Virgante

Any day now my wife and I are about to welcome our first born, a son. I've been thinking about what lessons I'd like to pass down to him, lessons which I wish I had understood in my early 20s. To that end, I have put together this list of 41 lessons I've learned by 41 Y.O.:

Choose the right type of words.

@webjuice_ie What about an owner who wants to setup a new website by themselves and who has very little coding experience, which is easier for someone in that category?

After 15 years working with WordPress, we finally moved our own agency website away from it. Old setup: WordPress + Elementor + plugins New setup: Astro + Tailwind CSS + clean static architecture The difference is massive: - faster loading - cleaner code - less maintenance - better Core Web Vitals - no plugin bloat - no Elementor drag - AI controlled This is the standard now. If your business website feels slow, bloated, or impossible to improve, it probably doesn’t need another plugin. It needs a rebuild.

@edwardeachday @patrickstox Listened to the episode, guy has a sidejob career waiting as a backup voice actors for Mark Ruffalo.

80 minutes of the one and only @patrickstox breaking down the biggest myths in SEO. Just dropped: youtube.com/watch?v=5Pfjbz…

Absurd and inhuman violence is spreading ferociously through the sacred places of the Christian East, profaned by the blasphemy of war and the brutality of business, with no regard for people’s lives, which are considered at most collateral damage of self-interest. But no gain can be worth the life of the weakest, children, or families. No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood.

FACT CHECK: False and misleading. The SAVE Act is not just about voter ID. Fraudulent votes are only 0.00006%, or less than 100 per election. It's a nothing-burger. The SAVE Act is about centralising control of the voting process under the government, which can and will be abused.

@theseoguy_ I had a call today from an LSA and couldn't answer. Called back 6 mins later and couldn't get through. Left a voicemail and sent a text. Definitely lost the client by not answering when the call came in.

I have two clients in the same industry getting the same number of leads from Google every month. One is doing 3x the revenue of the other. The SEO is identical. The difference is what happens after someone fills out the form. Client one gets a form fill and someone on his team calls back within 4 minutes. Client two gets a form fill and calls back the next morning. The person who filled out that form at 2pm already hired someone by 9am the next day. This is the part of local SEO nobody talks about because it has nothing to do with rankings. You can be number 1 in Google and still lose every lead to the competitor sitting at number 3 if they pick up the phone faster than you do. Speed to lead is the most underrated variable in the entire equation. When someone searches for your service and fills out a form or calls, they are in buying mode at that exact moment. They are not browsing. They are not researching. They are ready to hire someone. That window does not stay open long. Studies show that the odds of actually reaching a lead drop by over 80% if you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond. Most business owners are waiting hours. Here is what the best operators I work with actually do. Every form fill triggers an immediate automated text to the lead. Something simple. Their name, what they are offering, and a direct ask to schedule a call. It goes out in under 60 seconds without a human involved. Then a real person follows up within minutes after that. By the time the competitor even sees the lead notification, this guy is already booked. Set this up whether you are running SEO, ads, or anything else. Go into whatever CRM or form tool you are using and build an immediate text automation for every new form submission. If you do not have a CRM, use something simple. The text just needs to go out fast and sound like a human wrote it. This single change will recover a meaningful percentage of the leads you are currently losing and never even knowing about. Your SEO is generating the opportunity. Do not let a slow follow-up be the reason it goes to waste.

@jlowin lol at its response though. Bare minimum and efficient.

Somehow my clawbot can do syntax highlighting in Slack and no it's not a snippet. Can anyone explain? Because he can't.

@edwardeachday That Also Asked tool is great. Good episode.

Super fun episode. SEO Experiments That Prove Everyone Wrong - Google Leaks, AI Myths & Ranking Signals With Mark Williams-Cook youtube.com/watch?v=FA_B-x…

Trump’s persecution of Jerome Powell and his political opponents must end.

@shaneparrish And the current moment.

All the time you spend replaying the past comes at the expense of focusing on the future.

1/ New research analyzing 740,000 hours of human speech has found undeniable proof: we are starting to speak like ChatGPT. Not just in emails. In real life. Here is the empirical evidence of the "Cultural Feedback Loop." 🧵👇 2/ We all know the jokes. You see the word "delve" in an email, and you know a bot wrote it. But a new study (Yakura et al., 2024) asked a terrifying question: Are we just using AI to write text, or is AI actually rewiring how we speak spontaneously? The answer is yes. 3/ To prove this, the researchers didn't look at text (which is easy to fake). They went to the source: Spoken Audio. They transcribed: • 360,445 YouTube academic talks • 771,591 Podcast episodes That’s over 740,000 hours of humans talking to humans. 4/ First, they had to identify the "AI Accent." They compared human writing to ChatGPT edits to find words the AI is obsessed with. The top offenders? • Delve • Meticulous • Swift • Comprehend • Boast If you use these, your "GPT Score" is high. 5/ Then, they looked at the timeline. They used a "Synthetic Control" method. Basically, they used math to predict how often humans would have said "delve" if ChatGPT never existed. Then they compared it to reality. The chart is shocking. 6/ The moment ChatGPT was released (Nov 2022), the usage of "delve" in spoken audio skyrocketed. It broke the trend line completely. And here is the wild part: This happened in spontaneous podcast conversations, not just scripted academic talks. 7/ Why does this matter? Because it proves we aren't just copy-pasting. We are internalizing. This is the "Closed Cultural Feedback Loop." AI trains on human data. AI develops a "style" (polite, verbose). Humans adopt that style. Future AI trains on those humans. 8/ The researchers found this shift across every domain. Science, Business, Education—even "unscripted" chats are drifting toward the machine's preferred vocabulary. We are slowly, subconsciously homogenizing our language to match the tool we built. 9/ This leads to a risk called "Model Collapse." If humans start sounding like AI, and AI trains on humans, we lose linguistic diversity. We become an echo chamber of "meticulous inquiries" and "swift delves." The nuance of human culture gets flattened. 10/ The study calls this a "Cultural Singularity." It’s the point where the line between human culture and machine culture blurs so much you can't tell them apart. We used to worry about machines passing the Turing Test. We didn't worry about humans failing it. 11/ So, a challenge for you this week: Listen to yourself. Listen to your podcasts. When you hear "delve" or "meticulous," ask yourself: Is that the speaker's voice? Or is it the echo of the algorithm? 12/ This research is a wake-up call. Language shapes how we think. If we let an LLM dictate our vocabulary, we let it shape our cognition. If this thread made you think, give it a RT. Let's keep human language human. ♻️

"No good thing is pleasant to possess, without friends to share it." — Seneca, VI. On Sharing Knowledge

And also as happened with Putin, politicians and pundits spend too much time looking for complicated motivations from ideology or psychology or blackmail. It’s money. It’s always money. They’re crooks. With immense power, but still crooks. Don’t overcomplicate things.

@dieworkwear Some "christians".

heartbroken to learn the pope sympathizes with the poor. how can i continue to believe in god

With all respect to Sen. Kelly, who would be a formidable candidate, the American electorate deserves better than "Traitors versus Losers, the Sequel".

Bukele forced out independent judges, packed the courts with loyalists, then declared a state of emergency that allowed him to arrest and indefinitely detain people without any due process. When we say these guys are advocating for fascist ideas, it’s because they literally are.

I gasped when I saw the front page of this decision; Judge Young includes a postcard sent to him asking "Trump has pardons and tanks ... what do you have?" He responds "Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People ... have our magnificent Constitution."

While Clinton's 1990s policies on crime (1994 Crime Bill), immigration (1996 IIRIRA), and welfare reform shared MAGA's emphasis on enforcement and restrictions, equating them risks overlooking context. Clinton worked within norms, accepting elections and court rulings. Trump denied 2020 results, leading to Jan. 6 (where his "fight like hell" speech was cited in investigations), criticized judges (e.g., calling them "Obama judges"), and praised leaders like Putin and Orban. Diverse sources view this as undermining democracy, though others see mutual partisan threats. This distinction highlights tactical shifts vs. institutional challenges.