FireChat’s response only raises more questions, like this reportedly 6.1 million dollar grant from the DoD. Part 2. Yesterday, I published a note, FireChat was a tool for revolution. Then it disappeared. That statement still stands today, but the circumstances surrounding FireCha … | Continue reading
FireChat was a tool for revolution. Then it disappeared. For years, FireChat helped people circumvent their internet gatekeepers— the authoritarian governments and spineless corporations that control our every move through a network of proprietary data centers and deep-sea cables … | Continue reading
Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something Somewhere between the death of our favorite aggregator websites and the world surviving a pandemic, the modern internet was reduced to four companies in a trench coat. On the left breast pocket of that trenchcoat is … | Continue reading
Where have all the websites gone? It’s Tuesday morning. The year is 2009. You’re just waking up after a long and boozy New Year’s Eve with friends. Your head rings, and your mouth is the type of dry that makes you question your adulthood. You feel something scratch against your a … | Continue reading
Bloktoberfest— Some anticlimactic thoughts on blocking Note: this post is what I consider a note— some light musing that may or may not have a conclusion and may or may not turn into an essay one day. Oh, Elon Musk. You’re like the Trump of the tech world. Not so much because you … | Continue reading
How do we stop Meta in 2024? We fix the information loop Discursive dominance is “the ultimate emergence of one discourse as dominant among competing ones in their struggle for dominance.” Once discursive dominance is secured, objectives are easier to achieve. It’s why lobbyists … | Continue reading
Copy, Acquire, Kill— How Meta could pull off the most extraordinary pivot in tech history Meta's sudden interest in ActivityPub and Mastodon doesn't make much sense. There are a few impossibly consistent talking points floating through the Fediverse. Each tries to explain away th … | Continue reading
Posts critical of Threads and Meta missing on Mammoth app There were big chunks of posts missing under the threads hashtag feed. Some are still missing. Many of these posts were critical to the Threads / Mastodon interpolation. I’ve observed this behavior only on the third party … | Continue reading
The medium is the message— Threads isn't a win for the Fediverse Meta needs the Fediverse more than the Fediverse needs Meta. I say this in the sense that the Fediverse never needed Meta at all. In fact, the Threads / Mastodon interoperation is a net negative for "federated socia … | Continue reading
I got my first blue bubble scam text the other day and I think I know why Beeper Mini is a new Android app that gives Android users a blue bubble when they text iPhone users. According to some folks on the internet, Beeper Mini tricks iMessage into thinking the sender is using an … | Continue reading
Why it feels like AIs are coming for the artists Each week, a new AI thing goes viral. It's always something artistic-adjacent. Either it's a GPT-illustrated kids' book, an AI pop singer, or a chatbot promising to write the next blockbuster movie. And it's always from some guy wh … | Continue reading
The Village Effect of the Greater Web The internet is a vast and open plain. It represents the best account we have of the human condition (it's also really fun and interesting once you know your way around). So why does it feel so cramped in here? Why are so many of us confined … | Continue reading
A Frantic Friday Massacre Update: The Verge is reporting that Altman is in talks with the board to come back as CEO, is "ambivalent" about retuning without governing changes to the company. Lmao. What an embarrassing fiasco this all is. It's not even Monday yet. From Axios: Sam A … | Continue reading
My precious From Atlantic Staff Writer Charlie Warzel (via Threads): One thing in the OpenAI stuff that feels consistent (based on some internal convos I've had) is that a group of people that are laser focused on the doomer elements of AI and the more abstract principle of AGI f … | Continue reading
App defaults Just last night I stumbled on The Small Website Discoverability Crisis post while scrolling Hacker News. And here I am tonight, writing a post based on a viral trend with over 150 personal sites participating so far. The internet finds a way (goldblum.gif). There's a … | Continue reading
You likely already own the first big AI wearable It's AirPods. The world's most ubiquitous earbuds just so happens to have a computer chip and a voice assistant. The opening is right there. I'll eat my hat if Apple's first foray into the LLM market doesn't unfold like this: AirPo … | Continue reading
New technology same old people Humane, an AI hardware start-up whose name choice is as transparent as glass, has a "trust" section front-and-center on its website. It reads: At Humane, we believe you deserve the ability to own your data from the outset. That personal information … | Continue reading
Madonna in the 80s? AI already tainting our history This Reddit post, an ode to early Madonna, has 505 upvotes at the time of writing this note. But, the seemingly innocuous collection of Madonna photos from the late 70s and early 80s feels off. Particularly photos 7 and 8, whe … | Continue reading
How to properly peel a pomegranate Pomegranates are delicious, but can be tricky to rip open. In this guide I'll show you how to expose that sweet, sweet flesh and get away with it. Step 1: beat it over then head with a wooden spoon. Keep doing it until blee— uh, leaks. Step 2: R … | Continue reading
My Indie Web list Note 12/10/2023: I am in thr process of revamping my bookmarks and curation. if you came here hoping for a big list of cool sites, you'll want to come back in a couple days. Id say Monday. I have some fun stuff I'm finishing up. For now, most of my lists are dis … | Continue reading
Interesting finds: Design articles I still think about This post is officially my first on my newly designed custom blog (if you don't count the colophon). I figured I should share a few articles that have impacted my approach to design. As I write this, I realize the three artic … | Continue reading
This event was shot on iPhone and edited on Mac Just finished watching Apple's Scary Fast Event[^1]. Cook & Co. announced a new MacBook Pro, updated iMac, and the M3 chip family (M3, Pro, Ultra). Pretty standard stuff, if not a little light on substance. I'm not complaining. They … | Continue reading
Design & art There's a fundamental misunderstanding of what design sets to accomplish. Scrolling design-focused forums, you get the sense that design and art are viewed as interchangeable ideologies. We've somehow formed the belief that design, like art, can exist for its own sak … | Continue reading
Meta doesn't hate news, just anything that moves us off the app Meta's vision for social media is a billion lobotomized users engaging with The Hamburglar's new value meal. To realize that vision, the conglomerate is downgrading "news" on its platforms. Link to post here. Instagr … | Continue reading
Interesting finds, October 10, 2023 A few things I stumbled upon last week. No theme. Just some cool stuff. Every Noise Ever wonder what genre an artist belongs to? In an effort to categorize music and personalize playlists, Spotify "invented" a bunch of sub genres. Every Noise l … | Continue reading
I guess I'll just pay til I die? Why I'm switching from Ulysses to iA Writer I'm switching to iA Writer from Ulysses as my primary writing tool. The process has left me with some big feelings about Software as a Service (SaaS), particularly with writing apps. Admittedly, I'm a bi … | Continue reading
Apple is killing the cloud as we know it Hello. A technology novice may know that iCloud syncs their documents across all their devices— iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Someone a little more tech-savvy may understand that the cloud, as a general concept, is also used to offload computing … | Continue reading
Interesting finds, Oct 2, 2023 Things I stumbled upon on the internet last week. I've been into guides and manifestos lately, so here's a few I loved. A credible threat to (and from) commercial social network silos/1 Case against Facebook joining the Fediverse (ActivityPub). I li … | Continue reading
Elon received playbook to kill Twitter From Ben Collins for NBC: Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the 3,000-word anonymous article said, would amount to a “declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire.” The sender of the texts was offering Musk, the Tesla and SpaceX CEO, a … | Continue reading
Mind if I search your car Reuters reporting on Meta's AI chatbot and the dataset the company used to train it: Meta also did not use private chats on its messaging services as training data for the model and took steps to filter private details from public datasets used for train … | Continue reading
When exactly is Email Forgiveness Day? I remember it being April 30th. In fact, I'm sure of it. But, Gimlet Media, the company that produced the podcast where the holiday was invented says Email Forgiveness Day is September 30th. Today. Gimlet is the first on the search results f … | Continue reading
On the old web I stayed up late last night searching for the "old web"— personal homepages, digital gardens, manifestos, guides— the type of stuff FAANG buried under algorithms and shiny interfaces. And boy, did I find some stuff. The old web is alive and, well, its alive at leas … | Continue reading
On digital gardening When I stumbled on the concept of digital gardens, it lit up my brain[1]. It gave me a framework for something I've long tried (and failed) to accomplish with my previous blogs. My failures weren't always related to technical limitations. Though, I see now ho … | Continue reading
Just one more technology bro I promise bro just one more technology and the world will be a better place, bro, for you and for me, bro. From How a startup full of ex-iPhone talent is trying to make phones obsolete: Humane is trying to realize the promise of “ambient computing” — … | Continue reading
He killed something beautiful You know how when you push down on your feed, it refreshes? Twitter's design team invented that feature. They invented it; something so ubiquitous and elegant you don't even think about it. Twitter was one of the first social media companies to brand … | Continue reading