@kulturnation Haha really?! Over-promising and under-delivering! Good to know that I’m not the only one who has been deceived though...
@martinfeld Apart from that, how was the coffee? It does seem to me that the term “AI” is being widely and indiscriminately applied to devices/processes that don’t involve any intelligence at all, artificial or organic.
@artkavanagh I completely agree with your argument there. It’s just a buzzword to slap on things sometimes. Otherwise, the coffee wasn’t bad... I didn’t want to waste it!
@kulturnation Yes differences make it interesting! My only complaint with coffee is if it‘s lukewarm. What kind of tea do you enjoy?
@martinfeld And a really badly programmed idiot, at that. Is should not be hard to make it at least tell you that it was out of milk. Maybe even remove or disable the milky options under those conditions.
@kulturnation You certainly know your tea! I just find it really relaxing and am happy to try anything.
@kulturnation I drink tea fairly often but replacing coffee with it at certain times like you have is a good idea. 🙂
@kulturnation What’s your preferred coffee? I remember when I used to work at the Auslandshandelskammer in Sydney, there was a German intern who complained about the lack of ‘real coffee’ in Australia, because percolated coffee tends to be less common.
@kulturnation Yes I enjoy making it every so often but it does add a number of extra bits and pieces to your kitchen.
@kulturnation @martinfeld I don’t find an Aeropress too much work. I don’t bother with doing it upside down or a cold brew or anything fancy like that. I’ve got a stainless steel mesh filter (which will soon need replacing). I can’t imagine ever going back to an espresso machine.
@kulturnation @artkavanagh It's amusing to me how seriously some people take AeroPress. The fact that there are competitions is hilarious. I had an app on my watch for a while, which included recipes and timers and so on, however once I found the way that I like to use it, I just got rid of it. Coffee has to be one of the most subjective matters on the planet!
@kulturnation @artkavanagh So true about the sketching... I had a mental block about using my Apple Pencil when I first got it because I felt the need to draw properly. I then realised that I could just have fun... no expectations! I was also encouraged by a similar point that @stickmandiaries made in his Micro Monday episode.
@martinfeld I never drew anything really due to a family of artists before I got my iPad but now not a day goes by that I don’t doodle something and yes the pencil definitely freed me to doodle, and the more I do the more confident I get, most of which will not see the light of day. Just a shame that starting my creative journey cost nearly a grand!
@kulturnation @artkavanagh funny how ‘artificial flavoring’, ‘artificial grass’, ‘artificial flowers’, ‘artificial sweeteners’, artificial … pretty much anything really, is seen as somehow inferior to the real thing - and yet artificial intelligence is somehow superior ….
@JohnPhilpin wrote: funny how ‘artificial flavoring’, ‘artificial grass’, ‘artificial flowers’, ‘artificial sweeteners’, artificial … pretty much anything really, is seen as somehow inferior to the real thing - and yet artificial intelligence is somehow superior ….
Three days ago in this thread I wrote: I really do enjoy talking with people and everyone has their own stories to tell. A I has never appealed to me. Doesn't the adjective "artificial" always have a negative connotation? Wouldn't it have been smarter to call it life-like intelligence? It's live communication I enjoy the most. Doesn't everyone?
John, we obviously see alike on this! BUT .... It also continues to annoy me that I can't just point to one particular comment in a long thread, so I had to copy & paste your entire text and then I had to copy & paste my entire text, to make my point. Wasn't hypertext, the most important innovation when the web was created, supposed to make these sort of things a LOT easier? But here it is very complex, as I know of no way to point to ONE comment in a thread. I've mentioned it before, but I don't think Manton considers it to be a big deal. So it hasn't changed and likely won't. But it annoys me every time I want to comment on ONE remark in a long coversation of many. Maybe there's a trick I just don't know. But no one has been able to point it out to me so far.
@JohnPhilpin And now to make matters worse, I forgot to add a CC: @manton at the end of my rant. So I do it here and I say good luck on any possibility of Manton getting what I was saying in my super-long comment.
@Ron @JohnPhilpin I get it. It does record which reply you were referencing, so later we can add an option to show more information. I do like the flat conversations by default.
@manton I like the flat conversations too — deep nesting of threads can make reading them a real chore.
But allowing for an automated part of some replies to indicate, in short, which previous comment they are responding to? That would be really nice.
Slack, for instance, allows for this. And you can then keep your reply in-line without confusing everybody.
@grayareas My thought was that there could be an expanded view for longer conversations with more structure, but keep it simple otherwise.
@manton I second @grayareas; the flat conversations are very helpful for ensuring everything stays in context, but sometimes it is hard to guess (in longer conversations) which comment another is in reply to, so something like prepending the comment with a ↩︎ (or similar glyph; that one is confusingly used for both “reply” and “return”/”return from footnote to text” already on the web, so overloading with a 3rd meaning might not be good) that links to the comment another is in reply to would be helpful.
There are other use-cases, in play here, too, like Ron’s (wanting to be able to link to a single reply, clearly isolated, if not removed entirely, from the rest of the conversation, when writing a new blog post—which is harder to solve in the framework of the existing Conversation view), so I wonder if it would be possible to include the “in-reply-to-post-NNNNN” info in the HTML markup (at least as a hidden attribute) and the API so that 3rd parties could experiment with useful ways to employ and display that relationship?
@smokey @manton @grayareas @ron - I'm ok with flat conversations though have usually preferred threaded ones myself, but some indication of what reply a comment was to would be good, Maybe a "in reply to" link with a short snippet quote or something? It would also be very nice to be able to link to as specific comment in a thread in a blog post or something liek that. It would be good to be able to expose a permalink and set it up so if that link is followed it goes to that comment (rather than just the start of the whole conversation), and maybe highlights it in some way to indicate that that is the comment being referenced? The reader could then go up or down in the conversation to see more context but would know what comment was being referenced.
Click into a conversation you get the flat file ... and in most cases that is just fine .. pick a single comment in that thread and click into ‘the conversation’ I don’t expect to be taken to exactly the same place ... except scrolled to the top .. I expect to be taken to the specific comment that caused the comment I clicked on to be made ... wouldn’t that work?
@JohnPhilpin @smokey @manton @grayareas My recollection is that in the very beginning pf micro.blog there was no Conversation button. Then when it first appeared, I'm pretty sure you could click on the time stamp to get the URL for that one particular posting only. Or click on the new Conversation button and you got the URL for the whole conversation. That seemed pretty okay to me. That is all that would be needed now to solve what I want. I think I argued for this approach before and Manton rejected the idea, but I don't recall why. So I guess I'm repeating myself. Do you know any old guys who tell the same stories over and over? I guess I'm like one of those guys.
I have a hosted blog. I can go to the Posts tab, then click on the time stamp to get the URL to any given article I've posted. But I don't seem to be able to do the same for a reply, either my own, or someone else's. Why not? Isn't that a pretty basic requirement for a website? On my static Dylan bibliography website, you can click on any book or anything else I link to and get just that one thing! But here, click on a time stamp for any given comment and you get the whole conversation, if there is one! Click on the Conversation button and you get the whole conversation also. Why can't clicking on two different buttons give two different results? Why even have two buttons, if they're gonna give the same result? Okay, maybe just like with the old guy, you're gonna have to explain why what I'm asking for is impossible, or not preferred or desired, or why you just don't wanna do it that way. I don't wanna be known as the complaining old broken record guy.
This comment is something like the 44th one on this conversation (#3169339). It seems to be mainly a discussion of coffee and tea. But John and I made nearly identical comments about artificial intelligence, nothing whatsoever to do with either coffee or tea. Why do our comments have to be a part of this coffee/tea conversation? I don't even drink coffee and those who do drink coffee or tea probably don't want to hear about artificial intelligence, or artificial anything, for that matter. Can we get a divorce??
@kulturnation Yes, when a person posts a new article on their own, that posting would be at the top of a Conversation, with all replies to that coming in below in that Conversation. In the example I was giving, John had posted a reply to the coffee/tea conversation. I had idependently posted nearly the same comment as a reply to some other posting. But when I told John about it, I did it as a reply to him, which then put our artificial comments into the coffee/tea thread, where they didn't really belong. I'm still hoping for a divorce. ;-)
@Ron @kulturnation To be clear, I do think this can be improved. When you link to a different reply it shows that reply with a different color background, but it’s very subtle, and easy to get lost in long conversations.
It would also be very nice to be able to link to as specific comment in a thread in a blog post or something liek that. It would be good to be able to expose a permalink and set it up so if that link is followed it goes to that comment (rather than just the start of the whole conversation), and maybe highlights it in some way to indicate that that is the comment being referenced?
I expect to be taken to the specific comment that caused the comment I clicked on to be made
You can make these mostly work now (on the web) by taking the post ID from the “comment” URL and then appending it to that URL (with some other text) as an HTML anchor:
E.g., for DrOct’s post I’m replying to here, the URL is micro.blog/DrOct/3166896 (it’s the URL of both the timestamp, because it’s a comment, and of the “Conversation” link I see for the post in my Mentions). The reply/comment’s post ID is 3166896, so micro.blog/DrOct/3166896#post_div_3166896 jumps me straight to that post in the Conversation (and it is highlighted in grey, too, since the post that corresponds to the URL is already highlighted in grey on the web and in the apps). Try it using this link.
It’s easy enough to work up a JS bookmarklet to generate that sort of link, which would help on the web, but not in the apps (and also wouldn’t solve Ron’s use-case, as I understand it from this and prior conversations with him).
@smokey So that link works exactly how I would want it to! But only on the web. When I tried it on my phone I just to take to the top of the conversation and had to scroll until I found the subtly highlighted comment. This is what should just happen when you click on the timestamp of a comment (and arguably when you go to the comment URL, whithout having to append the extra bit at the end). That combined with a less subtle coloring of the comment in question would pretty much satisfy my needs. Thanks! This at least gives me a way to link to a specific comment, even if it's a bit clunky.
@DrOct Yep, that’s one of the things that’s great about the web; with a bit of JavaScript or URL manipulation (assuming enough stuff is in the underlying markup), people can innovate and create their own solutions.
There have been comments before about the highlight in the apps (at least on iOS) being too light/subtle, and Manton mentioned he would be open to revisiting that. I usually don’t have problems seeing it, but in the light I was in last night, I did (also, it seems like when it’s your own comment, there’s not a highlight on iOS?), so maybe it’s time to make a bug report suggesting a slightly darker highlight?
Also, I agree with you that the default action should probably be that you jump to the post that you used to enter the Conversation, everywhere, without having to resort to URL trickery. At least on the web, we have the work-around…