I’m paralyzed by the world. We seem to be at a kind of crossroads. There’s so much to be appalled by, so much to be worried about, and I worry that not saying something might be considered to be acquiescence or approval. So, in this moment, I thought I’d actually take a step back … | Continue reading
The requirement for TikTok to relinquish Chinese ownership or face a nationwide ban was signed into law today, as an add-on to a foreign aid bill: But even as ridiculous as it is to tack on a TikTok ban to foreign spending support, Biden had made it clear he supported the TikTok … | Continue reading
I like mail-in ballots because I can do my research as I go, on my own time, in my own environment. To me, it feels a lot closer to giving the process the time and attention it deserves.I filled in my Pennsylvania primary ballot this morning. I’d never been a British voter (I’m n … | Continue reading
So much of what we build on the web is about connecting people. It is impossible to connect people effectively without paying attention to social justice and equity. Otherwise we’re just connecting the privileged with the privileged, creating ever smaller networks of influence, a … | Continue reading
Solidarity with the 28 Google workers who were fired for protesting Project Nimbus this week. Anonymous Google and Amazon workers described the project as follows a couple of years ago: Project Nimbus is a $1.2bn contract to provide cloud services for the Israeli military and gov … | Continue reading
From the OpenJS Foundation: The recent attempted XZ Utils backdoor (CVE-2024-3094) may not be an isolated incident as evidenced by a similar credible takeover attempt intercepted by the OpenJS Foundation, home to JavaScript projects used by billions of websites worldwide. The Ope … | Continue reading
I am convinced that ActivityPub is going to change the entire web. | Continue reading
I decided to give Tesla FSD a second chance today. Aside from the bit where it decided to turn onto an actual municipal train track and use it as a road, it did really well! | Continue reading
The thing about most war commentary on social media is that it's speculative, almost on an entertainment level. Every time, there are people who bear the cost of this, who didn't ask for it, who don't endorse it, and yet will still pay an unimaginable price. It's described as poi … | Continue reading
Any business that depends on third-party APIs that it does not control and is locked into using is not a good business. | Continue reading
I hate writing resumés. There’s always been something about the format that never really sat right with me; each entry presents work I’ve done, sometimes representing many multiple years of my life, without explaining the “why” or the through-line of how I got there. It’s always … | Continue reading
I made some updates to ShareOpenly this weekend: The design now puts the shortlist of social networks you’re most likely to share to at the top. Firefish and Misskey are now supported. There are now instructions for adding “share to” ShareOpenly links to your site. I also added “ … | Continue reading
Footage and stories from Gaza are heart-wrenching. The systematic killing of aid workers is just a small part of the atrocities being committed over there. Hamas is not a force for good in the region but almost all of these people are civilians. There's no way to justify this. Th … | Continue reading
I really hope San Francisco stays an idealistic, progressive city and doesn't succumb to centrism. There are plenty of other places for people who want a city run by those values to live. San Francisco is, and has always been, special. | Continue reading
It’s my mother’s birthday. She would be 72 today. The week we lost her, I wrote this piece, which I re-read today. In it, our friend Anita Hurrell remembered her like this: One time you drove us in the van to the seaside and we ate sandwiches with cucumber in them and I thought t … | Continue reading
A friend asked me to recommend some places to visit in Edinburgh — not the big stuff (Arthur’s Seat, for example), but the small haunts and little delights that I used to love. I lived there for a long time, and think back on the city with a lot of fondness. But I’ve been in the … | Continue reading
I’d love to read about the early days of the Star Trek replicator. It’s a sometimes-useful macguffin in the context of Star Trek: The Next Generation and later shows: a device that can recreate virtually any object on command, from food to electronics. By the time ST:TNG was set, … | Continue reading
I think it would be fun to (co-)organize an East Coast IndieWebCamp this year, mostly because I would like to go to an East Coast IndieWebCamp this year. Perhaps there's scope for an IndieWebCamp NYC in September / October? | Continue reading
Over time I'm becoming more and more enamored with the Derek Sivers mindset to posting on the internet. | Continue reading
One of the disappointments of my adult life has been realizing that I’m way to the left of a lot of people - that things I think are sensible improvements that we need in order to help people have better lives are often seen as out of touch and overly-ideological. | Continue reading
I come from families of forced migrants. On one side, my father’s earliest memories are of the unspeakable horrors he endured in a concentration camp in Indonesia. On the other, my great grandfather’s Ukrainian village was burned down by the White Army as part of a vicious pogrom … | Continue reading
Yesterday I published a fediverse-aware / indieweb-aware version of a "share to..." / AddThis-like tool. It allows you to easily add a “share to ..” button to your website that works with as many social platforms as possible, and attempts to use whatever share intent a platform m … | Continue reading
You know all those “share to Facebook” / “share to Twitter” links you see all over peoples’ websites? They’re all out of date. Social media has evolved over the last year, yet nobody has “share to” links for Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, etc. There have been a few attempts to creat … | Continue reading
Nathan Schneider writes about how he uses screens: The underlying idea for me is that I like to keep a clear desk. In my office, for instance, I keep the desk where I meet with students empty, except for a few intentional symbolic objects on the side. I do this to express to stud … | Continue reading
Proposal: every product vendor must disclose the wages of the people who made it. If you buy a box of chocolate, you get to know how much the people who picked the raw ingredients made, as well as the chocolatiers downstream from them, and so on. If you buy an iPhone, you get to … | Continue reading
Walking around Oxford, my hometown, I used to see Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke from time to time. He always looked miserable. At Boots the Chemist? Miserable. At the Ashmolean Museum? Miserable. Having a picnic with his family? Miserable. Walking down North Parade? Miserable. It … | Continue reading
When you find yourself writing a 3000 word essay about engineering management on your personal website, you might want to take a step back and take another look at your goals. And if you find that this isn’t quite what you want to be talking or writing about, it maybe might be ti … | Continue reading
I’ve spent most of my career — now well over two decades of it — building things on the web. I’ve worked as a software developer, I’ve founded a couple of my own companies, and I’ve often found myself leading teams of engineers. Right now I’m the director for both engineering and … | Continue reading
One thing that becomes clear when you move outside of open web groups and a certain kind of tech company is the difference between trying to build the web as a platform and trying to use the web as a platform. In the former mental model, you’re experimenting to try and figure out … | Continue reading
If AI makes it easier to create generic, middle-of-the-road content, the way forward for human beings is to create content that is out there on the edges, blazing ground that probabilistic algorithms could never possibly reach. Which, honestly, I wish more people would do anyway. … | Continue reading
My posts are syndicated to Microsoft Start as part of the Creator Program. It’s been interesting to see which ones find an audience there and which ones don’t: politics seems to be more interesting to the community there than tech commentary, which stands to reason, as it’s a mor … | Continue reading
While I respect that some people find comfort in tradition and institutions, I can’t agree. Those things are how we maintain the status quo - and there’s so much work to do. | Continue reading
After some to-ing and fro-ing, I finally cracked how using Obsidian is useful. I’d previously been trying to work in the open and update my thoughts for a public website there — but, of course, that’s what my personal site is for! So it didn’t click, because I was already saving … | Continue reading
I’ve been thinking about the risks and ethical issues around AI in the following buckets:Source impacts: the ecosystem impact of generative models on the people who created the information they were trained on. Truth and bias: the tendency of generative models to give the appeara … | Continue reading
Someone I follow posted this weekend about how the progressive wing of the Democratic Party was stupid because it consistently pushed for projects that would require higher taxes. I don’t like the framing, and as a self-identified progressive I’m not particularly excited about be … | Continue reading
I used to have a night-time routine. I would help my mother up the six stairs from the living room to her bedroom, give her a hug, and set her up in bed. Sometimes, if she was feeling particularly weak, I would bring her toothbrush to her with a mug of water, so that she could br … | Continue reading
It’s snowing again. That’s it, I’m moving to Spain. | Continue reading
Confession: I’ve started to find ChatGPT to be useful in my fiction writing. And now, before proceeding, I must very quickly add that I haven’t let it write a word of the story, or come up with any ideas, or engage in any ideation. That’s all me. But writing is lonely, and conven … | Continue reading
Manu Moreale discusses the dual use of the garden metaphor for both walled gardens and digital gardens: It’s interesting how we’re using the same metaphor—the garden—to describe two completely different things. [The walled garden] is the embodiment of the capitalist mindset appli … | Continue reading
Here’s my pitch for a fediverse product for organizations.Think of it as WordPress VIP for the fediverse: a way for organizations to safely build a presence on the fediverse while preserving their brand, keeping their employees safe, and measuring their engagement.We’ve establish … | Continue reading
I write a lot about the intersection of technology and society here, and lately a lot about AI, but over the last year I’ve written a little less about what I’ve been up to. So, this post is an update about some of that. This isn’t everything, by any means — 2023 was, frankly, a … | Continue reading
404 Media reports that Automattic is planning to sell its data to Midjourney and OpenAI for training generative models:The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 … | Continue reading
Hunter Walk writes:The checks being cut to ‘owners’ of training data are creating a huge barrier to entry for challengers. If Google, OpenAI, and other large tech companies can establish a high enough cost, they implicitly prevent future competition. Not very Open.It’s fair to sa … | Continue reading
Breaking the News, the documentary about The 19th, aired on PBS last night and is available to watch for free on YouTube for the next 90 days.It’s both a film about the news industry and about startups: a team’s journey to show that journalism can and should be published with a m … | Continue reading
This weekend I realized that I’m kind of burned out: agitated, stressed about nothing in particular, and peculiarly sleepless. It took a little introspection to figure out what was really going on.Here’s what I finally decided: I really need to pull back from using social media i … | Continue reading
It's kind of impressive to see Ghost become a real open source alternative to WordPress. Many people have said it couldn't be done - but by focusing on a certain kind of independent creator (adjacent to both Medium and Substack), they've done it. It's a pretty amazing feat. | Continue reading
Over on Threads, Amanda Zamora asks:I'm plotting away on Agencia Media and some personal writing/reporting this weekend (over a glass of and many open tabs). One of the things I love most about building something new is the chance to design for intended outcomes — how to structu … | Continue reading
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, by Ursula K. LeGuin:They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there. Some of them understand why, and some do not, but t … | Continue reading