Welcome new subscribers

Summer is coming to a close now and the leaves may be starting to turn where you are. The weather in the Pacific Northwest has certainly changed the last month. We have had record rain this month. This is after expectations there would be a drought this spring.

I am making some changes to BrainScriblr that I want to share with you. I believe in communicating changes to my subscribers. This newsletter has always been a work in progress, or an experiement.

Since so many of you have come to me through Medium - where I cover artificial intelligence and open source software I think it is appropriate to start covering open source in my newsletter as well.

I chose the name BrainScriblr because I know AI is in an attention bubble currently and I wanted a name that would be able to transition beyond the AI attention bubble it is currently in.

In 2021 during the last crypto bubble I spent a lot of time writing about and covering crypto markets and trading tools and so on. That work became obsolete when the crypto markets changed and interest in crypto waned which meant the audience I built there disappeared. I do not want that to happen with BrainScriblr.

Also, the open source software arena has a lot of good things happening. Some of this is from open source AI tools and repos. Organizations like Hugging Face and Mistral come to mind as well as Kuytai too. I believe in the longer term these may become the projects that lead in AI development.

Practical changes to BrainScriblr are coming too. I am doing away with the ‘Research’ section. For that topic I will focus less on current news but on longer term discoveries that can be drowned out when I post a constant trickle of ‘Research’ info.

The ‘News’ section stays of course.

Also, I am focusing the ‘Tools’ section on recommending one tool per week. Many of these tools are essentially copycat projects of tools already widely in use. Really there is no need to add another image creator or personal assistant to the list unless they are exceptional. Also, I want to give myself more of a chance to test the new tools as opposed to merely presenting a list of tools. So each week I will try to find one tool to recommend, but I do not promise I will recommend one each week.

The ‘Prompt’ section will stay pretty much the same a I believe there is a lot of value for you, the reader, in that section. I will work on expanding this section to offer more in the way of tutorial and explanation for why/how the prompts work.

One other big change is I have decided - for now at least - to leave the ‘Scale’ plan through BeeHiiv. That is why there have been so many ads in recent months. I entered it because even though I love writing this newsletter it is not a paying gig yet. The Scale plan through BeeHiiv bears a cost to me which is equal to the ad revenue I gained. So what is the point in that?

This is not to say that I am switching to a subscriber based model. I am contemplating leaving it up to you as to how much you think the newsletter is worth. How do I do that? I am going to leave a link for tipping in the upcoming newsletter issues. With that you can tip or not. Either way it does not change what content you will receive.

The tipping will not start until September at any rate.

So again thank you for subscribing and being a part of the BrainScriblr newsletter and community. I appreciate you and your trust and confidence in me to provide you with timely and thoughtful content covering AI and Open Source issues.

Cheers