More coverage of the Social Web Foundation has been rolling in. (See my coverage of the announcement over here .) The New Stack : The fediverse has been a critical development in the open web over the past several years, since most of the social media landscape is dominated by ce … | Continue reading
I’m extraordinarily excited about the launch of the Social Web Foundation , which has been created to promote and support the growth of the Fediverse: the interoperable social network powered by the ActivityPub protocol. Users of services on the Fediverse can follow, share, and i … | Continue reading
[Casey Newton at Platformer] This fantastic round-up post focuses on Platformer's decision in January to leave Substack in protest of its content policies that permitted full-throated Nazis to earn money on the platform. With a long-term view, it's been a good strategic move: "We … | Continue reading
[Matthew Hutson at Nature] "Beyond the ability to fine-tune open models for focused applications, Kal’tsit says, another advantage of local models is privacy. Sending personally identifiable data to a commercial service could run foul of data-protection regulations. “If an audit … | Continue reading
[Kyle Orland at ArsTechnica] "Microsoft and Constellation Energy have announced a deal that would re-open Pennsylvania's shuttered Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The agreement would let Microsoft purchase the entirety of the plant's roughly 835 megawatts of energy generation—en … | Continue reading
[Tracy Durnell] "Links — connections between ideas — are the magic system of the Internet. They power the open web, enriching online writing. Generative AI is the parasitic dark magic counterpart to the link." I love Tracy's observation that "online, we think together", which als … | Continue reading
[Chris Metinko at Crunchbase News] "Last year, venture funding to Black-founded U.S. startups cratered — totaling only $699 million and marking the first time since 2016 that the figure failed to even reach $1 billion, Crunchbase data shows." And: "While last year did not see Bla … | Continue reading
[Eva at kibty.town] PSA for anyone who switched to Arc as their main browser (hey, that's me!): it had a giant vulnerability that the team, at the time of writing, doesn't seem to have acknowledged publicly, although it has been patched. Aside from the lack of disclosure, perhaps … | Continue reading
[Federal Trade Commission] "A new Federal Trade Commission staff report that examines the data collection and use practices of major social media and video streaming services shows they engaged in vast surveillance of consumers in order to monetize their personal information whil … | Continue reading
[Jason Koebler at 404 Media] "The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a l … | Continue reading
[Myoung-Gi Chon in The Conversation] "We found a disturbing link between work-related communication outside of regular hours and increased employee burnout. Answering emails after hours was linked to worse productivity, employees badmouthing their employers and other negative beh … | Continue reading
[Matt Mullenweg] "Those of us who are makers, who create the source, need to be wary of those who would take our creations and squeeze out the juice. They’re grifters who will hop onto the next fad, but we’re trying to build something big here, something long term—something that … | Continue reading
[Kavitha Surana at ProPublica] "When the mother of three realized she had unintentionally gotten pregnant in the fall of 2022, Georgia’s new abortion ban gave her no choice. Although it made exceptions for acute, life-threatening emergencies, it didn’t account for chronic conditi … | Continue reading
[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch] "Mozilla is exiting the fediverse. Though the concept of the open social web, also known as the fediverse, has been picking up momentum ever since Meta last year introduced its first-ever federated app, Instagram Threads, Firefox maker Mozilla on Tuesd … | Continue reading
[Simon Willison] "Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos, this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company is a compelling read." It really is fascinating. It's also really badly written, which says a lot about the priorities MrBeast … | Continue reading
[Media Economies Design Lab at University of Colorado Boulder] "The Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is launching a 5-month process of mentorship and peer-to-peer learning, empowering veteran community builders to adopt emerging open social network … | Continue reading
[Matt Burgess at Wired] "Today, a group of six computer scientists are revealing a new attack against Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset where exposed eye-tracking data allowed them to decipher what people entered on the device’s virtual keyboard. The attack, dubbed GAZEplo … | Continue reading
I have an electric car. All in, between car payments and insurance, but exclusive of the money it costs to actually charge it, I spend around $800-850 a month. That’s a ton of money! For all that cash, I must do a lot of driving, right? Absolutely not. I mostly work from home, ta … | Continue reading
It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that I plan to vote for Kamala Harris. Just consider the alternative: who he is, what he stands for, what the world might look like if he gains another four-year term. Last night’s debate performance may have sealed the deal for many voters. … | Continue reading
[David Allen Green at The Law and Policy Blog] "In essence: this endorsement is a masterpiece of practical written advocacy, and many law schools would do well to put it before their students." This is a fascinating breakdown of Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris: not ju … | Continue reading
[Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos at NiemanLab] "To survive, journalism must continue to embrace technology. But doing so should never cost newsrooms their independence. News organizations should prioritise building direct relationships with their audience to reduce reliance on thir … | Continue reading
[Lucas da Costa at Briefer] "Some people call our strategy "open-core" and that's technically right. Still, I'd rather say that we have two pieces of software: one that is open-source and another that is not. I think that's more honest because we're not trying to hide the fact th … | Continue reading
[Hunter Walk] "I asked some investor friends to share, as the title suggests, one thing they wished people better understood about venture capital. There were no ground rules other than to specify that ‘people’ could be founders, politicians, LPs, etc and that it would be default … | Continue reading
[iA] "In a text editor, chapters are files. Organizing your files is work, but in a large text body it’s essential work. Your book or thesis will grow from it and get stronger as you clarify the structure. With iA Writer 7.2, structuring large writing projects has become a lot ea … | Continue reading
What is your ideal place to live? I grew up in Oxford, England, which has radically colored my view of what a home can look like. It’s hardly a city at all — one girlfriend derisively called it “a village” — but sits close enough to London that you can get there in under an hour. … | Continue reading
Yesterday the Internet Archive lost its appeal in the digital lending case it’s been fighting for the last few years. In March 2020, the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, launched a program called the National Emergency Library, or NEL. Library closures caused by … | Continue reading
[Elahe Izadi at The Washington Post] I adore The 19th. It's making big moves, and that's good news for everyone. "What [Emily] Ramshaw and fellow co-founder Amanda Zamora started in January 2020 — a newsroom with just one reporter and no website — has grown into a digital operati … | Continue reading
[Paul Graham] "In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from t … | Continue reading
[Ghost] "It's a simple thing, but it's kind of a big deal. With this milestone, Ghost is for the first time exceeding the functionality of a basic RSS reader. This is 2-way interaction. You publish, and your readers can respond." This is a big step: a Ghost publication puts somet … | Continue reading
[Matt Webb] "The EU may (or may not) be making technology policy missteps, but they are gently and patiently promoting a certain way of life which feels globally very, very special, and fundamentally counter to the hypercapitalism found elsewhere." I love Europe, and this is a la … | Continue reading
[Robin Rendle] Robin Rendle on Sarah Jeong's article about the implications of the Pixel 9's magic photo editor in The Verge: "But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of this product. The … | Continue reading
[Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams] "After years of working with Iraqis whose relatives were killed by U.S. Marines in the 2005 Haditha massacre, American journalists finally obtained and released photos showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage—whose perpetrators never spe … | Continue reading
[Nolen Royalty] "On June 26th 2024, I launched a website called One Million Checkboxes (OMCB). It had one million global checkboxes on it - checking (or unchecking) a box changed it for everyone on the site, instantly." This story gets deeper from here: how he found a community o … | Continue reading
[Aaron Ross Powell] ""First, there’s what I’ve referred to in the past as the “Quillette Effect.” Because we believe our own ideas are correct (or else we wouldn’t believe them), we tend to think that people who share our ideas are correct, as well." This whole piece is worth you … | Continue reading
[Emily Peck at Axios] "70% of Americans said they approved of unions, per Gallup's most recent poll, conducted in August." This represents a giant change in American society: labor unions haven't been this popular since 1967. But at the same time, union membership is at a record … | Continue reading
Some things I’ve learned about me and writing recently: I’m impossibly distractible. It’s a learned behavior: I check all my social networks, take a look at my email, fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes. Writing on the iPad seems to help me a lot. Those things are there too, but the … | Continue reading
[Heather Bryant] Arguing that it's harder to just be a human online, Heather Bryant has published an online participation disclaimer: "The following disclaimer applies to participation in discourse as it relates to my individual experience as a human being in a global online comm … | Continue reading
[tante] Tante responds to Amazon's claim that using its internal AI for coding saved 4500 person years of work: "Amazon wants to present themselves as AI company and platform. So of course their promises of gains are always advertising for their platform and tools. Advertising mi … | Continue reading
[The 19th] "To understand how the anti-trans agenda could reshape all of our lives, The 19th set out to examine how the laws and rhetoric behind it are impacting Americans." My friends at The 19th dive into how the wave of anti-trans legislation and rhetoric is impacting American … | Continue reading
[Ingrid Melander and Guy Faulconbridge at Reuters] "[Telegram founder] Durov, who has dual French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was arrested as part of a preliminary police investigation into allegedly allowing a wide range of crimes due to a lack of moderators on Telegra … | Continue reading
[Martin SFP Bryant at The New Stack] "How do you get started if you want to integrate your own software with ActivityPub? [Evan] Prodromou has written a new book on this very topic, and we caught up with him to explore the practicalities of linking up with the fediverse." I'm con … | Continue reading
[George Hammond at the Financial Times] "Y Combinator, the San Francisco start-up incubator that launched Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe and Coinbase, is backing a weapons company for the first time, entering a sector it has previously shunned." Specifically, its a low-cost cruise missil … | Continue reading
I love hanging out in Reeder. I subscribe to thousands of feeds, and it handles them well for me. But it does make it hard for me to prune them once I’m subscribed. I found myself looking at this screen this afternoon: And I thought to myself: you know what? I don’t need to be su … | Continue reading
This proposed image for the fediverse is good; I like it a lot. But I don't know that the combative language on this site is helpful. The Meta iconography isn't right, I agree, but there's something off about calling them “a large corporation that is joining in as late” (sic). Fo … | Continue reading
[Tara Tarakiyee] "I want to talk about three examples I see of cracks that are starting to form which signal big challenges in the future of OSS." I had a knee-jerk initial reaction to this post - what open source bubble?! - but Tara Tarakiyee makes some important points here abo … | Continue reading
[Andy Jassy on LinkedIn] Andy Jassy on using Amazon Q, the company's generative AI assistant for software development, internally: "The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has sa … | Continue reading
Back in May, I announced Unoffice Hours , inspired by something Matt Webb had established with his community . Anyone could book a 30 minute meeting with me, for any reason, on a Friday. No money, no strings, no expectations. It’s been a wonderful experiment. I’ve met a host of n … | Continue reading
[The 404 Media team] "In the last year, we learned that the technical infrastructure exists now for even non-technical journalists to build a sustainable site that can receive money from subscribers. [...] If you are a journalist reading this thinking about going out on their own … | Continue reading