Perplexity is saving my linguistics classmates

I have a dark past. I asked questions. In class. Lots of questions. Too many questions. I hear things, I get ideas, I notice gaps, I ask questions.

It's a compulsion.

Some of the questions helped classmates. To be honest more were probably confusing or distracting. I likely featured in classmate daydreams -- but not in a good way.

Worse, some of the questions confused the professor. Or exposed what they didn't understand. That could be embarrassing or even humiliating.

Now I'm back in the classroom, doing freshman linguistics.  As a 65yo, I can do classes at Minnesota state colleges and universities for free. We pay a lot in taxes, but there are benefits to living here.

My question compulsion is still there, but LLMs are saving everyone. I set up a linguistics "collection" in Perplexity with appropriate prompts; now I type my questions into my phone (allowed in class). I get the answer with Perplexity and spare my classmates.

Never say AI isn't good for something.

PS. Perplexity is to modern Google as Google was to Alta Vista. A qualitative improvement. It's almost as good as 1990s Google.

The End Times have come for the Pinboard.in bookmarking service

In the years following the Great Recession, from 2010 to 2013, many web services went offline. In retrospect that was the end of the Berners-Lee web.

During that time, starting in 12/29/2011, I started using Maciej Cegłowski's Pinboard bookmarking site as a kind of micro blog. 

Pinboard filled part of the Google Reader Social vacuum. There were various apps and services around pinboard, in addition to IFTTT, that made that feasible. My Pinboard 's' posts were published to Twitter, then app.net, and most recently Mastodon (and probably a few other services too). They were also archived in kateva.org/sh. 

Pinboard imported my old Google Reader social bookmarks so it's a pretty complete set of things I shared, mostly tech and events that seemed to have potential lasting meaning. There are over 50,000 pins now. There were apps written for Pinboard, creating a small ecosystem of added value.

I'm still on my original subscription plan - about $20 a year or so. It ends in Feb 2025 and I won't be renewing. I feel like it's 2013 again.

Over the past few years there have been a slowly increasing number of pinboard outages with less communication. While debugging the last outage I purged my local history from the 3rd party Pins iOS app and found that Pinboard was throttling their download API. I could download only 100 of my 50,000 or so pins. (It's still easy to download the whole set as a file). 

That's ominous, but more importantly Pinboard is a one person show and that person is no longer responding to support emails. Maciej is no longer active on social media that I know of. His Pinboard.in support forum has been quiescent for years. I'll be researching my micro blog options and I'll write about what I come up with on tech.kateva.org. 

10 years is an eternity on the web. Pinboard had a good run, but it too is passing. I have my archives and you can still download JSON or HTM versions of past bookmarks. I might wish for a more graceful end but Pinboard was a good service while it lasted and there is a clear data exit if not a clear replacement. Thank you, Maciej, for the value you delivered to me.

Update: via a Mastodon friend a Hacker News article on the ignominious end of Pinboard and some alternatives: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41533958