"Remember! If you only signed up to hear when this feature is available, or you're wondering what ActivityPub even is: This probably is not the newsletter for you. This is a behind-the-scenes, engineering-heavy, somewhat-deranged build log by the team who are working on it." And … | Continue reading

Last week, without warning, my back went “crunch”. I’ve been dealing with what feels like a painful, bruised coccyx ever since. It should heal up within a few weeks, but until then, getting up from a sitting or lying position is really hard, walking has been awkward, and I haven’ … | Continue reading

“Tweet: Thrilled to have represented [VC firm] in our work with [company]. Huge outcome!” "Translation: A partner we fired actually did the deal, and no one serviced it well until it was clear it was going to be a homerun. Then we all fought over it and rewrote history in a ‘cong … | Continue reading

Purely hypothetically, I wonder what it would take to raise enough money to build another first-class fediverse platform for the mass market. Not because there’s anything wrong with Mastodon (or Threads or Flipboard), but I think the fediverse would be healthier with another big … | Continue reading

I grew up in Britain, but I was able to be there because of my European citizenship. When I moved to the US it was because my mother was terminally ill; I’d always assumed that I would go back. When the Brexit vote happened, I took it extremely personally: in lots of ways, the Br … | Continue reading

"The pervasive nature of modern technology makes surveillance easier than ever before, while each successive generation of the public is accustomed to the privacy status quo of their youth." The key, as Bruce Schneier argues here, is not to compare with our own baselines, but to … | Continue reading

This is a lovely piece about Tony Stubblebine, who, as it rightly says, is doing an excellent job as the new CEO of Medium. "Under Stubblebine’s direction, Medium, a site known for its many pivots, is finally being strategic about what it wants and where it’s headed. Last year, i … | Continue reading

Eric Yuan has a really bizarre vision of what the future should look like: "Today for this session, ideally, I do not need to join. I can send a digital version of myself to join so I can go to the beach. Or I do not need to check my emails; the digital version of myself can read … | Continue reading

One of my biggest regrets is how the Known hosted service declined. The paid subscriptions came to an end, and eventually the hosting whimpered out. Behind the scenes, the database cluster was in need of more maintenance than I was able to provide. Known itself has required more … | Continue reading

"The nation, fractured by war, disease, and famine, has seen more than 6 million people die since the mid-1990s, making the conflict the deadliest since World War II. But, in recent years, the death and destruction have been aided by the growing number of electric vehicles hummin … | Continue reading

I shared this with my team and one of them said they had to check that I didn't write it. This is exactly how I think about (and ask my team to think about) rooting software development in human needs. "All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user … | Continue reading

I don’t think it’s possible to morally support the ongoing bombardment of Gaza, but that’s too weak a statement. What’s happening there seems to be — based on what I’ve read through the news, what I’ve seen in video, the stories that have been sent back to us — an atrocity. The l … | Continue reading

On answering programming questions: "We found that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers contain misinformation, 77 percent of the answers are more verbose than human answers, and 78 percent of the answers suffer from different degrees of inconsistency to human answers." To be fair, I do … | Continue reading

"At least two digital media companies are exploring the fediverse as a way to take more control over their referral traffic and onsite audience engagement." The Verge and 404 Media will both support ActivityPub (a protocol, not a "plugin", as the article calls it) and plug into t … | Continue reading

"It’s simply too early to get into bed with the companies that trained their models on professional content without permission and have no compelling case for how they will help build the news business." This piece ends on the most important point: nobody is coming to save the ne … | Continue reading

Without serious intervention, newsrooms are going to disappear. Changes to social media and the advent of generative AI threaten their businesses and the impact of their work. They need to own their online presences outright and build direct relationships with their communities—a … | Continue reading

"The various decentralized social media systems that have been growing over the past few years offer a very different potential approach: one in which you get to build the experience you want, rather than the one a giant company wants." There's a chicken and egg problem here: whi … | Continue reading

"I want the IndieWeb to be a viable alternative to social media, gradually widening the audience beyond tech-savvy folks by making the tools easier to use and more reliable." This is what we were trying for with Known: something that felt social but was fully under the user's con … | Continue reading

A lovely blog post by Jon Hicks on his process for creating the ShareOpenly icon. Characteristically, lots of care and attention went into this. I'm really glad you get to see the open hand icons, which we eventually decided against, but feel really warm and human. Jon's amazing, … | Continue reading

"Taken together, our findings imply that return to office mandates can imply significant human capital costs in terms of output, productivity, innovation, and competitiveness for the companies that implement them." There's no doubt that there's a lot of value in being in the same … | Continue reading

"A quarter-century into its existence, a company that once proudly served as an entry point to a web that it nourished with traffic and advertising revenue has begun to abstract that all away into an input for its large language models." This has the potential to be a disaster fo … | Continue reading

"When Courtney Gore ran for a seat on her local school board in 2021, she warned about a movement to indoctrinate children with “leftist” ideology. After 2 1/2 years on the board, Gore said she believes a much different scheme is unfolding: an effort by wealthy conservative donor … | Continue reading

SEPTA - the South Eastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority — trains are covered with these ads for the Philadelphia Inquirer: I’m curious to know if they actually work. They feel very negative to me: a pot-shot at the New York Times rather than an argument for why the Inquir … | Continue reading

I recently wrote a short aside about stock options: But in general, for regular employees, I think options are rarely worth it. They typically require an up-front investment that many employees simply can’t make, so it’s a bit of a fake benefit to begin with, and their future val … | Continue reading