I've recently become curious about the scene, and discovered quite a bit going on. It seems most tech coops are operating more like agencies, taking on client work. Haven't seen many developing products.
Here is a new but somewhat active matrix channel where some tech coops folks hangout: https://matrix.to/#/#techcoop:autonomic.zone We plan to have an informal call to chat there on 22nd of February at 17:00-18:30 UTC.
Note that a big problem with building a product tech coop is that you exactly can't as easily raise millions: investors by definition cannot take stake in a coop. Instead, you need a business loan, and its less common to find financiers willing to loan large rounds for high risk investment. That may be a cultural thing though, because in theory, sufficient interest could offset the risk in aggregate I guess.
I've recently migrated to Zen [0] and its a breath of fresh air.
I agree with comments arguing bad bookmark UX is part of the problem. Zen's approach is a vertical tab sidebar with workspaces and folders. Crucially, it distinguishes pinned and ephemeral tabs.
The approach is much more natural to me than either bookmarks and tradition tabs.
I know its disturbing to many, but there is something nice about the post-truth moment: it feels like more people are actually questioning things more than when I grew up in the 90s/00s.
I think we need to shift towards a socionormative understanding of knowledge; as Rorty put it: "a fact is just something we can't be bothered to argue about". I agree with him that talking about truth isn't so useful for moving our culture forward.
We should be talking about how to negotiate the diverse vocabularies of discursive communities as they increasingly clash in our globalized culture. Dialectical exclusion is the cultural catastrophe of the day.
A number of the Claudes have pretty good 0-shot awareness of my post history from just my username.
Though nothing like grok 4, which probably has a better memory of it than I do, and will even regularly name drop a certain post from years ago in conversations.
It's a huge time saver though, and means I can even in a fresh context establish a rapport with a model extremely quickly. Just a few years earlier than I was expecting that level of latent space fidelity to occur.
Like, sure we can add memory features for context management, but anyone with a post history should probably *also* keep in mind that there's literally years worth of memory on tap for interactions with models, and likely at ever higher fidelity and recall. Latent spaces are wild.
Coming from a new-pragmatist orientation, this is a nice invitation to look more carefully at phenomological takes.
More please!