I was asked if I’m planning to monetize ShareOpenly. Short answer: I have no plans to do so. This is a personal project. If it’s wildly successful and the infrastructure costs skyrocket, I may look for donations or sponsorship of some kind in order to cover those costs. I’m not l … | Continue reading
It’s been a little over a month since I launched ShareOpenly, my simple tool that lets you add a “share to social media” button to your website which is compatible with the fediverse, Bluesky, Threads, and all of today’s crop of social media sites. You might recall that I built i … | Continue reading
Here’s what I would say to Russell T Davies if I could: One of my very first television memories is sitting watching Peter Davison’s Doctor (and reruns of Tom Baker’s) on a tiny 12” TV set, my face probably too close to the screen. My imagination ran wild. There was a large horse … | Continue reading
Mark Nottingham highlighted this alarming quote by CEO Alex Karp from the latest Palantir earnings call: I think the central risk to Palantir and America and the world is a regressive way of thinking that is corrupting and corroding our institutions that calls itself progressive, … | Continue reading
A small web development thing I’d missed until yesterday: When you want a link to open a page in a new tab, you’ve long been able to add the attribute target="_blank" to the tag. The problem was, that actually gave the opened pages rights to their referrer: it opened a security h … | Continue reading
When our son reached nine months old, I published this UsesThis-style list of products and services we were using; I had previously published one before he was born. He’s twenty months old now: walking around and using words. He straddles the worlds between being a baby and a lit … | Continue reading
I’ve been pretty sick for over a week now. Daycare is a Petri dish of germs and viruses, but most have them have passed me by; this one, in contrast, hit me like a ton of bricks. I’ve been the sickest I’ve felt in years: a really unpleasantly deep congestion in my lungs combined … | Continue reading
Happy International Workers' Day to everyone who celebrates! | Continue reading
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
Evan Prodromou asks if we agree with Aristotle that there are three kinds of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. (As Evan points out, he actually defined six, with Polity — government by political organizations — ranked first. Which is what we have. Lucky us.) I’m a … | 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
Tesla made “full self-driving” free for a month. Here’s one owner’s review. Not too far from my own, which I probably should write up. | 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