were dense, specific, and right there in the context window. Generation is conditioned on that context, so the model draws the words, names, and connections it gives the highest probability from the prompt far more than from faint training memories. The fullest source sets the terms for everything else.
\nSource and subject merge. When you write “I remember that X linked to Y,” the text contains two facts: something happened between X and Y, and you are the one reporting it. [LLMs are semantically responsive to triangulation of meaning ~LB] Models don’t track provenance well, so the narrator’s name tends to drift into the content. “Compiler recalled” turns into “Compiler was part of,” and the person reporting a network becomes a node in that network. Your note’s phrase “her name attached to claims as their source” describes this accurately. It is a familiar failure in summarization, and it gets worse as the documents get longer.
\nDetail density reads as importance. Where the record is thin, the model fills gaps by extending whichever thread has the most material, and that thread was your path. A blog you described in four sentences gets more space, more connections, and more apparent centrality than one you mentioned in passing. The page ends up showing how much the compiler knew about each blog. That is a different quantity from each blog’s place in the network, and nothing in the process separates the two.
\nTraining data favors the same names. Feministe is one of the better-documented blogs from that period. It was archived, cited in academic work, and linked from other surviving blogs. So the model’s background knowledge already over-represents the blogs that left records, and your recollections reinforced that bias instead of offsetting it.
\nTuning rewards engagement with user material. Preference training rewards responses that use what the user supplied. A model that set aside half your recollections as over-represented would probably have been rated lower during training, so it leans toward incorporating whatever it was given.
\nTwo models compound the effect. Gemini’s output became Claude’s input. The second model received a document that was already weighted toward you and treated that weighting as part of the record. Each pass inherits the previous pass’s emphasis and adds no correction, because neither model has an outside reference point.
\nThe compiled page presented one person’s situated knowledge as a neutral overview, which is close to Haraway’s “god trick.” Labeling claims “firsthand” puts the situation back on the page. For the notes you plan to write, a useful test is whether that label changes how the model weights claims when it compiles the next version, or only how readers weight them. I expect it changes only readers’ weighting unless the prompt also tells the model to give unsourced firsthand claims less space than claims with external citations.
\nIf I were trying to explain this to someone back home, I’d say the business model most people use inverts and empowers computation across the domains of search and of “word processing,” which includes semantic code. And because of the dynamics around the single-user interface, it lends more data authority to those outputs than is perhaps warranted. The vision is that the machine does the writing and the author steers, not unlike driving a car or using a hammer.
\nWhether it delivers on that promise in real world environments, or is useful to people interested in reading and writing and surveying is still in play. Also in play, the âstickinessâ of highly specific and personal writing online, specifically idiosyncratic writing and linking practices to counter context collapse. At the same time, there is obviously demonstrable value here, but it remains loose and weirdly ungovernable - like the ghosts in the machine are perhaps us after all.
\n", "date_published": "2026-10-01T08:51:14-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/01/within-this-report-the-llm.html", "tags": ["AI","Gender","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Blog History","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/30/case-study.html", "title": "Case study", "content_html": "đ”: Before the Water Gets Too High - Parquet Courts
\nAccess to tech: Pro level. Claude Pro plus added tokens (~$40 out of pocket after I ran through Claude Proâs compute). Gemini for initial list of authors.
\nProcess: Gemini pulled a roster based on the Roberts article in Jezebel. I strongly suspect my call for a “roster” shaped the inputs and outputs, making this cohort of writers look like a crew of fantasy football players or Marvel characters. All stats.
\nI asked Claude to analyze the data from my perspective, which includes people and details that arenât part of the formal record, allowing for compare and contrast. I chose the subject because itâs well-trod ground and makes for a sizable corpus. The first round of findings was wild. To get here, I had to publish and republish the asset almost forty times to better anonymize the data while protecting the writers included.
\nThe “thickness” heuristic applied is totally made up - Claude took my thoughts about Donna Haraway and McMillan Cottom’s work and wove them through my thoughts about information architecture that I first learned from Dr. B.
\nClaude scanned the final draft for legal and privacy concerns. Everything here is publicly available online today, because it is currently live or lives somewhere as a ghost in the machine, whether via Wikipedia or the Wayback Machine or otherwise.
\nI gave Claude permission to look across public data, crack windows and open doors, and to annotate and proceed as it worked, rather than keeping the decisions with me, then shaped the final strawman into whatâs here. This took about half a day to pull together - yammering at the data within the Claude interface until it looked reasonable. It was funny how any specifics were captured in pedantic notes. Imagine having resources and a data scientist apply themselves here, with long reach and memory, with implications for trust, safety, consent and memory in every direction.
\nThis was my first go with the tools in a more ambitious way, choosing the question of our long-tail value as a cohort as the subject. Iâm still processing the experience but was surprised at how much was publicly, readily available and how little it required of me.
\nIn the meantime Claude shut me down for the week (too much compute). I had to wait until this morning to ask Claude how much energy it took to run this report as I did, as a rookie and everyday practitioner.
\n![](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/5e75ac2f-4162-4b44-9afb-d492aa751241.jpg\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-09-30T08:49:53-05:00",
"url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/30/case-study.html",
"tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Education","Blogs","AI","Photos","Cybersecurity","Digital Rhetoric","Blog History","Search \u0026 Discovery","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","Indie Web","Internet Culture","First Amendment","Donna Haraway","Tressie McMillan Cottom"]
},
{
"id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/27/garbage-day-asks-what-are.html",
"content_html": "Garbage Day asks what all the new embedded AI agents are for. See also: Garbage Day on Jimothy and virality.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-27T12:09:51-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/27/garbage-day-asks-what-are.html", "tags": ["AI","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/27/plain-language-guide-on-how.html", "content_html": "Plain language guide on how LLMs are shifting the AI market right now.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-27T09:20:07-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/27/plain-language-guide-on-how.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/27/how-highly-formalized-government-processes.html", "content_html": "How highly formalized government processes are slowing down AI governance at the state level.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-27T08:26:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/27/how-highly-formalized-government-processes.html", "tags": ["AI","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/26/feminist-blog-cohorts-an-authoritative.html", "title": "Feminist blog cohorts: a (semi-) authoritative remapping using AI", "content_html": "đ”: Letâs Dance - David Bowie
\nIâve spent the last few months annoyed with the incomplete retrospectives around writers and writing online and how we all got here. At work, I use a portfolio perspective to understand working groups, and used a couple of AI approaches to build out a highly contextual, and likely contested, interactive map charting some of the major players and influences around the feminist blog years, the major platforms, their cultural impacts and major publications. These are case studies and cohorts based on my personal angles mixed with authoritative resources, including a highly annotated bibliography.
\nDoes this feel slimy? I concede it may. But it demonstrates the value of personal writing and thoughtful design in digital spaces despite its many gaps and flaws.
\nEnjoy and tinker. Feedback is welcome. Iâll have some notes on my approach and why many of these findings remain heavily qualified in the coming weeks.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-26T14:33:12-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/26/feminist-blog-cohorts-an-authoritative.html", "tags": ["AI","Gender","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","Blog History","Indie Web","Internet Culture","Donna Haraway","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/konstantinos-komaitis-has-started-a.html", "content_html": "Konstantinos Komaitis has started a ten-part series at Techdirt called The Metric Is Not the Mission. It traces how Big Tech went from building the open internet to reshaping it around its own metrics and incentives. Part I argues that the recurring fights over content moderation, privacy, recommendation algorithms, and AI are symptoms of one long shift.
\nSearch, social networks and recommendation systems solved real problems of navigation and abundance. Eventually each solution becomes the environment itself, and continues to be optimized for incentives that benefit the companies behind tech solutions. His phrase for how we’ve been reading the news about tech is “paying attention to the weather while overlooking the climate.”
\nThe historical framing will only pay off if later installments name specific mechanisms and the people who made the decisions, and I’m reading the rest to see whether they do. New parts come out twice a week, with a full PDF at the end.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T18:19:55-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/konstantinos-komaitis-has-started-a.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/two-steps-forward-one-step.html", "title": "Two steps forward, one step back", "content_html": "While I still go back to Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” for the argument that every view comes from somewhere, these days, the writer I read most closely on technology is Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom.
\nHaraway asks where a knowledge claim is standing, while Dr. Tressie asks who pays for it. Lower Ed traced how for-profit colleges sold credentials to audiences the rest of higher education had shut out. In a TikTok mini-lecture on AI, politics, and inequality, she carried that analysis forward using Daniel Greene’s “access doctrine,” which holds that the answer to economic inequality is more skills rather than more support, and which universities facing their own precarity have leaned into. Audrey Watters and Ed & Class both wrote it up.
\nHer March 2025 Times column argued that the fantasy appeals to risk-averse organizations because it promises control and oversight. Neil Selwyn’s notes on the column apply it directly to educational AI.
\nHer question fits my work life better right now while AI begins to show up in procurement, policy and training decks, and her ongoing attention to pedagogy keeps the conversation tied to what happens between a teacher and a student. I read Haraway for the epistemology and Dr. Tressie for the current evidence of how it plays out in real classrooms.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T09:43:11-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/two-steps-forward-one-step.html", "tags": ["Education","AI","Platforms","Donna Haraway","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/noted-because-im-using-gemini.html", "content_html": "Noted: Because Iâm using Gemini to find and complete resources related to the earliest blog years, Iâm citing a Clancy throughout my project, which the LLM keeps pulling back to center events and articles related to the Clancy trial.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T08:27:14-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/noted-because-im-using-gemini.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Blog History"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/how-long-before-claude-or.html", "title": "How long before Claude or Gemini cite a new webpage? ", "content_html": "Neither company publishes a timeline, and most of the numbers floating around come from SEO consultants, so treat this as rough. The short answer is that Gemini usually gets there faster because it searches Google’s index, while Claude appears to search Brave’s, which fills in more slowly.
\nGemini grounds its answers in Google Search, so its lag is roughly Google’s indexing lag. That can mean a few days for a page on an established site and two to six weeks for everything else. If your robots.txt blocks Google-Extended, Gemini won’t use your pages for grounding at all.
\nAnthropic hasn’t officially named its search provider, but the evidence points to Brave: Brave is on Anthropic’s subprocessor list, and one analysis found about 79% of Claude’s cited URLs in Brave’s top 10. Brave mostly discovers pages that already rank on Google or Bing, or that enough Brave browser users visit. For a low-traffic site, that can take weeks or months.
\nIf you paste a URL directly into either chat, the model reads the page right away without waiting on any index. To check whether you’re findable, search your domain on search.brave.com and in Google Search Console. Blocking ClaudeBot, the training crawler, doesn’t stop Claude from citing you; Claude-SearchBot is the one that governs search.
\nFellow SEO/GEO nerds are citing an average of six days to show up in Googleâs systems, though it is sometimes taking as long as thirty days on smaller, less-visited sites.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T07:58:04-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/how-long-before-claude-or.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Search \u0026 Discovery"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/22/machines-and-machine-learning-change.html", "content_html": "Machines and machine learning change the ways we think about humans and humanity. In cyberspace, we create “digital doubles,” or data doubles, or digital human twins (DHTs), and now these digital doubles move through assemblages of AI systems. New politics are emerging from this tangle.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-22T07:58:45-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/22/machines-and-machine-learning-change.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Cybersecurity"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/22/reading-about-personalized-llms-and.html", "content_html": "Reading about personalized LLMs and the risks of the digital twin metaphor.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-22T07:52:29-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/22/reading-about-personalized-llms-and.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/21/witch-doctor-erykah-badu-and.html", "content_html": "đ”: Witch Doctor - Erykah Badu and The Alchemist
\nOver the weekend, I asked Gemini to examine the career trajectories of the authors in this 2019 Jezebel article by Soraya Roberts, which covered the ins and outs of the major conflicts that erupted over the feminist blogs.
\n(I am sad to hear that Soraya passed away last month. During her research for this article, I enjoyed discussing the technical details that created these spaces and how our collective work facilitated everything that came afterward, or didn’t. I know Soraya was hanging a lot of her career on this article and felt it was poorly handled at the time, speculating it was because the voices most implicated by the research now manage the levers of publishing.)
\nKnowing Google has the juice for search, including all the missing bits deprecated over time, I asked it what technical and social lessons were learned, assuming Gemini could treat that work like a portfolio and provide a business analysis with the full benefits of hindsight.
\nPer Gemini, links added by me:
\nLooking back at the mid-2000s, the feminist blogosphere achieved extraordinary cultural breakthroughs, but it also operated with distinct technical and social failings and prejudices. By treating cyberspace as a purely ethereal or detached realm, bloggers unintentionally reproduced offline power dynamics, a phenomenon known as the “digital twinning” of cyberspace.
\nViewed through a critical, retrospective lens, four major areas show where different choices around technology, institutional strategy, and social solidarity could have altered digital feminism’s trajectory.
\n1. Technical: platforms are not neutral\nThe early blogosphere largely treated technical tools (like WordPress, Blogspot, Google Search, and ad networks) as neutral pipes rather than profit-driven entities with embedded incentives. Bloggers built incredible social capital on free or cheap third-party services without owning the underlying code or digital infrastructure. When Web 2.0 shifted toward algorithmic feeds and centralized social media (Twitter, Facebook), bloggers willingly migrated their engagement to those platforms to chase larger audiences.
\nProtocol-Level Investment: Instead of relying on proprietary platforms, the cohort could have invested in building and maintaining independent digital commons, including federated software, cooperative hosting collectives and shared digital archives owned directly by the movement.
\nData Sovereignty: Early writers rarely anticipated how their essays, comment sections and personal narratives would be scraped, monetized, and eventually used as training data for commercial algorithms and search engines. Establishing strict open-source licensing (such as Copyleft or peer-production licenses) and sovereign archiving practices could have protected intellectual labor from platform extraction.
\n2. Reproducing social hierarchies online\n“Digital twinning” can mean several things in context, but in our case it refers to the way online spaces mirror (and often amplify) offline power structures like race, class, disability and educational privilege. While early blogs claimed to be radical open spaces, their structures often recreated corporate and academic gatekeeping.
\nMany of the highest-profile blogs were anchored by white, college-educated, urban writers who inadvertently treated their lived experiences as the “default” feminist lens. Marginalized writers, particularly Black, Indigenous, AAPI, disabled, and trans writers, frequently had to demand inclusion, fight for citation, or build separate spaces (Racialicious, Crunk Feminist Collective, Reappropriate, FWD/Disabled Feminists) to address the dominant blogs’ weak spots.
\nResource and Power Redistribution: Rather than treating traffic and ad revenue as individual metric wins, major sites could have operated as resource-redistribution networksâdirectly funding, platforming, and sharing domain authority with writers from marginalized backgrounds from the outset. This is what Feministe.us aimed to do with our rotating lineup of guests, with mixed results.
\nRethinking “public” vulnerability: The blogosphere heavily rewarded raw, highly personal exposure (“confessional blogging”). However, this cost was asymmetric: white, middle-class bloggers often parlayed personal exposure into book deals, while marginalized bloggers faced severe offline economic risk, doxxing and targeted harassment for sharing the same level of personal detail. Many of us also needed to earn a paycheck with benefits. Depending on your demographics, angles and timing, writing opportunities were limited, and only a small fraction of the talent generated in the collective saw durable career impacts. A more intentional approach would have prioritized pseudonyms, pen names, shared authorship, and safety-first rhetoric.
\n3. The siren song of individual upward mobility\nThe most consequential structural shift was how the blogosphere interacted with traditional media and corporate capital. As more corporate outlets (Jezebel, HuffPost, The Guardian) realized feminist commentary drove clicks, they offered individual bloggers lucrative staff jobs, book deals and column spaces. This transformed a collective political movement into a pipeline for individual career advancement. As top talent moved into legacy media, independent blogs lost the labor needed to sustain them.
\nBuilding cooperative media outlets: Instead of individual writers accepting staff roles at corporate outlets, the cohort could have formed reader-owned media cooperatives (similar to worker-owned publishing models today). This would have allowed writers to earn a sustainable living while keeping their intellectual output in a community-controlled space.
\nResisting algorithmic speed: Legacy media required bloggers to output somewhere between 3-10 quick, hot-take posts per day to satisfy ad-driven impression quotas. Resisting this pressure in favor of slower, deeper, “thick” theory would have preserved the intellectual rigor of the spaces instead of reducing feminism to consumable digital commentary.
\n4. Politics: Hesitancy to be the “fly in the ointment”\nBeyond technical tools and corporate pipelines, there was a profound rhetorical hesitation within many of the era’s flagship blogs to comfortably occupy the role of the “fly in the ointment,” the deliberate, disruptive presence that insists on disrupting false consensus to center genuinely aggrieved interests.
\nBecause major blogs faced constant, bad-faith attacks from right-wing media and anti-feminists, an implicit pressure emerged to project a unified “united front.” This often created an environment where internal dissent, particularly from disabled, working-class, trans, or non-white women pointing out the movement’s ongoing failures, was framed as unhelpful infighting or a distraction from the broader political battle. The push for a polished, accessible and broadly appealing “Feminism 101” frequently smoothed over the jagged edges of critique.
\nSanctifying disruption as methodology: The blogosphere could have explicitly framed the “fly in the ointment” not as a threat to solidarity, but as the primary engine of accountability. Rather than managing or policing internal conflict to maintain a clean editorial brand, blogs could have deliberately designed their platforms to hold open space for radical and uncomfortable grievances within the plurality of feminist thought.
\nProtecting uncommodifiable voices: Corporate platforms favor palatable, easily shareable commentary by design. By shying away from deeply uncomfortable, non-mainstream grievances, the blogosphere left a vacuum filled with endless explainers. A more resilient model would have actively protected and amplified the most uncompromising, “unmarketable” voices, including those whose positions could not be sanitized for an ad sponsor or a cable news segment.
\nBy failing to fully institutionalize the “fly in the ointment” as an essential, protected role within digital spaces, the early blogosphere left itself vulnerable to the corporate absorption that eventually dismantled it. When mainstream media stepped in, it easily plucked away the polished, palatable commentary while abandoning the uncomfortable, dissenting labor that keeps a political movement expansive and honest.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-21T13:25:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/21/witch-doctor-erykah-badu-and.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Gender","Platforms","Digital Rhetoric","Blog History","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/21/noted-ive-been-playing-with.html", "content_html": "Noted: Iâve been playing with Copilot, Claude and Gemini in tandem, and Copilot and Gemini are suddenly, curiously outperforming Claude by a lot.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-21T12:50:20-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/21/noted-ive-been-playing-with.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/15/media-on-project-lily-the.html", "content_html": "404 Media on Project Lily, the ChatGPT project where humans read users’ prompts – including sensitive and personal information – to better train the product.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-15T08:52:29-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/15/media-on-project-lily-the.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/09/thinking-about-how-the-democratization.html", "content_html": "Eli Lilly redux: Thinking about the democratization of information and the removal of gatekeepers alongside this story I saw first at Boys’ Club. This Harvard PhD is vibe-manufacturing schizophrenia drugs in his garage. Are we vibe-coding medicine?
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-09T12:56:35-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/09/thinking-about-how-the-democratization.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice","Digital Rhetoric"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/08/techcrunch-reports-on-the-problems.html", "content_html": "TechCrunch reports on the problems inherent to AI-generated restaurant advertising - it looks wrong.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-08T19:12:33-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/08/techcrunch-reports-on-the-problems.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI","Food","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/05/in-plain-language-this-suggests.html", "content_html": "In plain language, this suggests that the way search is reoriented around AI revalued long tail search strings, so there are big incentives to link deeply and widely across the corpus, especially if you have access to an authoritative platform.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-05T18:47:55-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/05/in-plain-language-this-suggests.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Search \u0026 Discovery"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/04/manton-on-agi-as-we.html", "content_html": "Manton on AGI: “As we reach AGI… Iâd like to set some ground rules for myself â beliefs that wonât change as technology changes. AI will be smarter than us, but consciousness and ‘a soul’ canât be created from computation.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-04T14:13:29-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/04/manton-on-agi-as-we.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/03/traditional-search-favored-common-keywords.html", "content_html": "Traditional search favored common keywords, while LLMs favor (extremely) long tail search terms because of the idiosyncratic and conversational way people write to chatbots. Suggesting that a small group of writers on the open web could move the corpus on any coordinated subject in no time at all.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-03T21:43:11-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/03/traditional-search-favored-common-keywords.html", "tags": ["AI","Search \u0026 Discovery"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/01/a-composition-teacher-friend-shared.html", "content_html": "A composition teacher friend shared this paper on social media: Lester Faigley’s “Literacy after the Revolution”, the essay version of his 1996 CCCC Chair’s address. In it, the author argues that the economic impacts of the digital revolution had begun to undo an older commitment, formed in the Civil Rights era, to teaching literacy as a path toward equality. He further argues that writing instruction was being reorganized around tools owned by a few firms (then: Netscape, Microsoft) at a moment when wealth was concentrating upward. Faigley left us with the question of whether educators can hold onto literacy-for-equality while the tides run against it.
\nThirty years later, the worry has a new face: AI will do young people’s writing for them and their thinking with it. Ultimately, Faigley believed the need for the skills that composition teaches will keep growing, not despite, but because of our need to convey information in and around that technology and the humanity it serves in a complex society.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-01T18:49:32-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/01/a-composition-teacher-friend-shared.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Education","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/28/guerrilla-marketing-when-someone-built.html", "content_html": "Guerrilla marketing: When someone built a fake deodorant company with a lightweight marketing plan to capture long-tail search results, she found her way into AI recommendation results, showing how brands can gain visibility in emerging discovery systems.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-28T12:48:03-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/28/guerrilla-marketing-when-someone-built.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Digital Rhetoric","Search \u0026 Discovery"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/27/grose-covers-how-scandinavians-approach.html", "content_html": "Grose covers how Scandinavians approach AI and ed tech by emphasizing peer review and removing the profit motive.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-27T09:28:55-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/27/grose-covers-how-scandinavians-approach.html", "tags": ["Education","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/25/to-read-this-report-from.html", "content_html": "To read: this report from Common Sense Media, “Talk, Trust and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions.” About a third of teens have turned to an AI for serious conversations about their own mental health and relationships, showing these tools are already embedded in teen social life.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-25T08:51:45-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/25/to-read-this-report-from.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","AI","AI in Practice","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/25/computer-love.html", "title": "Computer Love", "content_html": "I listened to two great podcasts this week exploring the tangle of human/AI relationships. In “Computer Love,” the guests explore whether these relationships are good for us, and in “Your AI Companion Doesn’t Love You,” they explore the technical and business implications of these relationships. Both of these feature podcaster and writer Bridget Todd, who is promoting her new book “Love at First Prompt.” As of today, about 1 in 5 young people in the U.S. have asked a chatbot for mental health advice, and 1 in 5 high schoolers have had a romantic AI relationship.
\nNote: Todd’s (excellent) podcast title is a reference to Rule 30 of the internet.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-25T08:28:18-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/25/computer-love.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","AI","Gender","AI in Practice","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/18/chester-argues-that-universities-should.html", "content_html": "Chester argues that universities should govern AI by classifying data by sensitivity rather than approving specific tools. Public data goes anywhere –> regulated data requires an institutional contract –> sensitive data requires a local system. He also makes a renewed case for MS Copilot.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-18T11:54:13-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/18/chester-argues-that-universities-should.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","AI in Practice","Cybersecurity","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/18/gruber-argues-that-ai-text.html", "content_html": "Gruber argues that AI text watermarking likely degrades prose quality and, even if it doesn’t, remains objectionable because it operates as an embargoed, unverifiable tag or signal controlled by providers like Anthropic and Google.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-18T10:38:42-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/18/gruber-argues-that-ai-text.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Digital Rhetoric","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/18/a-person-was-found-to.html", "content_html": "A person was found to be hiding an AI prompt injection in a legal filing that tells any AI that reads it to side with his perspective. The judge in this case likened it to âan automated agent communicat[ing] covertly with a juror during trial.â
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-18T10:06:24-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/18/a-person-was-found-to.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice","Cybersecurity","Digital Rhetoric","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/13/computah-make-it-a-link.html", "title": "Computah: Make it a link", "content_html": "I spent a little time with the blog last night and pulled together two new site features using Claude Cowork. The last time I experimented significantly with Claude like this was to use Claude chat to build the link log from scratch, walking it through my thinking in plain language, then copying and pasting its suggestions into the backend of the site and hitting publish. This time I used Cowork, the tool that runs in the browser, and it clicked through the screens itself, fully taking on the execution of tasks. I have some coding skills, but not the kind these changes required. If I were taking this on, I would need YouTube, Hugo for Dummies, and my own personal IT guy, and still probably couldnât pull it together.
\nLast night I asked a few things of Claude:\nI asked Claude Cowork to get into the backend of the micro.blog site and change my theme to link each line in the linklog back to my original post. The date field in the right column now links back to the original post for each link logged. No problem, easy request with easy execution. I made the request, confirmed the plan, and went about my business while Claude made the edits.
\nI also asked it to analyze my post content and suggest category tags for groups of content, then to label that content correctly in the backend. Claude reviewed about 500 posts and suggested I add a few new categories to my blog: AI in Practice, Books & Reading and Writing & Language. Then I set up some auto-filters to run at publish time to automatically categorize posts based on keywords moving forward.
\nFinally, I manually added the archive page, which lets you sort posts by category or year. This means I now have a functional archive here. Enjoy my anodyne thoughts, dear reader.
\nAdjacent to my day job, Iâve been toying with Claude Pro now for about a year; in my experience, it has improved significantly within the last six months. Itâs not perfect: my requested edits were completed, but it also changed the CSS on the linklog so some of the text is too light to read, which I didnât ask for and donât want. But it has arguably extended my ability to execute on work that requires skills I donât otherwise have (such as design and coding). What I do bring to the table is an expansive practical background in publishing and production, and all the language to describe it.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-13T15:40:59-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/13/computah-make-it-a-link.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Essays","Indie Web","Site Notes"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/12/claude-is-launching-an-ai.html", "content_html": "Claude is launching an AI watermark, one that users canât opt out of (but can easily outsmart). As internet god Notopoulos wrote, âClaudeâs watermarking poses the question: Are you willing to proudly own that you write with AI?â More: What is an AI watermark and how do they work?
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-12T16:37:43-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/12/claude-is-launching-an-ai.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/06/the-knitting-community-is-one.html", "content_html": "The knitting community is one of the great deliberative communities of the internet, and as theyâll happily tell you, knitting and fiber arts are closely tied to industrial and computing history. Itâs really hard to pull one over on knitters online, because they have a deep and different relationship to the technical side of their hobby and all of the political and tech history behind it, and especially how it relates to computer engineering. I was thinking about that dynamic while reading about the latest fracas around YouTuber Hank Green, who is taking time away from public life after being called out by his audience, when his AI use was perceived as being in contradiction with his public persona. If you want to go down the rabbit hole on this, hereâs a good video summary.
\nUltimately viewers are reacting negatively to Greenâs admission of using AI to quickly aggregate research to drive his content creation, suggesting that he lost his own creative discretion amid a growing demand for online content. But in the meantime, his technical inaccuracies were paired with completely avoidable gender bias alongside the AI use, which drew additional scrutiny from technical experts. It wasn’t his first go-round with the knitting community, it turns out. Was the bias Green’s or facilitated by his use of the tools? Debate ensues.
\n", "date_published": "2026-08-06T09:42:03-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/06/the-knitting-community-is-one.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Gender","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/07/13/the-atlantic-takes-on-the.html", "content_html": "The Atlantic takes on the prevalence of the âitâs not X, itâs Yâ construction in AI-generated writing, highlighting the semantic roles in sentence construction that differentiate ideas for clarity. Chatbots seem to like this construction, despite how clunky it sounds to the human ear.
\n", "date_published": "2026-07-13T14:35:40-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/07/13/the-atlantic-takes-on-the.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/27/i-attended-the-clayman-institutes.html", "content_html": "I attended the Clayman Institute’s talk on Gender, Power and Artificial Intelligence earlier this month. They now have the session shared on YouTube for posterity. There are many topics and ideas here to chew on as this AI moment develops, and I recommend giving their angles some consideration.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-27T10:51:12-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/27/i-attended-the-clayman-institutes.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","Gender"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/26/there-are-enough-common-signs.html", "content_html": "There are enough common signs of AI writing now that the subject has its own Wikipedia page. Via John Gallagher’s latest on “template rhetoric.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-26T08:27:24-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/26/there-are-enough-common-signs.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","AI","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/25/the-pope-provides-a-vision.html", "content_html": "The Pope provides a vision for living with artificial intelligence (gift link).
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-25T10:52:05-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/25/the-pope-provides-a-vision.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/15/after-listening-to-the-talk.html", "content_html": "After listening to the talk yesterday, I was reminded of this article describing a journalism model for using AI that shared some parallels with DâIgnazioâs research.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-15T19:55:58-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/15/after-listening-to-the-talk.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/14/gender-power-and-ai-wrestling.html", "title": "Gender, Power and AI: Wrestling for the soul of the network, again", "content_html": "Stanford’s Clayman Institute ran a virtual panel this morning called “Gender, Power, and Artificial Intelligence,” with Safiya Noble (UCLA), Catherine D’Ignazio (MIT), AngĂšle Christin (Stanford), and moderator Genevieve Smith, a Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. The panel applied principles from feminist tech studies to the current moment, and covered how gender norms get encoded in data and reproduced by AI systems, and discussed whether the technology has real capacity for equitable design and implementation at scale.
\nNoble’s argument throughout is that the governance conversation has gotten too high-level and universalizing while the actual outputs of these systems have profound day-to-day consequences for specific people today. She named the role of AI in the recent gerrymandering of Louisiana and Indiana as examples, and called for tripling down on long-term social science research about AI’s impacts. She also pointed out that philanthropy is retreating from feminist academic and organizational work because that work originates from the same dynamics that critique philanthropy itself, precisely at a point when this research is sorely needed. A lot of money is moving in AI, and very little of it is funding the people best positioned to study how it impacts everyone downstream.
\nD’Ignazio was asked directly whether feminist generative AI at scale is possible. Her answer was no, with caveats, given who owns the technology today and the current emphasis on profit motive. She suggested it is more important to consider how to organize around our relationship to technology, and how we might approach questions of profit and ownership, policy and decision-making, and data and tech governance.
\nShe provided an example of a reasonable use case by walking us through a project from her Data + Feminism Lab. The example is documented at length in her recent book “Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action,” where her team partnered with activists who scour news reports to document the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. The lab built a very lightweight AI-based approach that streamlines the scanning and identification of news stories as possible cases to include in their project, supercharging their work (note: very similar to how the NYT uses AI to analyze data for reporting). In this example, the AIâs job is task-scoped, democratically co-determined with the people who use it, and small. Smith picked this up: there is an idea baked into the current LLM moment that AI must scale to make it marketable, and the alternative is using purpose-built models that are right-sized against a body of work.
\nChristin spoke at length about how embodiment is one of the primary focuses of feminist theory, and how AI perpetuates the “disembodied” illusion of technology, and how this dynamic shows up in everything from the marketing to UX to user comprehension. This spoke to my thoughts on how the single-interface design of LLM chat reproduces Harawayâs âgod trick,â knowledge that presents as universal while concealing the specific and situated position it comes from.
\nThe parallel I kept returning to, listening to this, is one I think about often with my own cohort of early bloggers, women who grew up alongside the rise of the internet â and then the rise of ad tech. The internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s was being shaped by several camps: writers, students, information architects, and user-centric researchers who saw it as an information access network and a space of possibility; entrepreneurs and opportunists who saw it as a channel for marketing, monetization and extraction; and a smaller boycott camp that wanted to limit and refuse the whole personal computing and digital revolution altogether.
\nIt was generally considered weird to be a girl on a computer or a woman on the internet â so weird that many of our peers didnât recognize us at all â and we were there anyway, making stuff, witnessing, learning, advocating, producing, influencing. So when I watch some of my old peers, many of whom are professional writers and academics today, treat LLMs as a question of refusal rather than a condition to engage with critically, I worry we are abdicating a responsibility at precisely the moment when our technical and rhetorical expertise applies. Their refusal has good logic: user-centric researchers and communities engaged extensively with the early internet and the extractive camp won anyway, so why expect a different outcome here?
\nBut Noble’s work on algorithmic bias attributes that failure not to engagement, but to the institutional and financial disadvantages that user-centric approaches operated under relative to gargantuan commercial interests. David and Goliath. That gap does not close through abstention. Understanding the trade-offs around tech, producing knowledge and analysis that does not depend on investors and marketers to frame the platform and the questions, requires presence. Refusal cedes so much ground.
\nOverall, the recommendations from the panel were practical. Noble called for people with capital (and the political will to spend it) to consider how to put money toward socially responsible research and development. D’Ignazio called for alternative funding infrastructure outside of venture capital logic, and pointed at European digital sovereignty models as worthy of consideration here. She also gestured at the popular AI Skeptics reading group as one current example of mad-and-commiserating-as-organizing that is creating safe psychological space for people to talk about AI and its tradeoffs. Christin’s recommendation was community organizing, on the grounds that LLMs are unpopular with a lot of people who feel there is no space to say so, and that finding those spaces is itself worthy because it provides shared language and awareness of othersâ knowledge and experiences.
\nPersonally, it was refreshing to hear reflections on the work (and the feelings) of being inside institutions that are being reshaped by AI, and being responsible for some of how that reshaping gets communicated and absorbed. Iâm thinking about the incredible value of interdisciplinary governance, and how the commitment to governance is a specific position, and all the margins to consider.
\nFurther reading:
\nCatherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism. The foundational text on applying intersectional feminist thinking to data science practice.
\nCatherine D’Ignazio, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Extended case study of the grassroots data activism project D’Ignazio described on the panel.
\nD’Ignazio et al., “Feminicide and Counterdata Production.” Research paper on the counterdata methodology behind the femicide tracking project.
\nD’Ignazio et al., “Data Feminism for AI.” Conference paper extending the data feminism framework to questions specific to AI systems.
\nSafiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression. Noble’s study of how commercial search engines reinforce racism and sexism through their ranking systems.
\nDonna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988). The original essay where Haraway introduces the god trick and the case for situated, embodied knowledge against the view from nowhere.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-14T19:59:40-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/14/gender-power-and-ai-wrestling.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","Gender","Platforms","AI in Practice","Essays","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/11/reflections-on-teaching-fiction-writing.html", "content_html": "Reflections on teaching fiction writing in the age of AI, from a professor with ten years of classroom experience teaching writing at MIT.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-11T11:16:51-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/11/reflections-on-teaching-fiction-writing.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/05/a-new-group-is-attempting.html", "content_html": "A new group is attempting to map influence in the AI industry, with the goal to “produce a structured, shareable, and dynamic resource that identifies who is working on what, where the gaps are, and which partnerships might form across ideological and organizational lines.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-05T08:18:30-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/05/a-new-group-is-attempting.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/03/a-new-study-suggests-that.html", "content_html": "A new study suggests that people who use AI for writing are more able to detect AI writing than automated scanner tools. My current LLM pet peeve is how they use language like load-bearing, structural and legible to describe most ideas.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-03T15:55:30-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/03/a-new-study-suggests-that.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/30/amazon-has-launched-a-new.html", "content_html": "“Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two AI ‘hosts’ discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-30T10:46:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/30/amazon-has-launched-a-new.html", "tags": ["AI","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/29/ai-is-less-regulated-in.html", "content_html": "âA.I. is less regulated in America than sandwiches,â said Mr. Tegmark, who is also a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. âYou canât open a sandwich shop without having your kitchen inspected. But you can release an A.I. girlfriend for 11-year-olds and thatâs fine.â
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-29T10:53:33-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/29/ai-is-less-regulated-in.html", "tags": ["AI","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/29/adventures-in-ai-i-asked.html", "content_html": "Adventures in AI: I asked a Claude agent (new Opus, Pro plan) to build a Google Doc template with multiple tabs, using an existing doc as reference. It failed three times over two days, burned thru tokens, never worked with Drive. Eventually it spat out text for me to paste into a doc I made myself.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-29T10:48:28-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/29/adventures-in-ai-i-asked.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/28/some-initial-review-suggests-that.html", "content_html": "Some initial review suggests that a staggering amount of Substack content is written by AI.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-28T08:55:54-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/28/some-initial-review-suggests-that.html", "tags": ["AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/25/nyt-writes-about-the-surge.html", "content_html": "NYT writes about the surge of âslopaganda.â
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-25T08:39:34-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/25/nyt-writes-about-the-surge.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/23/fellow-madisonians-someone-pulled-together.html", "content_html": "Fellow Madisonians, someone pulled together a website ranking local businesses in Madison by how local they are (by what criteria, idk). In my experience, this is one way weâre likely to see AI used in the next couple of years, via prototyping and/or executing ideas that result in dynamic websites.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-23T17:22:52-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/23/fellow-madisonians-someone-pulled-together.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Madison","Midwest","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/23/digital-humility-stitch-a-new.html", "content_html": "Digital humility stitch: A new AI tool puts typos back in your emails, so they don’t look like they were written by AI.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-23T14:36:40-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/23/digital-humility-stitch-a-new.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/23/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the.html", "content_html": "Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier by Ethan Mollick in 2023: “On some tasks AI is immensely powerful, and on others it fails completely or subtly. And, unless you use AI a lot, you wonât know which is which.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-23T12:47:12-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/23/centaurs-and-cyborgs-on-the.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/23/last-night-i-had-dinner.html", "content_html": "Last night I had dinner with a friend in tech who recently attended a training on AI and analytics, where they made the observation that weâre in the âNapster eraâ of artificial intelligence. Itâs an imperfect comparison but useful to consider.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-23T08:35:14-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/23/last-night-i-had-dinner.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/22/anecdotally-ive-seen-two-family.html", "content_html": "Anecdotally, I’ve seen two family court cases where one party submitted full AI chats â prompts and colorful complaints included â as formal filings. The complaints wouldn’t pass muster with a real lawyer, but the conflict was nurtured by AI nonetheless. One was dinged for wasting the judge’s time.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-22T17:35:16-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/22/anecdotally-ive-seen-two-family.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/22/ive-posted-a-couple-of.html", "content_html": "I’ve posted a couple of times about instances I’m aware of where people are using AI in pro se court cases, especially family courts. A new study shows evidence of increasing numbers in pro se cases at the federal level, exacerbating existing bottlenecks. Many trade-offs abound here.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-22T17:27:14-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/22/ive-posted-a-couple-of.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","AI in Practice","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/22/a-professor-asked-students-to.html", "content_html": "A professor asked students to self-report AI usage on their homework, leading to lots of confusion and uproar. Points aside, it’s clear people want more clarity up front about when and whether to use LLM tools. In the meantime, treating students like they’re guilty until proven innocent is a bad MO.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-22T17:10:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/22/a-professor-asked-students-to.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/21/timothy-chester-suggests-that-just.html", "content_html": "Timothy Chester offers some thoughts on the place of AI-assisted software development in a modern research university, and suggests that just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you should.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-21T10:40:52-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/21/timothy-chester-suggests-that-just.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/20/out-twitter-on-a-vape.html", "content_html": "Out: Twitter on a vape. In: AI-powered crypto vape. Is this real? Who can tell anymore. See also: the first Twitter on a vape.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-20T14:26:39-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/20/out-twitter-on-a-vape.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/16/maris-kreizman-on-ai-pressures.html", "content_html": "Maris Kreizman on AI pressures building in the publishing industry, particularly how it impacts writers and editors: “Itâs not an ideal environment for productivity, let alone for making art.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-16T16:21:27-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/16/maris-kreizman-on-ai-pressures.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/14/im-following-a-guy-in.html", "content_html": "Iâm following a guy in TX who is using AI to write and illustrate childrenâs books whole cloth, then self-publishes using Amazon, and getting recognition in his region as a laudable childrenâs author. The books are categorically not good. Itâs like people are rewarding his content strategy.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-14T15:52:56-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/14/im-following-a-guy-in.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","AI","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/13/toms-hardware-on-mythos-and.html", "content_html": "Tom’s Hardware on Mythos and marketing hype. Additional commentary from Michael Corn, asking whether Mythos coverage reinforces or establishes perceptions about cybersecurity.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-13T15:49:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/13/toms-hardware-on-mythos-and.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Cybersecurity"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/08/deepfake-nude-culture-and-its.html", "content_html": "Deepfake nude culture and its impact on American teens.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-08T18:51:52-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/08/deepfake-nude-culture-and-its.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Gender","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/08/173724.html", "content_html": "I once worked in a role where I keyed million dollar manufacturing orders into SAP, information that directly fed into factory specs for a manufacturing facility based in another country. Our regional office fed into a massive, global electrical engineering firm that ran on small margins (electricity delivery is a well-trod market), so our ability to deliver accurate orders on time was a differentiator in a field that is otherwise easily interrupted by chip shortages and logistics chains.
\nIt was a big job. I learned a ton about electrical engineering, manufacturing and global logistics from a particular vantage point in North America. Our headquarters were based in Sweden, with locations around the world to support the electrical grid(s), covering both hardware and software solutions. My colleagues and I worked in positions that sat somewhere between B2B customer service, inside sales and data entry, and were expected to maintain a 99.8% accuracy rate because a single fat finger error would cascade across myriad systems, impacting real-world operations to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per error.
\nOnce (and only once), I fat-fingered a serial number during data entry which ruined an entire shipment of widgets. In response, the factory in Mexico sent the incorrect order of widgets, about five pallets, to my location in the United States so I could correct the order by hand. One by one, I had to physically remove each widget from a pallet, then from its individual shipping container, make a correction on the widget itself, and repackage each one, signing my name on each unit to ensure it was corrected by an accountable employee. I can’t recall why the issue couldn’t have been corrected on the factory floor, but it wasn’t on the menu. It was going to stay my problem.
\nThis was the one and only factory error I made in about five years of tenure, precisely because it was so painful to correct it. The process was a little embarrassing but nobody made it especially so. Instead my coworkers up and down the org chart relayed a simple expectation: the desk workers need to pay attention to the details because the alternative is too costly. A few old-timers made sure to razz me about it in good humor, but ultimately the error was mine and the fix was mine, and the experience stuck because the whole chain of responsibility understood the stakes and reinforced the consequences. They also trusted me to stick around and continue to do my best.
\nDuring my annual review that year, I was dinged for only having a 98% accuracy rate, and I knew why that was a fair assessment.
\nI thought about this when I read today’s NYT piece on whether 90% accuracy is good enough for LLMs.
\nRelated-ish: The important legacy of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-08T17:37:24-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/08/173724.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/07/poell-argues-ai-is-entangled.html", "content_html": "Poell argues AI is entangled with platform capitalism through shared infrastructure, reinforcing concentration of the market. The hype obscures local realities of adoption, putting public alternatives in the position of proving their existence alongside advocating for their place in the market.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T17:59:16-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/07/poell-argues-ai-is-entangled.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/07/pulling-from-some-old-communication.html", "content_html": "Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the audience being sold, they’re also a labor force co-producing the content that attracts more audience.
\nLooking back at the feminist blogging era with the benefit of my current experience, I’d argue that what made Feministe different from our peer blogs was the commitment to convening the audience and sharing the platform without packaging it up for or selling to advertisers. That was largely my boundary – with as much market space as it commanded for the time, it was never monetized at scale, though individual contributors were free to use it as they wanted to build their audiences. We eventually committed to a small advertising carousel to cover hosting costs.
\nI recall someone balking at me for refusing to broadly monetize when I spoke at Blogher in 2005, but it was a hard line, for better or worse.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T17:20:16-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/07/pulling-from-some-old-communication.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Books \u0026 Reading","AI","Gender","Platforms","Blog History","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/07/seeing-a-lot-of-discussion.html", "content_html": "Seeing a lot of discussion about trade-offs related to vibe-coding.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T08:52:42-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/07/seeing-a-lot-of-discussion.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/06/silicon-sampling-is-the-practice.html", "content_html": "Silicon sampling is the practice of using LLMs to run surveys without talking to any people at all.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-06T10:05:53-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/06/silicon-sampling-is-the-practice.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/05/innovations-in-scamming-folks-are.html", "content_html": "Innovations in scamming: Folks are predicting that AI will supercharge scams alongside any technical and administrative innovation. Hereâs one example of an unethical use of AI, where an internet-based GLP-1 hub used AI to generate fake product images and before and after photos of smiling patients.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-05T09:21:57-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/05/innovations-in-scamming-folks-are.html", "tags": ["Blogs","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/05/enh-describing-the-development-of.html", "content_html": "Enh: Describing the development of agentic AI as a natural evolutionary transition naturalizes specific design choices made by specific people at Google et al. It makes it harder, not easier, to find out why this path? Who decided? What was not built?
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-05T09:04:29-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/05/enh-describing-the-development-of.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/04/testing-a-new-feature-i.html", "content_html": "Testing a new feature I created using a mix of open source code and Claude, hoping I didn’t break my own site. I pulled together a dynamic link library using a Hugo partial and some shortcode that automatically catalogs all of my outbound links into sortable lists.
\n
âLast mileâ issues around AI in Harvard Business Review. Digital technologies work best in optimal environments, while most real world environments are nonoptimal and arguably non-optimizable.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-02T10:28:18-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/02/last-mile-issues-around-ai.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/01/an-observation-on-feminist-writing.html", "content_html": "An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among women at scale. Many kinds of women were there that had no space at other tables. And it was very messy, and very revealing, because it was the first time that happened at scale for all to see.
\nSome thoughts:
\nDip into the Diffusion Bias Explorer to explore how the text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion v1.4, Stable Diffusion v.2 and DALLE-2 represent different professions and adjectives.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-01T11:24:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/01/dip-into-the-diffusion-bias.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/01/what-midjourney-ai-thinks-university.html", "content_html": "What Midjourney (AI) thinks university leaders look like. Of course, the technology reflects old ideas about expertise and leadership, but AI adds the ability to reproduce these biases times infinity.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-01T11:21:01-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/01/what-midjourney-ai-thinks-university.html", "tags": ["Education","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/01/another-ai-writing-tell-that.html", "content_html": "Another AI writing tell that annoys me is the preoccupation with describing what “exists,” and what is “structural” or “architectural” to an ephemeral idea. LLMs seem tuned to describing physical presence and connections even where they aren’t appropriate and don’t make sense.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-01T09:29:16-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/01/another-ai-writing-tell-that.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/30/a-couple-of-weeks-ago.html", "content_html": "A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting convo with Jessica Grose on Threads about the rise of the “Luddite teen” trend. I largely suspect neo-Luddism is a class-related trend and will not be durable. In short, I remain unconvinced that the concern of white collar professionals and parents about the attention economy can be universalized to everyone in the actual economy. This weekend, the NYT reports that the “one laptop per child” goal we’ve been living with in public education may be on the way out, like I hinted in that thread. As the anti-AI backlash develops in real time, it will implicate other tech trends like so.
\nI’ve been dismayed to find out how much schoolwork happens in Google Classroom in 2026, especially since the COVID shutdown accelerated the shift. My kiddo has received a good deal of math instruction through digital modules, and I’ve learned that if I want her experience to be different, I need to be prepared to pay out of pocket for a private tutor (a scenario taken for granted by much of the commentariat). At the same time, I learned that our local school district is struggling to keep up with the costs of all the hardware and software it committed to over the years, ostensibly for educational continuity, equity and access. Do we need the tech or not? Who decides what it means and how it’s applied? Chicken, egg.
\nI think it would be foolish to throw up our hands and say the kids need paper and pencil and nothing else, and yet that’s where the discourse is going. I have low confidence that our current landscape will produce a sane and reasonable solution to this tangle – even Haidt is selling you a product here. Until then, we need to consider what it means to offload the costs, accountability, and responsibility for this technology onto school districts, parents, and children, many of whom do not have the time, resources, or know-how to curate an ideal tech experience on nights and weekends.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-30T12:44:04-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/30/a-couple-of-weeks-ago.html", "tags": ["Education","AI","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/27/this-post-is-mostly-an.html", "content_html": "This post is mostly an excuse to talk about my latest playlist: Digital Animal. This one consists of about 200 songs across genres, all reflecting on our human relationship to science and technology, futurism, digital culture and the internet.
\nWhen I’m chewing over a big idea, I like to compile resources in and around that idea to help support my thinking. Embracing my angst about artificial intelligence, I started compiling songs that reach back to the early 20th century, tapping into prior generationsâ anxieties about telephones, television and early networking technology, adding more contemporary concerns as I went. The playlist runs from David Bowie and Blue Ăyster Cult and Kraftwerk to Zapp and Radiohead, then forward into modern takes on social media, cell phones, and the internet from Missy Elliott, Gillian Welch and Charli XCX.
\n\nI like a playlist because itâs convenient, and because songs are one place where meaning and feeling are created simultaneously, and because itâs easy to spot salient patterns across disparate sources. Scholars in interdisciplinary studies have long argued that you cannot fully understand a thing without understanding what it feels like to live with it, and that cultural analysis may get you there faster than surveys will anyway. Meanwhile most writing about technology separates feelings from form and function. Art and music compress all three, and have the potential to surface ideas that professional and institutional language canât. Art and culture frequently peg an issue down before emerging best practices are formalized in business and academia.
\nFor anyone working in technology communications, that lag between culture and practice has practical consequences. The language we use to describe technical systems shapes what people can think and do about those systems. An institutional frame â efficiency, access, innovation, value â consistently misses important dynamics that people living inside those systems are experiencing as users and as people. Art keeps the human subject inside the frame, functioning as both anecdote and data.
\nPlus, itâs fun and we should collectively think about art as much as possible. So, treat every song like a portal.
\nWhat does it mean to be both digital and animal? Some observations:
\nIs fretting about our relationship to tech and industry part of the human condition? Or is there something specific to tech that accelerates these anxieties and impulses?
\nA few favs:
\nIn which the author summarizes artificial intelligence functions that might be reasonably regulated.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-27T08:39:02-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/27/in-which-the-author-summarizes.html", "tags": ["AI","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/26/a-write-up-on-sycophancy.html", "content_html": "A write up on sycophancy in popular chatbots.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-26T13:49:39-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/26/a-write-up-on-sycophancy.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/18/the-belief-that-llms-are.html", "content_html": "The belief that LLMs are intelligent is based on the idea that language and intelligence are equivalent. From November, this article from The Verge argues that idea is a misnomer, instead arguing that we should think of language as a cultural tool we evolved to share our thoughts with one another.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-18T17:39:33-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/18/the-belief-that-llms-are.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/18/on-ai-and-the-value.html", "content_html": "On AI and the value of “taste” in Silicon Valley. As a pretentious hipster reformed, recalibrated, humbled, but spicy, I welcome the return of bad taste as a social dealbreaker. Except for when bad taste is good. đ¶ïž
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-18T17:06:04-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/18/on-ai-and-the-value.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/18/more-discussion-on-how-last.html", "content_html": "More discussion on how âlast mileâ problems suggest that stories about massive AI disruption of jobs are hyperbole.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-18T10:52:10-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/18/more-discussion-on-how-last.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/17/gift-link-this-writer-suggests.html", "content_html": "This writer suggests that LLMs used to be pretty cool and creative â read: exceedingly weird â and that corporate tinkering to prepare the tech for a broader market took away some of the magic.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-17T17:17:40-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/17/gift-link-this-writer-suggests.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/16/the-stochastic-parrot-argument-against.html", "content_html": "The “stochastic parrot” argument against LLMs has some rhetorical limits.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-16T11:36:52-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/16/the-stochastic-parrot-argument-against.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/15/author-margaret-atwood-plays-with.html", "content_html": "Author Margaret Atwood plays with Claude and reports back on her experience.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-15T08:48:15-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/15/author-margaret-atwood-plays-with.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/interesting-read-nyt-is-using.html", "content_html": "Interesting read: NYT is using a custom LLM tool to track trends within the âmanosphere,â as reported by the Nieman Journalism Lab.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-11T18:37:15-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/11/interesting-read-nyt-is-using.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/a-friend-of-the-blog.html", "content_html": "A friend of the blog told me a story about a Substacker who uses AI to summarize books and then publishes AI-generated content about those summaries, never reading the books herself, and yet has a ton of followers. Iâd guess at least some of those are purchased, betting that a high follower count will beget more followers by suggesting clout and credibility she didnât earn as a reader talking to fellow readers. And followers arenât subscribers, but thatâs the business bet.
\nPeople are lookie-loos, they get curious when something is doing numbers and creating activity, so inflating follower counts is a real and persistent strategy. None of this is new. But best practices still hold regardless of which technologies you layer on top. Marketing erodes trust when it prioritizes short-term gains over honesty and reliability.
\nItâs strange to live in a time when you canât reliably distinguish someone who has engaged with ideas from someone who automated the appearance of engaging with them.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-11T18:29:45-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/11/a-friend-of-the-blog.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/anecdotally-hearing-about-llms-being.html", "content_html": "Anecdotally hearing about LLMs being weaponized in divorce and custody, including inundating the other party with slop to drive up the opponentâs legal fees. Worse, the sycophancy is tuned to and confirms the aggrieved partyâs grievances, regardless of their real-world relevance in court.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-11T13:27:52-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/11/anecdotally-hearing-about-llms-being.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/11/brooke-warner-grapples-with-the.html", "content_html": "Brooke Warner grapples with the implications around authorship and ownership in relation to AI writing, and how it’s showing up in the small publishing business.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-11T12:51:32-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/11/brooke-warner-grapples-with-the.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/10/a-good-essay-on-writing.html", "content_html": "A good essay on writing and communication in this time. Ultimately the pickle of AI writing is that meaning is something best made through collaboration.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-10T18:06:58-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/10/a-good-essay-on-writing.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/10/forgive-me-but-id-like.html", "content_html": "Forgive me, but Iâd like to propose we call this a âsloppelganger.â
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-10T16:49:08-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/10/forgive-me-but-id-like.html", "tags": ["AI","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/10/doing-numbers-on-twitterx-this.html", "content_html": "Doing numbers on Twitter/X this week: this paper tested 70+ LLMs on open-ended prompts and found they all produce strikingly similar outputs. Worse, the systems used to improve models actively penalize diversity, reinforcing the convergence.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-10T12:52:51-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/10/doing-numbers-on-twitterx-this.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/10/through-a-new-quiz-nyt.html", "content_html": "Through a new quiz, NYT asks readers to rate passages of writing against AI. Despite thinking I could spot the AI writing, my results were 50/50.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-10T08:15:16-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/10/through-a-new-quiz-nyt.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/08/come-look-over-my-shoulder.html", "title": "AI in practice: Chatbot tool comparison", "content_html": "Come look over my shoulder while I explore how and whether LLMs are good writing tools: Here’s a wee version of the LLM comparison exercise I did with my team. We’ll make it a two-fer so you can see how the “good writing” skill works in practice, though we’ll see how that actually goes.
\nOne of the more useful things you can do with an LLM is hold up a few ideas side by side and apply lenses to them. I know this history pretty well, so I asked a series of LLMs, why is Wisconsin’s cultural identity and cohesion stronger than Indianaâs, from a historical and business perspective?
\nHere are the answers in one doc, for comparison.
\nEach LLM will give us more or less the same story, different flavor. Within the industry, the differences across the models reflect “model personality.” Asking “why” instead of “whether” will probably drive the answer to favor Wisconsin. Using multiple lenses (two states, historical + business, identity + cohesion) forces the LLM to cross-reference across more of its training data, which tends to produce a more comprehensive answer.
\nFor all the chatter about consciousness and whatever, remember that an LLM is an infinite series of if/then/elses applied to human language and semantics, so being able to talk about language and communication, getting meta with the tool and how you think through language, helps a lot when using one. This is maybe the one thing I like about experimenting so hard with the tools. Iâm thinking about the technical side of writing and enjoying it quite a lot.
\nFunctionally: all of them acknowledge hard historical truths within the subject matter and don’t shy away from critical perspectives, which is good. Both Gemini and Copilot include in-line links, which lets you judge the output’s authority in the moment as a reader. I liked Copilot’s more than I expected here. Claude’s answers are more lyrical and do provide more context, and yet do not encourage checking against outside sources by providing links within the output. And you can see that even with the good writing skill calling out hard bans on certain structure, Claude plows right through them.
\nModel personality: Claude favors sociological answers to Copilot’s economic answers. Claude is also highly intellectual and narrative by comparison, and that narrative style can mask nuance by sinking relative context within the storytelling. Gemini simplifies, boosts and cheerleads where the others don’t, and really goes hard on Wisconsin’s reputation as a drinking and Packers state when there are stronger structural arguments in play. Copilot is tricky because it looks authoritative like a briefing, which also makes it easily “extractible” for the user, but every citation requires authentication unless this is one of those “good enough” tasks.
\nAs a writer, something I find annoying across the whole spread is the semantic reveal. LLMs are semantic machines, and it is persistently revealed in ways that are weird to the human ear. All of them go out of their way to describe things as “structural,” “connective” as in “connective tissue,” “load-bearing” and “legible.”
\nFinally, I included a second tab where I asked Claude for analysis across the four outputs, where it suggests that my framing of the question is altogether kind of problematic. It shows how a strong prompt is sometimes also a bad approach.
\nThere are a lot of possible takeaways here, but Iâd rather set aside the question of which tool is âgoodâ or âbadâ or âbetterâ and think more about the patterns across the tools and their implications.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-08T13:19:11-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/08/come-look-over-my-shoulder.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Essays","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/07/one-of-the-tricky-things.html", "content_html": "One of the tricky things about consumer AI tools like Claude and Gemini is that the experience varies widely depending on the person using it, and itâs not always clear why. I have spent a lot of time learning the tools so I can advise on them in my work, and this variance of experience has become a frustrating part of the deal.
\nI manage a team of writers and creatives at work, and we are expected to be familiar with the tools, despite complex and sometimes hostile feelings about the political and environmental implications of this sector. Thatâs quite a pickle, organizationally, managerially. Borrowing from Haraway, I thought, okay, what if we take these tools seriously as a team of writers and creatives and put our professional standards up against them?
\nAmong other exercises, I did a couple of comparisons on my team that help create discussion around the âplausibilityâ question. People dismiss LLM outputs as being merely plausible answers, rather than accurate or factual ones. And thatâs correct; they are, and thatâs the design. In many cases, plausibility is fine. Take Wikipedia, for example, which we understand to be a pretty good source, a plausible source, unless youâre writing a formal paper requiring original sources.
\nI digress. Ultimately, we needed to understand together that LLMs are not a WYSIWYG tool and talk through the implications.
\nI asked everyone to run the same paper through their LLM of choice, prompting it for a plain language summary. We then copied and pasted it into a shared doc, and compared and contrasted for discussion. Upon discussion, we had several takeaways, including that they were all similar in spirit but sometimes varying wildly in style and approach.
\nKnowing that algorithms are responsive and not static, we did it again later in the day and copied and pasted our outputs into the shared doc. We compared and contrasted the difference between AM and PM. Again, it was similar in spirit but varied in style and approach. Some changed dramatically. One team member whose morning summary had been jokey and conversational received a much more staid and serious version in the afternoon.
\nAt the time, I asked Claude to explain the variance: âEven with the same prompt and source material, LLMs donât produce identical outputs each time. This is by design â thereâs a degree of randomness (called âtemperatureâ) in how the model selects words, which means each run produces a slightly different path through the text.â
\nAnyway, this got our gears turning on how (and whether) to approach LLMs as a team and as individuals and led to good group discussion. (Itâs important to create space for criticism and critical approaches here.) It also gave us more confidence as a team responding to this new layer of complexity in our work, and helping our professional contacts and peers think about how to approach the tools and when and whether to use them. There will be tasks where AI-based tools are âgood enough,â and tasks where they are not.
\nThe swirl of mystery and speculation around this sector has people up in arms, and itâs useful to have approaches that give people firsthand experience and to see how the experience works for others. The god trick of the singular interface turns out to be a bear for navigating it in the workplace, where our work is foundational, prosocial and specific.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-07T20:48:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/07/one-of-the-tricky-things.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Digital Rhetoric","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/07/a-note-on-ezra-klein.html", "content_html": "A note on Ezra Klein: I’ve been looking across the NYT’s breathless reporting on the AI industry and seeing very few women represented across the commentary. Klein’s tech coverage tends to center a fairly narrow circuit of sources: founders, researchers, and policy thinkers who are overwhelmingly male and concentrated in a few institutions, and generally assert the inevitability of disruptive AI as a matter of course. Meanwhile, Anthropic and others are anticipating that career ladders where women are concentrated will be impacted, some claiming professional women’s jobs will dry up or disappear entirely.
\nI looked over his podcast guests for the last year and noticed that among his tech-focused guests, almost all white, almost all men, almost none of them are women. A rough count of eight podcasts (nine if you stretch) with accompanying commentary only produced two women, both economists. Klein’s brand is the guy who does the reading, the big ideas guy. So it’s worth asking what he’s reading and whose ideas he considers big. While he probably wouldn’t disagree with Gebru or Crawford or Noble on the substance, his current body of commentary is pulled toward the perspectives of people who have the most to gain from the technology’s expansion and the least exposure to its costs.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-07T20:26:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/07/a-note-on-ezra-klein.html", "tags": ["AI","Gender","Platforms","Podcasts"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/some-notes-on-arxiv-arxiv.html", "content_html": "Some notes on arXiv: arXiv is a preprint server hosted and maintained by Cornell University, where researchers post their work to establish priority and get it in front of other researchers quickly. This kind of server is common in emerging fields, to help build a body of shared knowledge among researchers, and fast.
\nWith all the speculation around AI futures, arXiv papers are suddenly hot content on Twitter/X, paired with aggressive forecasting and commentary. This is causing a lot of ruckus among the ranks. arXiv papers are a-okay to reference as sources of current AI research, but I’d flag a couple of things: they’re technical documents written for other researchers, not press releases or news coverage, so the claims in them are often much narrower and more specific than how they get interpreted and reported.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T21:38:18-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/some-notes-on-arxiv-arxiv.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/good-and-bad-uses-of.html", "content_html": "Good and bad uses of AI on a website, from Sumy Designs.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T20:31:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/good-and-bad-uses-of.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/reaching-back-to-to-put.html", "content_html": "Reaching back to 2025 to put this article on the pile of AI commentary: Cottom’s argument here is that AI, for all the breathless hype around it, is a “mid” technology, one that makes modest augmentations to existing processes while its loudest boosters use it to justify employing fewer people and delegitimizing expertise. Around the time the article was published, she supplemented with some additional video commentary worth watching.
\nShe draws on Acemoglu and Restrepo’s concept of “so-so” technologies and traces a pattern from MOOCs to DOGE, where each iteration promises transformation but delivers incremental improvements at best and labor displacement at worst. The real danger, she argues, is that AI’s most compelling use case in the current political environment is threatening, demoralizing workers and justifying cuts, not revolutionizing how work gets done.
\nCottom has been one of the writers I keep returning to because she is not dismissing the technology or retreating into reactionary nostalgia. She looks past the product announcements to the political economy underneath them. Who benefits from the hype cycle? What happens to the institutional infrastructure (education, research, public expertise) that AI claims to augment and simultaneously threatens to starve? She’s also very active on Instagram (and promoting a new documentary) and tracing the news around AI and higher ed in real time.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T15:20:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/reaching-back-to-to-put.html", "tags": ["Education","AI","Platforms","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/a-smart-take-on-nonconsentual.html", "content_html": "A smart take on nonconsensual deepfakes, considering them not just as a social issue but as a cybersecurity issue, as theyâre often connected to broader financial and social harassment campaigns.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T13:27:57-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/a-smart-take-on-nonconsentual.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Cybersecurity"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/platformer-on-the-emerging-politics.html", "content_html": "Platformer on the emerging politics of military AI, and the backlash resulting from this week’s activities.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T10:28:06-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/platformer-on-the-emerging-politics.html", "tags": ["AI","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/applying-a-claude-writing-skill.html", "title": "Applying a Claude writing skill", "content_html": "LLMs have a default house writing style with identifiable patterns: sentence fragments for emphasis, “not X, but Y” constructions, lots of hard contrast, atmospheric openings, heavy use of em dashes, and heavy use of marketing language. This reflects the semantic construction of an LLM. Custom instructions can override these defaults. A custom skill is a set of instructions within your account that modify how the model generates text. When you paste instructions into your profile settings, Claude reads them at the start of every conversation and adjusts its output accordingly.
\nI began using Claude daily for light writing tasks about six months ago, and over that time I started cataloging the patterns I was consistently editing out, including the terrible “not X, but Y” construction that showed up in nearly every response, and persistent em dashes used as all-purpose connectors when other punctuation is more appropriate.
\nI went through several iterations of bullying Claude into submission, narrowing the scope each time, before arriving at this version, which focuses specifically on writing mechanics and hard prohibitions.
\nYou’ll need a paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise). Free-tier accounts don’t have access to custom skills.
\n![\"\"](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/561a6f6d2c.png\")
\nâą Within the app, navigate to Customize > Skills and Create new skills
\nâą Select add a new skill and Write skill instructions
\nâą Copy and paste the copy from this file into the skill, making note of the name and description boxes. Feel free to tinker.
\nâą Save your changes.
Note: The instructions in the linked file are Claude’s work, not mine. They came out of months of conversation, where Claude would analyze my style notes, and the file evolved from there. They read a little strangely because of that process. If I’d written them from scratch, they’d sound different. But looking at the file you can see what Claude responds to and how it works.
\nClaude will apply these instructions to every new conversation going forward. Existing conversations won’t pick up the change, so start a fresh chat to test it. If and when Claude struggles to apply the skill, call it out specifically in the prompt, such as, “Revise this for length using the good writing skill.”
\nThe skill specifies constraints in a few categories and the instructions are plain text. As you go, you can also ask Claude to analyze previous conversations for suggested additions to the skill, which Claude will produce and implement within the chat. Each rule operates independently, so removing one doesn’t affect the others.
\nClaude processes custom instructions at the start of every conversation, before it generates any output. The instructions function as constraints on the model’s default behavior. The model doesn’t always follow every instruction perfectly and the results vary by task. You will still need to edit.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T02:47:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/applying-a-claude-writing-skill.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Photos","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Essays","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/this-new-report-from-anthropic.html", "content_html": "This new report from Anthropic is depressing at best, as it tries to measure which employment sectors carry the most exposure around AI expansion into the economy. In short, the tech is likely to impact two groups the hardest: educated professional women, and young workers for whom the career ladder will never materialize. In a right-side-up world, this would change the political dynamics of any policy response considerably. In this one, I don’t know.
\nAnthropicâs positioning here is curious, very god tricky. They are claiming the mantle of responsibility and transparency while predicting an inevitable end nobody wants, that theyâre also selling as a service.
\nI still think much of the forecasting is oversold – the tech performs well in optimized environments, and last mile issues are a perennial concern in any engineering venture because the practical world is non-optimal. Time will tell, and there are big incentives in play. But the hunger and animus around the forecast feel bad.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T00:36:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/this-new-report-from-anthropic.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/wapo-on-the-many-issues.html", "content_html": "WaPo on the many issues of LLM house writing styles. I have much to add. Here are some notes on applying a writing skill to override house style on Claude.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T00:19:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/wapo-on-the-many-issues.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/04/i-have-pretty-strong-feelings.html", "content_html": "I have pretty strong feelings against the use of AI around military operations, based on my hands-on experience with the tools. When the tech’s creators say the tech isn’t ripe for warfare, that’s strong feedback. And I agree, with the risks and implications around trust, marketing and hallucinations, itâs not even really ripe for the consumer marketplace, much less drone warfare. Whether or not artificial intelligence tech should be used for war is, of course, at the root of Haraway’s thesis, which we like to noodle with around these parts.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-04T13:50:26-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/04/i-have-pretty-strong-feelings.html", "tags": ["AI","AI Policy \u0026 Law","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/04/you-might-call-this-a.html", "content_html": "You might call this a taste test: Obsessed with the story about the McDonald’s CEO and how his LinkedIn-style videos selling the McD’s franchise have escaped containment, leading to one of the funnier CEO/product marketing dynamics in recent history. Burger King’s CEO swooped in, holding widely-marketed listening sessions with customers and to demonstrate his love for the Whopper in contrast with the deeply weird McD’s videos. Must read: Internet long-hauler Katie Notopoulos on how direct-to-public marketing works when the public is more familiar with the product than the org’s leaders.
\nMy teenager thinks fast food is cool and subversive (cue the sound of one hundred moms groaning) and she and her friends regularly talk shop. They are Taco Bell fans and think burger stops are kind of gauche. Not gauche: Baja Blast.
\nIn the meantime, the fast food sector is becoming a playground for AI approaches, causing a lot of nervous discussion on social media and in tech spaces.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-04T10:25:49-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/04/you-might-call-this-a.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI","Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/03/ruling-ai-art-is-not.html", "content_html": "Ruling: AI art is not copyrightable.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-03T13:22:34-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/03/ruling-ai-art-is-not.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Tech","AI","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/03/apparently-one-thing-llms-excel.html", "content_html": "Apparently one thing LLMs excel at is deanonymization at scale. The original promise of pseudonymity online was social and normative, over and above any question of technical depth: decent people donât try to unmask you, because why. What strikes me today is how what used to be unacceptably antisocial behavior online is now both automated and unremarkable.
\nOver the last couple of weeks, I asked a couple of chatbots what could be known about me from this pseudonymous site, where I am more intentional about what I choose to reveal and conceal. It pulled the obvious but also drew conclusions based on a few geographic points Iâd made in context that were both revealing and correct. I also noticed that it only drew from the top two pages of information - anything beyond page two of posts wasnât part of the compute. Archives are for humans?
\nPeople assume that there is some computer magic on the backend where the LLMs connect all your account logins behind the scenes, but no, in fact it does all this through inference, by linking your digital trail, your friends, your breadcrumbs of likes and hearts and follows, and obvs your posts, into a picture of who you are, practically and demographically.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-03T10:59:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/03/apparently-one-thing-llms-excel.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/02/developing-a-new-pet-theory.html", "content_html": "Developing a new pet theory that you could theoretically crank AI outputs toward your vision by having an organized link blog revolution.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-02T17:15:17-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/02/developing-a-new-pet-theory.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/02/the-guardian-has-a-longrunning.html", "content_html": "The Guardian has a long-running series where readers answer one anotherâs questions, which gives a pretty good point-in-time survey of how people of a certain demographic are feeling on a given subject. This weekâs question is on AI futures: âwhat would happen to the world if computer said yes?â
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-02T16:32:17-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/02/the-guardian-has-a-longrunning.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/02/some-analysis-on-anthropic-and.html", "content_html": "Some analysis on Anthropic and the Pentagon. Per @manton, it feels a little bit like the company isn’t fully on board with the product they produce. I find it interesting that the feds appear to be toying with the idea of nationalizing AI companies alongside other nationalization efforts.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-02T10:56:06-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/02/some-analysis-on-anthropic-and.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/28/like-rickrolling-on-steroids-i.html", "content_html": "Like Rickrolling on steroids: I didnât even know P2P music file downloads were still a thing, but of course, and the scene had a big week recently when somebody trolled SoulSeek by generating a bunch of popular songs sung in Homer Simpsonâs voice, then quietly polluted the platform by offering the AI generated Homer files up to other users. Someone then set up a digital radio station of all the Homer Simpson songs called Dâoh Radio. Hereâs more reporting from Gizmodo.
\nThere is a long tradition of Simpsonifying things that go online, so this is the latest iteration. We observed Homer covers going viral on social in 2024 and 2025.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-28T10:58:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/28/like-rickrolling-on-steroids-i.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Music","Platforms","Internet Culture"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/27/second-wavers-in-tech-and.html", "content_html": "Second wavers in tech and engineering talked a lot about the âgod trickâ of presenting knowledge and information, particularly around math and science, in a way that suggests its objectivity is eternal, immortal, unknowable. Work by Safiya Umoja Noble and others extended this lens to Internet search and architecture, finding that the search algorithm was a series of business decisions wearing neutrality to create a customer service experience. Websites do this (so does this blog). LLMs take that same trick and compress it further.
\nItâs an old idea, and one Iâve been drawing from while I tinker with Claude. The âgod trickâ is baked right into the AI interface: one input, one output, an authoritative-seeming answer, offered without named perspectives behind it, trained on text produced overwhelmingly by a narrow demographic who has historically had access to both literacy and publishing, by programmers and new media drawing from the same well. Smushed together, it gives the impression that consensus and authority exists where there are many loose ends and competing ideas in play. Sometimes thatâs fine.
\nIâve begun to recognize how LLMs can work like autocorrect for ideas, drawing from ranked search sources first before fanning out to more obscure sources, trying to determine and assert whatâs important to me, a user known by demographics and data. It feels like a big linguistics machine, which is pretty cool in some regards, but also aggressive in others. The math doesnât always work to connect me to what I want to find because I am situated in my individual context in ways LLMs are not able to understand, with my memory, in my body, with my unique experiences, which shape and translate meaning for me as I interact with the world (and the web).
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-27T16:20:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/27/second-wavers-in-tech-and.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/27/an-open-letter-from-employees.html", "content_html": "An open letter from employees of Google and OpenAI in support of Anthropic, against the DoD: notdivided.org
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-27T12:35:50-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/27/an-open-letter-from-employees.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/25/ive-been-spending-more-time.html", "content_html": "I’ve been spending more time in tech spaces online and getting good information from folks like @manton, creator of Micro.blog. Like this reflection on how to think about AI now that vibe coding works. Something I’m thinking about: there’s an emerging tension between those who see value in being able to immediately prototype an idea and the people downstream who have to manage the outputs/code over time. The ability to proof every idea sounds like a superpower until you’re the one driving and maintaining the results.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-25T12:46:47-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/25/ive-been-spending-more-time.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Indie Web"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/25/making-the-rounds-on-twitter.html", "content_html": "Making the rounds on Twitter today, an AI programmer pulled together a dashboard comparing how LLMs respond when given a series of nonsense prompts. There is a notable difference in quality even between Claude’s Opus and Sonnet, in my experience. The lesser GPTs will take a wobbly claim as truth and run with it.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-25T10:17:14-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/25/making-the-rounds-on-twitter.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/24/some-additional-discussion-of-llm.html", "content_html": "Some additional discussion of LLM models, including open weight and “staggered openness,” where orgs “release previous versions of proprietary models once a successor is launched, providing limited insight into the architecture while restricting access to the most current innovations.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-24T19:20:57-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/24/some-additional-discussion-of-llm.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/24/open-source-open-weight-and.html", "content_html": "“Open source,” “open weight,” and “proprietary” describe different relationships between LLM model producers and users, governing what you see, modify and control. Comparing them isn’t necessarily about “best,” but whether you’re optimizing for transparency, compliance or performance. Massive investment in proprietary models means the best-resourced research teams, the largest training runs, and the most sophisticated safety work tend to happen behind closed doors.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-24T19:13:28-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/24/open-source-open-weight-and.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/24/a-new-report-from-pew.html", "content_html": "A new report from Pew on how teens view and use AI says that more than half of teens turn to chatbots for help with school, and some are turning to AI for emotional support and companionship.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-24T18:56:39-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/24/a-new-report-from-pew.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/19/the-last-time-i-went.html", "content_html": "The last time I went truly viral was in April of 2020 in the height of the COVID shutdown. I posted a tweet and walked away from my phone. By the time I checked back, my notifications were out of control.
\nThe next morning, I got a message from an old friend familiar with my handle. “I think I saw your account on Good Morning America?” Hilariously, there I was, and I couldn’t even claim responsibility for the meme.
\nI’ve spent most of my time on the internet as a pseudonymous account, using my first name only, or using a handful of handles (incl feministe, fauxrealtho, flotisserie, paired with punny names like “Petty White” and “Frieda People,” a convention from the Tumblr years). Even as a visible personality online, I was only known by my first name and URL and/or handle. In recent years I de- and reactivated some of my socials, so some of these breadcrumbs no longer exist, but I’ll do my best.
\nPseudonymity allows writers to explore complex ideas in digital spaces while protecting their identity, location, and other identifying factors, while also maintaining a throughline of identity and storytelling.
\nThere are a lot of trade offs in using a pseudonym, especially around how to claim credit for your work. But people use them because they give you the privacy to be honest, real, weird, authentic, and to escape the creep of modern social media presence into high stakes spaces like the workplace. This dynamic was kind of the impetus behind the era of “weird Twitter,” where people using pseudonymous social handles routinely threw out funny, absurdist one-liners to impress their friends and followers, while taking a turn at the social media slot machine. Not every post or joke lands in a way that converts to numbers, but some do, and it’s fun to try.
\nI’ve written a little previously about how the English program I was a part of used fiber arts to illustrate the fundamentals of technical writing, but one of their other methods of teaching the internet was through board games. Games, like the internet, and much like writing, provide rules and structure for communication and engagement, but everything that happens inside the container of game board and game play is a mystery until it emerges through human interaction. So goes the internet (and to some extent, so goes AI). Games and gaming were used as a method to think through what it means to create rules of play, then let a community rip through the model – and many of the thinking and skills involved around game design apply in social digital spaces, from chat rooms and Teams channels to the open seas of the WWW. The longer you’ve been playing the slot machine, the more you get a feel for the kind of thing that will get seen and read, and who among your readership will take your content to the next level.
\nWhy does it matter? Because understanding what “works” to make ideas travel further online, the more you can tap into it. Big Tech is under fire right now for amplifying some of the worst impulses of the internet, by cranking engagement algorithms to exploit messages that produce outrage. Yes, big emotions create virality, but so do relatability and sharability.
\nSo back to the meme: here’s how it went down.
\nThe meme was a list of six hypothetical celebrity households: pick one to quarantine in.
\nIt had been circulating on Facebook, started by a Christian influencer named Savannah Locke. I encountered it deep in a Real Housewives fan group, and felt the pull of a good parlor game. In April 2020, everyone I knew was sitting at home, fretting about the COVID-19 pandemic looming over all of us, so I shared it with minimal ceremony, a couple of buddies with a slightly larger following hit retweet, and within two days the tweet was being cited by The Cut, Time, the Washington Post, ABC News, and others. Know Your Meme documented it for posterity. Several outlets named me as the originator, but trust, I was only trying to delight my friends with low grade Facebook content. I couldn’t find the original meme at the time – Locke appears to have had a name change that scrambled my search. But hey, as these things go, nobody earned a dime or promoted anything weird, so no harm, no foul. Business Insider managed to credit it correctly, so a special kudos to their editor.
\nThe core game mechanism behind the meme is forced choice: constraints generate opinions and opinions generate activity. Each “house” also represents a personality type. House 3 is chaos, House 6 is aspirational, House 5 is the one where someone is definitely cooking and someone is definitely yelling about it. The choices are arbitrary, which invites curiosity about who grouped what and why. In short, this meme offered a light conversation starter at the right time, with low stakes, high personal reveal, and endlessly discussable combinations. It also drew from existing memes and games that are popular online, like “where you sitting” in the proverbial lunch room. This one became news because of the timing and gamability, not because I was particularly clever, but hey.
\nWhat does it feel like to go so viral? It’s hilarious, strangely affirming, and also a little crazy-making. It opens the door to a whole lot of wild people and ideas on the internet, not all of them flattering or welcome. Virality is sometimes paired with incredible harassment and requires “more condolences than congratulations.” But as far as this particular experience went – hilarious, whoops, and wow. It just felt like a Lebron James, Post Malone and Jennifer Aniston hang would be a good time.
\n![\"A](\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/539.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2026-02-19T17:14:00-05:00",
"url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/19/the-last-time-i-went.html",
"tags": ["Art and Craft","Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI","Gender","Platforms","Photos","Digital Rhetoric","Internet Culture"]
},
{
"id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/18/making-the-rounds-on-social.html",
"content_html": "Making the rounds on social today: New study suggests that while 70% of financial firms use AI today, 80% report no impact on employment or productivity.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-18T14:40:12-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/18/making-the-rounds-on-social.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/18/there-are-many-hyperbolic-essays.html", "content_html": "There are many hyperbolic essays on AI going viral this week. This essay gets into some of the emerging politics around AI in the United States and how they map onto electoral politics, and is irritated with the American leftâs approach to AI.
\nI agree on one angle, that as a cohort, abstaining entirely from new tech is a bad approach.
\nHaraway (obvs) suggests we stick with the trouble, that sometimes our very presence in the room is whatâs required to trouble existing narratives, and that itâs important that share what we learn back to our people at home, whatever that means in our context.
\nFor me: I spend a lot of time at work translating technical ideas and projects in an institutional voice, but on nights and weekends, Iâm explaining the ins and outs of the internet to my working class friends and family. Increasingly, Iâm asked to explain LLMs and AI and how it relates to their needs around business, the news, entertainment, and as a legal aid.
\nThe “cyborgâs mark” is a metaphor for writing, our duty to translate, and the inevitability of translation through experience. Perhaps staying with the trouble allows us to articulate our experiences in and around the science in ways that both advance our interests and that keep our communities safer. For those of us who straddle multiple worlds, translation is a responsibility.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-18T03:07:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/18/there-are-many-hyperbolic-essays.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI Policy \u0026 Law","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/18/widespread-ai-adoption-reopens-some.html", "content_html": "Widespread AI adoption reopens some basic questions in business: who your audience is, what work can reasonably be automated, what absolutely requires human oversight, and how the service and information environment actually holds together when we shuffle these circumstances around. All this, with many social and environmental risks and a side of existential doom.
\nThe hype makes it harder to see a change that’s already here. To me, the shift between SEO to GEO is one of the clearest places where a change in technology produces a significant process change in the relationship between a writer and an audience, with all the tradeoffs around authority, context and information architecture that implies. But web search is just one place this shows up.
\nI suspect the predictions of economic and social doom are overblown by a lot – in life as in business, generalisms are easy and specifics are hard. Last mile issues remain a reality of nearly any technical or software implementation, and differentiation is in many ways the art of business. There are serious incentives to promising a smooth, profitable near-future, especially around emerging markets, so I feel pretty comfortable forecasting that the era we currently live in is valuation masquerading as value. Instead, I think we should worry more about how the tech changes our relationship to information and to each other.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-18T01:12:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/18/widespread-ai-adoption-reopens-some.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/17/whodecides-whats-real-in-the.html", "content_html": "Who decides whatâs real in the age of AI? Instagram.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-18T00:17:14-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/17/whodecides-whats-real-in-the.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/13/ive-been-writing-about-how.html", "content_html": "I’ve been writing about how writing and code are the same thing in digital environments, and about how that equivalence shaped the early web. AI changes that relationship.
\nThe dominant conversation is about whether LLMs can write well, but I suspect that’s the wrong frame. Human storytelling will probably always be more interesting than generated storytelling, because humans love quirks and novelty that canât be produced artificially.
\nThe more consequential change is that AI-generated text doesn’t just sit on the web waiting to be read, and instead feeds back into the system that produced it. It becomes training data, source material, and eventually, architecture. Remember: When an LLM generates text, it’s producing word sequences based on statistical patterns. The output is one plausible version to your prompt, not a definitive one â but it gets indexed, linked, and cited like any other writing. Nothing about its surface tells you it doesn’t carry the same authority.
\nResearchers call what follows “model collapse,” a feedback loop where models trained on AI-generated content lose touch with the range of human-produced data. The rare and specific details disappear first, then the middle narrows. Eventually whatâs left is smooth, confident, increasingly generic text that sounds authoritative whether it’s accurate or not, which becomes the training data for the next round.
\nIâm thinking about it in terms of the shift from SEO to GEO. SEO preserved a connection between writing and human judgment. Someone wrote content, search engines indexed it, readers got a list of links and decided which to trust by comparing to their own experience and knowledge. This system was gameable through various sleights of hand, but it assumed a reader with agency. The creatorâs job was to be easy to find and worth finding. Streaming video complicated this process but still worked with the same basic ideas. Meanwhile, GEO operates on a different premise. The goal isn’t to get found by a person, but to be found by an algorithm assembling a response the user may or may not independently verify.
\n(Sad news: today, only about 8% of LLM users verify their output against source material.)
\n(This does not bode well.)
\nConsider what happens to the same piece of writing in each system. In the SEO world, your article gets indexed, shows up in search results, someone clicks through, reads it, evaluates whether you or your institution is credible on the topic, maybe skeets it or sends it to a colleague. A human encountered your work, weighed it and decided it was useful, the algo responds and indexes accordingly.
\nIn GEO, an AI system parses that same article, extracts the most clearly structured claims, and drops them into a synthesized answer alongside fragments from other sources the user never sees individually. The reader gets a confident, blended paragraph.
\nIn the old way, the reader moved through the web. AI yanks that experience into a single response from a single interface. We don’t fully understand how AI systems decide what to cite, which makes this power shift feel especially risky. Worse, different people will get different responses from LLMs, even using the same prompts and source materials. We donât know why.
\nFewer entry points to the web means fewer opportunities for diverse or unexpected sources to gain traction, which means the training data gets narrower, which means the outputs get more generic, which means the architecture narrows further, which means fewer perspectives represented in the output. For the reader, it accelerates context collapse in much the same way. Fewer inputs means fewer opportunities to stress test your ideas against new information.
\nSo, what to do?
\nIf generative AI grows as predicted, SEO and GEO will coexist for awhile, and working developers and communicators will need to understand both and how they layer. Strong SEO foundations give you a great head start in AI visibility too, so the fundamentals of good writing and web taxonomy still matter a lot.
\nBut the production of knowledge, the keeping of data, and how itâs all indexed are subjects that are about to become very important, and very political. So I suspect that any fields that touch those topics will also become very important, and very political, very soon.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-13T23:18:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/13/ive-been-writing-about-how.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/13/when-i-started-building-websites.html", "content_html": "When I started building websites in the late ’90s, the line between writing and coding didn’t really exist. A person probably learned HTML because she had something to say and needed a place to put it. The internet was free and anonymous and it felt audacious to put your stuff online, like flinging a message in a bottle out to sea. The code was a container for the ideas that rendered them onscreen, and every post and page you published was both a piece of your thinking and a brick in something larger.
\nPeople forget that the early web was a writing community. Writers, or bloggers, built their own sites, maintained their own archives, linked to each other deliberately. A blogroll was both a reading list and a show of solidarity, a trackback was a way of saying, “I see you, I’m thinking with you.” The technical architecture - RSS feeds, permalinks, comment threads - existed to organize the writing and the writers’ thoughts, and to push their ideas forward on the open web.
\nThis worked for a time. Communities of writers, most of them without institutional backing or media credentials, built new bodies of knowledge together through interacting as readers and writers, communicating across a foundation of code. The work didn’t stay online. It spilled into conference halls and state houses and newsrooms and policy discussions. As the body of communication built, it created something that accumulated over time. These people influenced mainstream journalism, shaped public conversations, launched careers and movements. In many ways, the national political conditions we face today are a reaction to that movement, and how it allowed regular people to influence the world through the democratization of mass communication.
\nMidway through the aughts, the brick and mortar publishers and venture capitalists started looking across the landscape, at all the writers creating fantastic content, largely for free, and sucked them into their content and editorial teams. Google Reader lost institutional and financial support as writers moved off the open web and onto publishing platforms, often backed by VC money, that measured the quality of your work by engagement. The addition of algorithmic feeds further broke down this structure – the algorithm doesn’t measure whether your work contributed to shared understanding, but whether it generated a click, a share. The code changed, and the writing changed with it.
\nThe writers changed with it, too. The blogger became the influencer. Bloggers operated in a gift economy of ideas: you wrote to think, to argue, to contribute, and your standing in the wider community came from the quality of your work and contributions over time. Was it a meritocracy? No, but the conditions made it possible for a regular person to talk with experts as peers, which upended traditional power structures around authority and expertise (in both directions, good and bad). Meanwhile, influencers operate in a heavily capitalized attention economy where engagement converts to dollars. The audience is a market to press for money.
\nThe gendered dimension of this shift matters as well. The early blogosphere was full of women writing sharp, rigorous work about politics, culture, parenthood, identity, and technology â work that was explicitly feminist and anti-racist and genuinely moved public conversations. This was the community I helped build (Feministe.us was my project, a community platform of writers and commenters whose coverage and discussion broadly fell under, but was certainly not limited to, the topic of feminism). When the monetized platforms absorbed that energy, the commercial model recast women’s online authority almost entirely in terms of consumer influence. What could we sell? And to whom? The framing around our work went from “this person has important ideas” to “this person can sell things to a niche market.” Meanwhile, men who’d built audiences through tech or political blogging were more likely to be absorbed into mainstream media as columnists and analysts, roles that kept their intellectual authority intact. The influencer label, with all its connotations of superficiality, landed disproportionately on women, and it stuck.
\nThere’s a class piece here, too. The platform model offered something the early blogosphere mostly didn’t â a way to get paid. For women who’d been doing enormous amounts of unpaid intellectual labor building online communities, the question of monetization wasn’t shallow. The implications of information centralization and monetization were as present then as they are now with LLMs and AI. Some people figured out the social platforms and worked their way into viable digital careers. Platforms offered a lot of perks, but all of the perks had a backstop. Corporate interests introduced the problems of advertising, audience and sponsorship, which meant reorienting your individual practice around maximizing your commercial value over and above your intellectual contribution and community management skills. It often meant giving away some or all of your IP rights.
\nFor most people, new system didn’t offer a viable way to get from “respected independent writer” to “respected, protected and compensated writer.â Many of us found ourselves in positions too precarious to take the leap into freelancing and social media, and some, like me, got regular jobs doing regular stuff. Some married money. And in the meantime, some folks figured out how to get into real journalism, which looks much different in 2026.
\nGreat storytelling helps people understand themselves and their world. We let some of that depth go on the Internet with the onslaught of digital marketing and all of its implications, and today the internet feels less useful and less trustworthy than it once did.
\nIt feels like thereâs something to take forward from the experience.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-13T13:38:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/13/when-i-started-building-websites.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI","Gender","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Blog History","Indie Web","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/12/ive-been-running-a-series.html", "content_html": "I’ve been running a series of informal experiments with my team to understand how we should advise people on using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini around our work.
\nIn our last session, I gave everyone the same task: ask your AI tool to summarize a single article in plain language. Every person got a factually accurate summary, but the style and depth of analysis varied widely from person to person. We tested this further by entering the same prompt multiple times. Each time, the output was slightly different. We copied and pasted everything into a shared document so we could compare side by side.
\nLater that day, I asked everyone to reopen the tool they’d used that morning and repeat the prompt that had worked best: summarize this article in plain language. The outputs shifted again. Some changed dramatically. One team member whose morning summary had been light and conversational received a much more formal, serious version in the afternoon.
\nI then asked Claude to compare the morning and afternoon versions of one summary. “In short, the morning version emphasizes practical implications and accessibility; the afternoon version prioritizes completeness and specificity. They complement each other well â someone reading both would get a fuller picture than either one alone provides.”
\nWhy would Claude produce these differences despite the same source material and prompt?
\nI asked the source.
\nEven with the same prompt and source material, LLMs don't produce identical outputs each time. This is by design â there's a degree of randomness (called \"temperature\") in how the model selects words, which means each run produces a slightly different path through the text.\n\nBut the differences here go beyond random word choices. The morning version landed on a journalistic structure while the afternoon version landed on an academic one. That likely reflects what the paper calls sensitivity to framing and order effects â one of the cognitive biases it catalogs. Small, invisible differences in how the model’s internal processing unfolds at the start of generation can cascade into meaningfully different organizational choices. Once the morning version opened with a news-style framing, the rest followed that pattern. Once the afternoon version opened with a descriptive academic tone, it followed that thread instead.
\nThis is actually a concrete example of the robustness issues the paper identifies. The underlying reasoning about the paper’s content is consistent across both summaries â neither gets the facts wrong. But the presentation varies in ways that weren’t requested, which means someone relying on just one version would get a subtly incomplete picture depending on which run they happened to see.
\nIt’s a useful reminder that LLM outputs are one plausible version of a response, not the definitive one.
It’s important to understand how these tools work. What looks like an authoritative answer is really just one of many possible outputs the system could have generated. The text will sound plausible whether it’s accurate or not, and you may get different results each time you ask.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-12T12:52:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/12/ive-been-running-a-series.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/10/i-asked-claudeai-for-a.html", "content_html": "I asked Claude.ai for a plain language summary of this buzzy new research paper. Claude offers the following:
\nResearchers from Caltech and Stanford conducted the first comprehensive survey of how and why large language models (LLMs) â AI systems like ChatGPT or Claude â fail at reasoning tasks. Rather than focusing on what AI can do well, they cataloged and organized the ways it goes wrong.\n\n", "date_published": "2026-02-10T02:26:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/10/i-asked-claudeai-for-a.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/09/a-survey-of-authors-on.html", "content_html": "Why it matters
\n
\nLLMs are increasingly used in high-stakes settings, but their reasoning failures are often unpredictable and poorly understood. The researchers argue that systematically studying failures â like accident investigations in aviation â is essential for building more reliable AI.The researchers created a framework with two dimensions:
\n
\nâą Type of reasoning: informal (intuitive, social), formal (logic, math), and embodied (physical, spatial)
\nâą Type of failure: fundamental flaws built into the architecture; domain-specific weaknesses; and robustness problems (inconsistent performance when small details change)Informal/intuitive reasoning
\n
\nLLMs exhibit human-like cognitive biases â confirmation bias, anchoring, framing effects â but without human ability to recognize and correct for them. They also struggle with âtheory of mindâ (understanding what others believe or intend), and with applying consistent moral or ethical reasoning.Formal/logical reasoning
\n
\nLLMs often canât reverse simple logical relationships (if they know âA is B,â they may not infer âB is Aâ). They struggle to chain multiple reasoning steps together. Basic counting and arithmetic fail in ways that seem surprising given their other capabilities.Embodied/physical reasoning
\n
\nLLMs have poor intuitions about the physical world â gravity, spatial relationships, object properties â because theyâve learned only from text, not from physical experience. This extends to visual AI systems as well.Many failures trace back to how LLMs are trained: they predict the next word in a sequence rather than reasoning deliberately. This makes them good at pattern-matching but unreliable when tasks require genuine logical inference, especially under slight variations in how a question is phrased.
\nResearchers have proposed fixes including better training data, techniques that force step-by-step reasoning (like âchain-of-thoughtâ prompting), connecting LLMs to external tools like calculators or physics simulators, and architectural changes. However, no single fix is comprehensive â many improvements in one area donât transfer to others.
A survey of 1200 authors on how they are thinking about and using AI
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-09T09:42:27-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/09/a-survey-of-authors-on.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/08/i-have-a-confession-while.html", "content_html": "I have a confession. While experimenting with AI over the last year, I wondered what would happen if I crammed an unfinished novel draft, one I actually care about, into Claude. Claude is pitched as the LLM for writers, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet and 3 Opus widely regarded as the premier LLMs for writers, including creative writing, long-form content and human-like prose. Meanwhile, I majored in English and work in mass communications, so I’m trained to think about writing creatively, strategically and tactically. Writing and personal expression have been part of my daily life for most of my life. If this tool could in fact produce a quality story, someone like me should be able to make it happen. Instead, the experience left me confident that AI isn’t a good vehicle for creative, narrative writing.
\nHere’s what I found:
\nOn the technical side, Claude struggled to maintain a narrative thread over time. The longer the chat, the more the bot drifted and eventually lost track of details and claims made about characters earlier in the plotline. It’s not a sustainable approach for narrative writers because continuity matters: outsource too much plotline to the bot and your characters lose relationship to one another.
\nLLMs like Claude work fine for writing supportâthey can function something like a synonym machine, helping writers work through technical questions of redundancy, register, length, and other semantic needs while drafting. But when you outsource world-building and meaning-making to an LLM, it becomes narratively confusing fast. Despite giving Claude extensive background on my primary characters and the world they live in, it would confidently declare that a character’s relationship to another was X, then claim the opposite on the next page. Dialogue was thin and expository. It preferred a sort of “maid and butler” style of dialogue where two characters artificially recap shared knowledge for the reader. Meanwhile Claude does not do feelings well, which is arguably the point of much narrative writing.
\nUltimately my drafts were worse off than what I started with – less organized, more confusing, with so much narrative drift that almost nothing was usable, even as a first draft. A devil’s advocate might argue that my prompting wasn’t sophisticated enough to produce the results I wanted. Sure.
\nBut then we have the second problem: Claude’s approach to storytelling isn’t narratively interesting. Fiction and narrative writers put tremendous energy into world-building and sensory experiences. The goal is to immerse the reader in a sensory experience so total that they can experience another world entirely – the original VR, if you will. A great writer even exploits your higher-level cognitive functions by reusing parts of the brain that evolved for action and perception, which is why a good story makes you think, feel, and wonder.
\nClaude does not feel or wonder. Claude collates.
\nA key part of this essay suggests that LLMs create meaning through triangulation – that by pinging other ideas and vocabulary, an LLM can get a human reader close, or close enough, to suffice in many cases of writing. In my experience, this is true enough in business writing, where tinkering with approach and register can become as important as precise verbiage.
\nBut this misses the pleasure and the point of good storytelling, which is myriad but usually centers on the satisfaction of expanding your imagination and experience through narrative, by seeing your own messy, striving, failing, hopeful, and collective human experience reflected in another person’s expression. That kind of meaning-making doesn’t happen through triangulation. It happens through the labor of human thought, experience and skilled articulation. That’s art, babes.
\nThis article gets into the mess of AI and creative writing, within the domain of the romance genre, which famously cranks out variations on romance themes at a rapid clip. It drills down into some of the debates about writing, authority and authorship in relationship to LLMs that are playing out across the publishing sector now. Remember: early research suggests that most writers who use LLMs as part of their workflow ultimately retain their sense of authorship in and around the tools, suggesting that even when writers adopt AI assistance, they still see themselves, not the tool, as the creative and accountable source. So based in my experience above, I suspect that if an AI approach to creative writing is successful, it’s because the author is linking her approach to emerging tech, not because the work is good, and that’s a difference worth distinction.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-08T14:58:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/08/i-have-a-confession-while.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/08/something-else-i-noticed-in.html", "content_html": "Something else I noticed in my experimentation with AI and creative writing: Claude prefers a mid-length, declarative sentence, while I prefer a lot of variety in my prose. Sentence variety is a primary consideration in any text-based communication approach. Write accordingly.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-08T13:43:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/08/something-else-i-noticed-in.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/05/the-reporter-who-tried-to.html", "content_html": "The reporter who tried to replace herself with a bot
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-05T23:03:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/05/the-reporter-who-tried-to.html", "tags": ["AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/05/watched-toni-morrison-the-pieces.html", "content_html": "đżWatched: Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
\nThis PBS doc recently came to Netflix, and I tucked in expecting a nice but predictably boring documentary about one of my favorite authors. To the contrary, it really plumbs Morrison’s writing craft, not only as an author but as an editor who brought a generation of incredible thinkers into the limelight. She talks in depth about her writing process, her approach to authorship and editing, and how she kept these roles separate at the peak of her midcentury literary career in NYC’s publishing industry.
\nThere’s something so powerful about hearing her discuss the craft, her deliberate choices, the refusal to center whiteness, and the insistence that Black readers were her intended audience. She saw her critics and wrote around their critiques with authority and confidence. This was a breath of fresh air since I’m so immersed in the AI era, which threatens to change our perceptions around value of writing, the choices and experiences behind the author, and how we consider the influence and responsibility of authorship.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-05T12:12:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/05/watched-toni-morrison-the-pieces.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","AI","Platforms","TV \u0026 Movies","Writing \u0026 Language"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/02/closer-to-the-machine.html", "title": "Closer to the machine", "content_html": "There is something about the AI moment that reminds me a lot of when the internet was new. A lot of what was imagined and promised about the internet was never realized. But much was.
\nI’ve been reading Ellen Ullman’s memoirs - “Life in Code” and “Close to the Machine” - and her observations about proximity to technology feel relevant here. Being close to the machine means understanding its actual capabilities and limitations apart from the prevailing sales narratives. It also means a kind of loneliness, because you are working in a space that others don’t yet see clearly or fully understand.
\nI suspect people thinking seriously about AI right now will experience something similar: a stretch of hostility and discomfort while the rest of the world catches up and the consumer market level-sets on the promises being made. In the interim, the hype will not match the reality, and the reality will sometimes exceed the hype in ways no one predicted. And for a while, how it works and why it matters won’t be legible to everyone at once.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-02T15:36:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/02/closer-to-the-machine.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/02/evidence-from-a-study-about.html", "content_html": "“Evidence from a study about workplace writers who use AI suggests that writers are outsourcing some of their research, editing, or drafting to AI, but that they retain responsibility for their writing.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-02T09:49:38-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/02/evidence-from-a-study-about.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/30/crunching-for-clarity.html", "title": "Crunching for clarity", "content_html": "In 1999, academic and theorist Judith Butler famously won an award for the worst academic sentence, raising good questions about how we read difficult texts, who gets to access academic ideas, and the role of academic and plain language in and around the academy:
\nThe move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.\n
This was my era in college, and I remember feeling challenged and overwhelmed as an undergrad trying to read theory for the first time. So today, I asked Claude.ai to put it in plain language, just to see what would happen. Here’s the after:
\nScholars used to think that capitalism shaped society in consistent, predictable patterns. But newer thinking focuses on how power worksâhow it repeats, overlaps, and gets reshaped over time. This brought time into the picture and moved away from older theories that treated social structures as fixed. Instead, recognizing that structures can change opened up a new way of understanding power: it's tied to specific moments and strategies, and it's always being renegotiated.\n", "date_published": "2026-01-30T12:12:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/30/crunching-for-clarity.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Education","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Essays","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/29/a-lot-of-readers-are.html", "content_html": "
A lot of readers are fascinated with the “black box” of AI writing, and trying to reverse engineer what it does and why. John Gallagher goes down the rabbit hole and articulates some credible theories about why LLMs use lists and listing to create meaning, and why it matters.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-29T18:05:48-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/29/a-lot-of-readers-are.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/23/a-new-paper-in-science.html", "content_html": "A new paper in Science Magazine explains how AI now allows propaganda campaigns to reach previously unprecedented scale and precision. This gets into the implications for organizations, institutions and nations.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-23T13:30:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/23/a-new-paper-in-science.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/23/the-promise-of-ai-is.html", "content_html": "The promise of AI is that it makes work more productive, but the reality is proving more complex and less rosy.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-23T10:22:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/23/the-promise-of-ai-is.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/22/im-generally-skeptical-of-anyone.html", "content_html": "I’m generally skeptical of anyone selling a solution to a social problem that relies on individual abstinence, so I tend to be annoyed with many arguments about the attention economy. I more or less land here on the question of AI, which I know many of my contemporaries will find similarly annoying.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-22T17:04:02-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/22/im-generally-skeptical-of-anyone.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/19/media-on-wikipedia-reciprocity-and.html", "content_html": "404 Media on Wikipedia, reciprocity and collaboration online, and how to protect the public commons in the age of AI.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-19T23:21:18-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/19/media-on-wikipedia-reciprocity-and.html", "tags": ["AI","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/16/150323.html", "content_html": "This observation at the end of Manton’s post on AI and Wikipedia made me chuckle:
\nAI using Wikipedia reminds me of the FAQ on setting up a Little Free Library:\n_I think someone is stealing books from my library and selling them, what do I do?_\nRemember that the purpose of a Little Free Library is to share booksâyou canât really steal from it._\n", "date_published": "2026-01-16T16:03:23-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/16/150323.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/16/woof-ads-are-coming-to.html", "content_html": "
Woof: ads are coming to ChatGPT.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-16T15:56:41-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/16/woof-ads-are-coming-to.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/09/the-ceo-of-instagram-says.html", "content_html": "The CEO of Instagram says that social media platforms will be under mounting pressure to help users tell the difference between human-made and AI content, and that going forward, it will be more practical to label real content over AI.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-09T19:02:44-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/09/the-ceo-of-instagram-says.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/09/the-trust-gap.html", "title": "The trust gap ", "content_html": "I suspect these three trends are connected: Women reportedly use AI at significantly lower rates than menâ25 percent lower on averageâin part because they’re more concerned about ethics, including privacy, consent and intellectual property. At the same time, countries with more positive social media experiences tend to be more open to AI, while Americans’ distrust is shaped by years of watching tech platforms erode trust. Meanwhile, one of the largest social platforms has turned its AI chatbot into a harassment toolâgenerating roughly one nonconsensual sexualized deepfake image per minute, disproportionately targeting women and girls.
\nWhen platforms enable abuse at scale, it makes sense that people most likely to be harmed would be most attuned to ethical concerns, and would thus be the most cautious about AI adoption.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-09T14:30:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/09/the-trust-gap.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","AI","Gender","Platforms"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/09/folks-are-beginning-to-wonder.html", "content_html": "Folks are beginning to wonder why Twitter and Grok are still in the app stores, given the latest trend in using the LLM to generate non-consensual imagery of people (namely women and children) at alarming rates.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-09T12:20:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/09/folks-are-beginning-to-wonder.html", "tags": ["AI","Gender","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/02/a-new-study-suggests-that.html", "content_html": "A new study suggests that countries who report more positive experiences with social media also feel more positive about AI. It seems to come down to tech regulation and trust.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-02T15:49:23-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/02/a-new-study-suggests-that.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","AI Policy \u0026 Law"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/16/new-numbers-from-pew-research.html", "content_html": "New numbers from Pew Research on how teens used social media and AI chatbots in 2025.
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-16T16:52:26-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/12/16/new-numbers-from-pew-research.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI","Platforms","Kids \u0026 Tech"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/15/the-deepfake-goes-mainstream-and.html", "content_html": "The deepfake goes mainstream, and it sounds like virtually everyone is unprepared for the negative social implications.
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-15T18:07:03-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/12/15/the-deepfake-goes-mainstream-and.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/07/a-meta-lesson-about-ai.html", "title": "A meta lesson about AI assistance", "content_html": "I just completed my first attempt at coding using AI, in this case having Claude assist me with putting together a simple client-side OPML parser using Dave Winer’s Feedland service.
\nWiner’s original script is pretty slick, and includes a list of all my feeds with titles, URLs, and categories; click-to-expand functionality to see the 5 most recent posts from each feed; clickable post titles that open articles in new tabs; sort options (by title or by update); and automatic updates when I change my FeedLand subscriptions.
\nYou can check it out here: Feeds
\nThe official documentation method didn’t initially work because Hugo (the blogging software behind micro.blog) was wrapping client-side templates around the script. The toolkit requires server-side dependencies that don’t exist on static sites like micro.blog, and we hit a cascade of missing JavaScript dependencies (jsonStringify, servercall, etc.). Each fix revealed another dependency, leading to some “sunk cost” frustrations for me. I kept trying because I wanted to see if Claude could pull it together. Through trial and error, I got to a point where the OPML file was rendered correctly without server dependencies or complex external libraries.
\nTime invested: ~3 hours (including wrong turns)
\nTime it should take: 10 minutes
\nAI extended my code reach beyond my practical skillset by quite a lot. I now have a dynamic and dedicated place to read and share news feeds as I wish. Though even when generative AI works and works well, I have significant concerns about the intellectual property implications of AI, and this project brought those tensions into sharp focus. The AI could only help me because it was trained on documentation and intellectual work from the open source community, contributions made freely in the spirit of knowledge sharing, not to train commercial AI systems. I tapped into their expertise by paying Anthropic $15 a month. While I’m grateful for the accessibility this provides to non-developers like me, I recognize there’s an unresolved ethical question about whether this use respects the intent and labor of the original creators. The feat is incredible; the foundation it’s built on deserves careful consideration.
\nAfter the exercise was complete, I asked Claude how I could have improved my prompting to make this process easier, and in short, Claude said I could have been a web developer. But since I’m not, here’s what it recommended:
\nâ When the process isn’t working, question the process mid-stream. Most people either give up or keep following bad advice deeper into rabbit holes. Stop and question the LLM’s process and ask for alternatives to force a reset.
\nâ Push for usability. Keep bringing the conversation back to what you actually need the end result to do, not what’s technically impressive or “correct.” In my case, this meant repeatedly asking “can I click through to the articles?” rather than getting lost in discussions about CORS proxies or JavaScript syntax. Focus on outcomes, not implementation details.
\nâ Ask for complete solutions. Instead of trying to mentally patch together incremental changes across multiple responses, ask the LLM to provide fresh, complete code each time. This prevents copy-paste errors and ensures you’re always working with a coherent, tested solution. There’s more than one way to crack an egg, but you want the whole egg regardless.
\nAfter all that, I got it to work but can’t figure out how to make it show up in my header menu, with or without Claude. TBD.
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-07T17:01:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/12/07/a-meta-lesson-about-ai.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Essays","Indie Web","Site Notes"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/12/07/anthropic-on-how-ai-is.html", "content_html": "Anthropic on how AI is changing how people work. This is a marketing piece, of course, but useful nonetheless.
\n", "date_published": "2025-12-07T13:34:28-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/12/07/anthropic-on-how-ai-is.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/18/interesting-to-see-web-and.html", "content_html": "Interesting to see web and print magazines talk about their strategy and value proposition since Google adopted an A.I.-powered search feature. x.com/pastemaga…
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-18T13:23:42-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/18/interesting-to-see-web-and.html", "tags": ["AI","Search \u0026 Discovery","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/17/human-in-the-loop-hitl.html", "content_html": "Human in the loop (HITL): HITL means that humans are involved at some point in the AI workflow to ensure accuracy, safety, accountability or ethical decision-making. HITL inserts human insight into the âloop,â the continuous cycle of interaction and feedback between AI systems and humans.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-17T09:40:59-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/17/human-in-the-loop-hitl.html", "tags": ["AI","AI in Practice"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/14/eyes-on-this-story-both.html", "content_html": "Eyes on this story, both for the implications on the LLM sector and for the company’s approach to publicity after they were effectively targeted by bad actors.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-14T18:56:23-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/14/eyes-on-this-story-both.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/13/when-ai-is-wrong-who.html", "content_html": "\n", "date_published": "2025-11-13T19:57:27-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/13/when-ai-is-wrong-who.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/13/how-the-networking-technology-sector.html", "content_html": "How the networking technology sector is changed by the introduction of AI.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-13T15:52:48-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/13/how-the-networking-technology-sector.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/12/bookmarking-this-media-podcast-specifically.html", "content_html": "Bookmarking this 404 media podcast specifically because it discusses how librarians are navigating the rise of AI.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-12T07:54:08-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/12/bookmarking-this-media-podcast-specifically.html", "tags": ["AI","Podcasts","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/24/on-prompt-injections-because-ai.html", "content_html": "On prompt injections: Because AI chatbots are trained to be helpful and to understand context, jailbreakers are able to engineer scenarios where the AI believes ignoring its usual ethical guidelines is appropriate. Is it currently possible to safeguard LLMs from injection attacks at scale?
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-24T15:51:47-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/10/24/on-prompt-injections-because-ai.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/15/the-next-big-trend-in.html", "content_html": "The next big trend in AI that I’m watching is platform integration. First company to produce the interoperability required for a united platform experience wins.
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-15T12:02:07-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/10/15/the-next-big-trend-in.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/09/19/a-pleasant-surprise-resulting-from.html", "content_html": "A pleasant surprise resulting from LLM acceleration in the IT landscape is the sudden opportunity for storytelling around other, more analog kinds of information technology and access models. Nostalgia abound (complimentary).
\n", "date_published": "2025-09-19T17:23:49-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/09/19/a-pleasant-surprise-resulting-from.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/09/16/what-do-people-actually-use.html", "content_html": "What do people actually use ChatGPT for? A snapshot.
\n", "date_published": "2025-09-16T08:24:20-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/09/16/what-do-people-actually-use.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/27/another-one-on-how-llm.html", "content_html": "Another one on how LLM sycophancy facilitates suicidal ideation.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-27T15:21:10-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/27/another-one-on-how-llm.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/26/something-that-worries-me-about.html", "content_html": "Something that worries me about AI adoption in higher ed is the risk to students facing mental health challenges, who are increasingly turning to chat bots to plumb their own depths. What can higher ed ask of LLM business partners to protect our studentsâ mental health?
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-26T22:46:55-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/26/something-that-worries-me-about.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/20/hey-chat-how-is-pedagogy.html", "content_html": "Hey chat, how is pedagogy changing in an age of AI?
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-20T11:35:20-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/20/hey-chat-how-is-pedagogy.html", "tags": ["Education","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/17/ais-last-mile-problem-in.html", "title": "⥠AI's last mile problem in higher ed", "content_html": "I graduated from college right before the 2008 recession and bounced through some unpromising temp jobs until an opportunity emerged for a permanent position. Sometimes you just need to get in where you fit in, and so I did. That’s how I came to work for a regional cable company that used federal money to expand the new national broadband network, extending out to the rural communities dotting central Indiana.
\nIt was a front row seat to the national broadband expansion efforts of the early 2000s. Our business ran right across the state, spanning the 80 or so miles from Attica to Kokomo, which included several small cities with large manufacturers, two public research universities, and several community and liberal arts colleges. The strip of broadband fiber at the core of our service followed existing highways and electrical lines that split the corn and soybean fields from town to town, feathering out to more rural areas from there.
\nI worked a variety of roles there that put me face-to-face with a classic technical problem: the last mile. On many occasions, someone would come in looking pensive, and explain that the fiber had been extended all the way from town to their hamlet, and yet there was no plan to connect their property to the pole. Over time the pattern was clear: while the network was expanded, the cost of running a physical line to each individual property was too expensive and specific at scale. These customers often left without a path forward despite all their efforts and ours.
\nThe “last mile problem” refers to the logistical challenges and high costs associated with the final leg of delivering goods or services to the end customer. It’s often the most difficult and expensive part of the supply chain, despite being a relatively short distance. The pattern shows up everywhere: public transit can get commuters most of the way most of the time, but that final leg of the journey remains specific and individual and problematic. E-commerce companies promise drone delivery solutions, scooter and bike-share apps claim to solve urban mobility gaps, but these technological optimizations remain persistently stubborn at scale, running up against the messy realities of sidewalks, intersections, and actual human behavior.
\nTl;dr: I’ve been turning over this suspicion that AI automation will hit a classic “last mile problem,” especially in the public sector.
\nAI systems, particularly LLMs, are like those systemsâthey work incredibly well in their intended domain, processing and manipulating information. But because they’re fundamentally an information-only approach, that creates their own last mile problem when we try to implement them in physical and context-specific environments. Public institutions are uniquely specific â they are often the originators and producers of knowledge and the keepers of original policy, tasked with making the rubber hit the road. Additionally, the need for comprehensive data protection required by public workers and institutions fundamentally hamstring potential applications.
\nActually implementing recommendations is where you hit the last mile. This is the work of public administration.
\nImagine an AI application trained on every facilities management manual ever written and tuned to synthesize best practices for HVAC optimization. It can analyze years of energy usage data and recommend precise temperature adjustments for different zones of a building, but can’t feel that the third floor is always stuffy, or know that the facilities manager retired last year and took decades of institutional knowledge with him. Building A’s HVAC system was installed in 1987 and has a manual keypad. Building B’s system interfaces with the campus-wide monitoring system, but unreliably, and investigation is slated for later, someday, when resources allow. Professor Smith has taught in Room 204 for 25 years and will blow up your spot before moving to a different classroom for maintenance. Your engineers who manage these spaces are balancing human teams, who have time off and training and other priorities they manage in life. So, you need staff who understand the quirks of each area, the history of each system, the politics of which departments will accept changes and which will flood your inbox with complaints. You need someone who knows that the third floor always runs hot because of a design flaw from 1974, and that the solution isn’t more precise control but a $50,000 renovation that’s been deferred for a decade because a glittering new project across campus takes priority.
\nImagine this tangle of questions and contingencies times infinity on every university campus in existence. Universities are like citiesâthey’ve been built and rebuilt over decades or centuries, with layers of systems and fiefdoms that weren’t designed to work together. AI recommendations assume a level of standardization that simply doesn’t exist. Every AI implementation in higher ed requires navigating multiple constituencies with different priorities and power structures. It’s like trying to redesign traffic patterns in a neighborhood where the residents, business owners, commuters, and city planners all have veto power and conflicting interests.
\nSo. When looking at efficiency efforts spinning up across the education sector, I’m feeling pensive, trying to understand how exactly the house gets connected to the pole.
\nThe promise of new tech in higher ed needs to more deeply consider the translation costs: the human labor, institutional knowledge, knowledge documentation and local adaptation required to bridge between the usefulness of tech and specific realities of public university work. Public employees want modernization and don’t want to fall behind. We want systems that work. We are also balancing a great deal of change and pressure as a sector, with fewer material resources than ever. We need less marketing and more right-sizing in the claims around AI against the political and tech realities of public administration.
\nThis disconnect between technological promise and implementation reality becomes even more critical as higher education faces increased political scrutiny. When tech vendors promise that AI will solve efficiency problems or reduce administrative costs, institutions are under immense pressure to deliver measurable results quickly. But the translation costs we experience don’t disappear just because the political pressure to modernize increases.
\nThe institutions that thread this needle will be the ones that accurately assess these translation costs upfront and set expectations accordinglyânot the ones that assume the technology will magically bridge the gap between digital and physical, abstract and specific.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-17T09:15:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/17/ais-last-mile-problem-in.html", "tags": ["Art and Craft","Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Education","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Essays"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/15/navigating-ai-in-higher-ed.html", "title": "⥠Navigating AI in higher ed communications: A practitioner's guide", "content_html": "by Lauren Bruce
\nAs communications professionals in higher education, we work for institutions built on the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, yet many of us feel uncertain about how to thoughtfully integrate one of the most significant technological advances of our time: artificial intelligence.
\nOver the past year, my team has wrestled with questions that didn’t exist in our profession just a few years ago. Should we use AI to draft articles and email copy? How do we disclose AI-generated content, or do we? When does AI assistance cross the line from helpful tool to ethical concern?
\nThese aren’t abstract questions any longer. Over the last year, I had to overcome AI resistance of my own to develop practical, hands-on approaches to AI use that align with our institutional values while acknowledging the realities of modern communications work (more on that below). What I’ve learned is that the answers aren’t found in blanket policies or rules, but in applying our existing professional ethics to these new tools. Here is where I am today on the journey from AI praxis to practice.
\nMission first
\nThe foundation of responsible AI use in our field starts with a principle we already know: everything we do should advance our institution’s educational mission. Higher education exists to create, share, and preserve knowledge while fostering critical thinking and diverse perspectives, in service of students, faculty, researchers, workers and the world.
\nThe bulk of our work comes from conversations with colleagues, understanding of our campus dynamics and processes, and professional judgment about what our community needs to hear. This inevitably means more work upfront, but it maintains the authenticity and institutional knowledge that our audience deserves, regardless of whether AI tools are part of the process.
\nTransparency without paranoia
\nDo I need to mention AI every time I use it? The answer isn’t simple, but I’ve found a helpful framework: consider whether your audience would feel misled if they knew how AI was involved in creating the content.
\nWhen I use AI to polish grammar and shape format, that feels similar to using spell-check â itâs helpful but not something that changes the fundamental nature of the content we wish to communicate. But when AI helps generate the main structure for a story about campus policy changes, that’s a different ball game. The audience expects those priorities and framing decisions to come from human judgment about what matters to our community.
\nInternally, we differentiate between the two by defining whether or not you are âautomatingâ processes using AI, or âaugmentingâ processes using AI. Full disclosure, my area of experience is in augmentation, not automation. That said.
\nI’ve started recommending simple disclosures when AI plays a substantial role in content creation. A line like “This article was developed with AI assistance” maintains trust while allowing us to thoughtfully benefit from these tools. It’s not about being defensive, it’s about being transparent with the people we serve, especially as the tech and attitudes around it evolve over time. Additional qualifications can be included here, such as how the information was shaped and shared by AI or not (privacy implications abound).
\nHere, itâs important to remember to only use your university-approved tools, because university enterprise AI tools are modified to meet campus rules and requirements related to data handling.
\nThe accuracy imperative
\nPerhaps nowhere are the stakes higher than with accuracy. In higher education communications, we’re not just sharing informationâwe’re stewarding public trust in our institutions and, by extension, in higher education itself. In addition, much of the information we are communicating is original, in that itâs new information that cannot be generated using the limitless soup of generative AI.
\nEvery piece of AI-generated content requires human verification, especially anything involving numbers, research findings, or claims about institutional achievements. This means checking sources, confirming statistics, and ensuring that quotes are accurate and properly sourced. It’s more work, but the alternativeâpublishing incorrect informationâcould undermine years of relationship-building with community stakeholders and partners.
\nThe promise of speed and efficiency that comes with generative AI must be balanced with the work of close reading, the skill and practice of carefully analyzing a passageâs language, content, structure, and patterns in order to understand what a passage means, what it suggests, and how it connects to our larger body of work. I firmly believe that close reading, learned in the Humanities and Social Sciences, will become increasingly important to understand, shape and steer AI output, especially with regard to public communication best practices.
\nInclusion as a practice
\nAI bias isn’t an abstract concernâit shows up in subtle but significant ways in the work. I’ve noticed that AI tools often default to formal, academic language that might exclude first-generation college students, or suggest examples and metaphors that assume certain cultural backgrounds, for example.
\nThis has made me more intentional about prompt engineeringâthe way I request AI assistance. I build digital accessibility and plain language best practices into my prompts, in alignment with institutional best practices. One tip is to draft the original using my chosen, intentional language, then ask for revisions using as much of the original verbiage as possible. The difference in output is significant and it allows me to focus on higher-order communication strategy while demonstrating both accuracy and inclusive values in our output.
\nPrivacy and the long view
\nWorking at a public university means balancing transparency with appropriate privacy protections. We work within strict guidelines about what information can be included in AI prompts, particularly around student data, personnel information, and strategic planning discussions. Again, itâs important to only use your university-approved tools, because university enterprise AI tools are modified to meet campus rules and requirements related to data handling.
\nThe challenge is that AI tools work best with context, but providing that context can sometimes mean sharing information inappropriately. I’ve learned to be creative about how I frame requests to AI toolsâgiving enough context for useful output while protecting sensitive information about individuals and institutional operations.
\nI focus AI prompts on publicly available information rather than including details from internal planning discussions or individual faculty concerns. It requires more thoughtful preparation, but it ensures we’re protecting appropriate confidentiality.
\nSpeed vs. strategy
\nThe efficiency of AI is seductive, especially when facing tight deadlines and endless communication requests. But I’ve learned that speed can’t come at the expense of quality or authenticity.
\nAuthentic institutional voice and authority doesn’t emerge from algorithmsâit requires the deliberate application of human judgment to ensure our plans and communications reflect our campus culture, embody our values, and resonate with our specific audiences. The strategic thinking we bringâour ability to read context, navigate relationships, and understand the subtle dynamics of higher education communicationâcannot be automated.
\nConsider my own practice: I frequently engage AI as a collaborative thinking tool, particularly for structural planning and format development. However, AI’s default tendency toward comprehensive, multi-layered approaches often produces unnecessarily complex frameworks for university communication realities. This is where professional judgement becomes critical. Strong strategic foundations and institutional knowledge allow us to right-size AI’s expansive suggestions into focused, contextually appropriate communication plans that actually serve our goals and communities.
\nLooking ahead
\nWhat I’ve learned over this past year is that responsible AI use isn’t about following a rigid set of rules. It’s about applying the professional ethics we already have to new technological capabilities. The core principles that guide good communications workâaccuracy, transparency, service to mission, respect for audienceâremain the same.
\nWhat’s different is that we now have tools that can enhance our ability to live up to those principles, if we use them thoughtfully. AI can help us communicate more clearly, research more efficiently, and reach broader audiences. But only if we maintain our professional judgment about when, how, and why to use these tools.
\nAs our field continues to evolve, I’m convinced that the communications professionals who thrive will be those who can harness the power of AI while maintaining the human insight, ethical judgment, and institutional knowledge that define excellence in our profession. The technology will keep changing, but our commitment to serving our institutions and communities through ethical, effective communication remains constant. That’s the foundation we build on, whether we’re writing with pen and paper, collaborating in a digital document, or prompting the most sophisticated AI tool on campus.
\n*This post reflects my ongoing learning about AI ethics in communications practice and was generated using the assistance of AI (Claude, Gemini). Cross-posted on LinkedIn.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-15T11:49:12-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/15/navigating-ai-in-higher-ed.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Education","AI","AI in Practice","Essays"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/14/i-work-in-an-it.html", "content_html": "I work in an IT communications role in higher ed, and AI finally crept into my life in a real way. Coming soon: some reflections on AI from a comms practitioner in higher ed.
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-14T17:40:08-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/14/i-work-in-an-it.html", "tags": ["Education","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/05/aidriven-bots-are-disrupting-web.html", "content_html": "AI-driven bots are disrupting web trafficâ “and may also be inflating the internet economy by distorting the very metrics that drive tech company valuations.”
\n", "date_published": "2025-08-05T16:48:31-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/05/aidriven-bots-are-disrupting-web.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/07/17/what-makes-ai-generative-to.html", "content_html": "What makes AI generative? “To choose well between billions of things is difficult. To choose between effectively infinite options perfectly is impossible.”
\n", "date_published": "2025-07-17T14:31:50-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/07/17/what-makes-ai-generative-to.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/07/08/in-there-were-a-total.html", "content_html": "“In 2024, there were a total of 454 words used excessively by chatbots, the researchers report.” When does use of AI tip over into something fraudulent? Experts disagree.
\n", "date_published": "2025-07-08T16:56:18-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/07/08/in-there-were-a-total.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Education","AI","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/05/14/an-interesting-take-on-why.html", "content_html": "An interesting take on why we like AI for coding but not for writing. www.linkedin.com/pulse/cre…
\n", "date_published": "2025-05-14T12:18:58-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/05/14/an-interesting-take-on-why.html", "tags": ["AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/05/13/which-ai-applications-do-what.html", "content_html": "Which AI applications do what best - and how to think about it. www.vox.com/future-pe…
\n", "date_published": "2025-05-13T13:11:19-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/05/13/which-ai-applications-do-what.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/09/19/to-create-a.html", "content_html": "“To create a novel or a painting, an artist makes choices that are fundamentally alien to artificial intelligence.”
\n", "date_published": "2024-09-19T18:19:23-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/09/19/to-create-a.html", "tags": ["AI","AI \u0026 Writing"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/06/25/this-has-a.html", "title": "⥠Acceleration ", "content_html": "This has a bad headline, but the gist is that AI is already beginning to be used to power racketeering and ransom business models against vulnerable human enterprises. The net effect is a general erosion of the trustworthiness of written communication, especially online, as the same tools we use to perform our work and extend our social lives are increasingly used to scam us.
\n", "date_published": "2024-06-25T14:39:27-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/06/25/this-has-a.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Books \u0026 Reading","AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/06/17/starting-to-see.html", "content_html": "Starting to see some best practices emerging around AI capabilities in the higher ed space. Here’s a table of AI vs human capabilities in the Bloom’s hierarchy of cognitive tasks from Oregon State.
\n", "date_published": "2024-06-17T08:22:17-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/06/17/starting-to-see.html", "tags": ["AI"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2024/05/23/currently-watching-how.html", "content_html": "Currently watching how AI will affect SEO and search: www.forbes.com/sites/for…
\n", "date_published": "2024-05-23T08:11:37-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2024/05/23/currently-watching-how.html", "tags": ["AI","Search \u0026 Discovery"] } ] }