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The New Yorker

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web

OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?

You should read this article. Honestly. You’ll thank me later.

Bon voyage @brickwhartley!

it's real

Ok, some time ago someone suggested we should do a quick post with tips & trips for the beta editor, and I'm in the mood this morning, so let me put on my work hat for a sec and write a serious post about what we are doing with it. To mark this as a serious post, let me even add a title:

Beta editor tips and tricks

Uhh, getting all fancy here. Anyway, jokes aside, let me share a few details that make using the beta editor a pretty nice experience, and you may not be aware of (or at least, some of them!)

1. The Drawer

See, my favorite feature, the one I use most often, and the one I think it's more useful when writing tumblrstuff, it's the / drawer. When you are at the start of a new line and write /, a drawer gets open where you can, using only your keyboard, select what do you want to happen in that line:

It allows you to select the text style without having to write first and then select the text to change it. It also allows for media blocks insertion (which I don't use quite often, but hey, maybe you do!)

2. Quick links!

There's this great way to add links to a post that ... well, after using it, any other way feels pretty terrible. Just copy whatever url you want to link, write the text, select it and paste the url ... boom, link created!

3. Image handling

Yeah, the image sets have been pretty borken on the beta editor for a long time. We know, we are sorry. But we have been working a lot in the last couple of months on that area and now it's so much better! functional, even!

4. Tag! Tags!!! TAGSSSS!!!

You may know this already because it has been widely reblogged, but now you can edit tags in the beta editor!

5. Down to Markdown

Well, if for some reason you like to write your posts using markdown, but you don't like the beta editor (admittedly spartan) markdown mode, you can just use whatever fancier editor you like, copy/paste the markdown text, and see it being converted from engineerlish to well-adjusted-humanlish format before your eyes!

And well, that's all I can think of on this sunny morning on the outskirts of Madrid. We keep working on it heavily, so cool things are coming! I don't really feel comfortable leaking any incoming features that I'm not directly working at, so I better shut up before I tell you about sdlgkjsñlgkl

Another Tumblr dev: [appears out of nothing] Another Tumblr dev: [kicks my keyboard out of the window] Me: hey!! that was my good keyboard! Now I'll have to write on my laptop, like a nerd!

me_irl

Tumblr engineering...

We do what we must, because we can.

For the good of all of us,

Except the ones who are banned.

But there's no sense crying over every mistake.

You just keep on trying till you run out of bells.

And the engineering gets done, and you dev some neat crabs,

For the people who are still around

Sing it with me:

1 2 3 4 my pasword is secure

Another idea: Communities on Tumblr

For a while now folks have asked us for better ways to connect with other people who share similar interests. We’re listening, and at Labs we’ve been looking into fulfilling that need, Tumblr style.

Introducing Communities, a new place to connect with others on Tumblr:

Here in Labs, we’re working on big ideas that could transform how Tumblr is used, while keeping that Tumblr vibe alive. You can see one of those ideas above. We’re calling it “Communities”, a new dedicated space on Tumblr for people to share and discuss all the content they love. Communities can cover topics like your favorite show, artist, movie, video game, your school, your board game group, friend group, big or small, whatever you want.

Each Community has their own semi-private safer space away from the regular dashboard where you can interact with other Tumblr users who share the same interests and passions as you. There are moderators and members (you!), rules, and privacy settings. Each community has its own feed of posts from members, separate from your Following and For You feeds. Interactions within community spaces stay there and replies will work more like a traditional comment section. Folks will be able to reblog posts into a community, but not out — at least not yet.

We’re very excited for you to try it, and help define the best path forward. What we have is a prototype to help us validate the idea, but there’s still plenty of questions that need answering. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be reaching out to people across Tumblr, and the internet at large, to try our prototype. Based on the feedback we get, we’ll iterate on the idea to see what resonates best with all of you on Tumblr.

If this sounds interesting, please like, reblog, or reply to this post, and we’ll invite you to beta test this feature when we roll it out to a wider Tumblr audience, as a little perk for following the Labs blog.

Stay tuned for more!