I enjoyed Cory Doctorow’s reflection on six years of his new blog, Pluralistic.

Since he “still completely wed to the idea of ‘POSSE’ (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere),” he goes into his frustrations publishing his content to the different familiar platforms:

After I write the day’s post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a ton of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I’m always wrestling with them.

He explains the specifics of each one, which I appreciate as a person who often wrestles with similar issues, especially (in my case) Word and Teams, but also on Mastodon and Tumblr (which I gave up completely; I just let Micro.blog push it automatically). Thankfully, Micro.blog creates a newsletter automatically (see under “How”) from my posts.

What surprised me a bit (as he said it would) was that Doctorow adopted AI into his workflow:

There is one technology that has made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama – an open-source LLM – on my laptop.

He knows many of his readers will quickly pick up their pitchforks, so he goes into a long, detailed explanation about how he uses it and what for. In short (though I recommend you read his post), he mostly uses Ollama, an open-source platform for LLMs, to catch typos and grammatical mistakes before he publishes his posts. I do the same thing on this blog with Grammarly, which I expanded on before.

But best of all, he goes into why people should stop banning AI just out of principle. In his own words:

Let’s start with some context. If you don’t want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then you are totally fucked.

He goes on to explain what I’ve been preaching my friends and readers for years, that so much of what we use today came from what “immoral minds,” that those who oppose those technologies out of principles cannot voice their opinion online unless they are hypocrites, since the internent, slicon chips and cell phones are all technologies that are based on such minds - but again, read his post. He links everything to other posts of his, which in turn link to online resources.

I love his viewpoint:

Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what’s better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own.

Yes. Hell yes. I’ve been doing this with LLMs and AI image generation for a couple of years now, using Linux and open-source software.

That’s how we make good tech: not by insisting that all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it

He goes on and on, providing examples and links that guide people on how to do just that. It is so well put, I think I want to print the URL to his post on small paper bits and store them in my wallet just in case the next person comes around and rants on how AI is a shit technology. It is not. It’s the people and how they utilize it. Always was, and always will be.