David is on board. Who else?
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Introducing Plausible Community Edition
[Plausible Analytics]
"We’re real people who have rent to pay and mouths to feed. We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team. If we cannot ...
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
‘It’s about survival’: Athens mayor focuses on getting capital through extreme heat
[Helene Smith at The Guardian]
"Barely six months into the job, the mayor of Athens’s top priority is simple: ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on recor...
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Substack rival Ghost federates its first newsletter
[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]
"Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, mor...
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Rural Republicans Pushing Back Against School Voucher Expansions
[Alec MacGillis at ProPublica]
"Voucher advocates, backed by a handful of billionaire funders, are on the march to bring more red and purple states into the fold for “school choice,” their preferred terminology for vouchers. And again and again, they are run...
Kind of miffed that this evening’s traditional Irish music session in the Jolly Brewer has been cancelled because of the men’s football—I was looking forward to playing some tunes! 😞
Kind of miffed that this evening’s traditional Irish music session in the Jolly Brewer has been cancelled because of the men’s football—I was looking forward to playing some tunes! 😞
Speaking at Peckham Digital
I’ll be presenting a beginner’s guide to the IndieWeb.
Directory enquiries
I was having a discussion with some of my peers a little while back. We were collectively commenting on the state of education and documentation for front-end development.
A lot of the old stalwarts have fallen by the wayside of late. CSS Tricks hasn’t been the same since i...
notizBlog
• Matthias Pfefferle
ein notiz.blog
Ein notiz.Blog,Worte tanzen still im Netz,Gedanken verweilen.
Tuesday session
Tuesday session
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
My technology coaching and consulting in 2024
My availability has opened up for a handful of consulting engagements in addition to my regular work as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica.
I’ve founded two startups (both based on open-source technology communities that I also founded). I’ve been a CTO, led product...
Pop Culture
Despite all of this hype, all of this media attention, all of this incredible investment, the supposed “innovations” don’t even seem capable of replacing the jobs that they’re meant to — not that I think they should, just that I’m tired of being told that this future is inevitable.
The reality is that generative AI isn’t good at replacing jobs, but commoditizing distinct acts of labor, and, in the process, the early creative jobs that help people build portfolios to advance in their industries.
One of the fundamental misunderstandings of the bosses replacing these workers with generative AI is that you are not just asking for a thing, but outsourcing the risk and responsibility.
Generative AI costs far too much, isn’t getting cheaper, uses too much power, and doesn’t do enough to justify its existence.
Does anyone do self-assessments of how they’d quarantine people they share a living space with if they got sick? Doing one of these for family members, sort of like a drill to see how easy it would be to isolate someone. So far, identified several action items.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
What matters
The only goal that really matters is building a stable, informed, democratic, inclusive, equitable, peaceful society where everyone has the opportunity to live a good life. One where we care for our environment, where we champion democracy, science, education, and art, where equality for all is seen as a virtue, where truth is spoken to power, and where nobody can fall through the cracks.
Let's get there together.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
📖 A Psalm for the Wild-Built
[Becky Chambers]
“You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I w...
GET IN THERE LEWIS!
Never mind loveless landslides, England are practicing ponderous progression. Amazing! Unbelievable! How are we still in Euro 2024!? 🏴
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The America I love
I’m a natural-born American citizen but never lived here until my early thirties. I have a complicated relationship with the country: I never thought I’d live here until I suddenly did. As it happened, my parents moved back to look after my grandmother, and ten years later,...
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
📖 Mobility
[Lydia Kiesling]
It took me a long time to get through the first third of this novel. The protagonist is so vapid, her point of view so incurious and at the same time so familiarly American, against a backdrop of obvious imperialism and climate obliviousness...
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Florence
I’ve spent the week in Florence, Oregon, a lovely little town on the coast. It’s a bit windy and a little cold, but as I’m fond of saying, I lived in Scotland for a decade. I can take it.
Frank Herbert came to the town in 1957 to write about the dunes overtaking it. The piece was never published, but it gave him an idea for a novel.
In 1970, a whale washed ashore here, and the Oregon State Highway Division decided to use dynamite to dislodge it. The ensuing events were not quite as planned. If you’ve never seen it, the video is legendary.
Did you know that Dune and the exploding whale beach were the same place? Well, now you do.