Jamie Thingelstad

Digging the Challenge Coin that I received from @mtt today. Thank you! Pictured here alongside another challenge coin I got from Elwin Loomis. Someday I’m going to mint my own!

When I signed up to host this IndieWeb Carnival it was several months in the future and I thought it would be simple to put a theme together and run the carnival. As it approached I started to feel like the theme I had in mind wasn’t a theme but more a topic and wasn’t going to be big enough for a whole carnival. I explored a bunch of avenues for different options and wasn’t finding anything I loved.

I decided to ask the family over dinner. They had no idea what a blog carnival is, but that is fine. Right away Tammy suggested Renewal. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere it is Spring and it has that feeling of renewal. As we rolled it around more I liked it more. It is April, it is Spring, and it is a time of renewal.

The theme of renewal resonated with me because it can apply to so many things. Renewal could happen in a day or a year. It could apply to your relationships, yourself, your digital world, whatever you want. We can point a desire for renewal anywhere we like.

• We can renew the bonds of our most treasured and intimate relationships.
• Connecting more with friends and family renews those relationships.
• Watching the plants come to life after a long winter sparks thought of renewal.
• I think after decades of commercialized and surveilled social networks on the web it is time for a renewed focus on writing, publishing, and people.

Do you have a story of renewal to share? Is there a need for renewal that you see and a way to make that happen? How do you approach renewal?

Everyone and anyone is welcome to participate in this IndieWeb Carnival. Share your stories of renewal and send a webmention to this page and email me to submit your posts. I will share a list of all posts!

I’m very happy with these Ukrainian Tryzub Trident pins that I ordered from ShopUA 1000. Made in Ukraine. 🇺🇦

I would like to create blog posts from some workouts. It seems like something that Shortcuts should make possible but I’ve not seen anything to make it easier to do. Is anyone familiar with something that does this? I’d like a map and statistics in the posts.

Months ago when I signed up to host the April IndieWeb Carnival I thought it was a great idea and now I’m finding myself atypically anxious about choosing a good topic! 😬

LEGO and Pokémon announced that they are launching a multi-year partnership in 2026. This is going to mint an incredible amount of revenue for both companies. 💰 Consider how many of these sets will be bought and never even opened for collectors. 😲

The LLM functions I’ve built for the Weekly Thing have worked really well. So well in fact that I’m redoing my Shortcuts to move from simple calls to the ChatGPT app to using the OpenAI API directly. This has the added benefit of additional fine tuning including optimized system messages. 👨‍💻

The new metal Loon sculpture at Allianz Field is impressive in person. Cool addition to the stadium.

The pizza at Boludo is so incredible. Delicious and unique!

I attended a public lecture hosted by Anselm House on Are We Merely Machines? tonight featuring Rosalind W. Picard of the MIT Media Lab. It was an interesting talk covering materialism, scientism, and ontology. Picard’s view is that we are not, and that we should not, attempt to blur the lines between machine and human, and that humans are always ontologically the maker.

I’m challenged to find the difference so stark.

One argument often asserted is that machines using artificial intelligence only know what they know because they have learned it from what people have done. However isn’t that equally true for people? Nobody is born a poet, they learn from poets. You are not born a Chess Grandmaster, you learn from chess players. AI and people do the same thing. The incremental small improvements in knowledge are mostly unmeasurable.

Another assertion is that LLMs are just statistical models of language and they put words together branching on simple math. How can we assert that people don’t do the same thing? The structure of language itself limits the structure, and isn’t our brain doing something somewhat similar to the LLM?

Which isn’t to say that I believe an AI is a person. I do not. I think it is likely more accurate to say I lack the philosophical depth to explore the points in detail.