People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Has anyone ever seen Trump laugh?
Not sure what to make of Sam Altman’s op-ed in The Washington Post. When he writes about model weights and export restrictions, I keep thinking of the Llama 3.1 release this week. Feels like more between the lines that I’m missing.
Checked in at The Empire Music Hall. Lúnasa — with Jessica
Big news for AltStore to be getting Fortnite. Also from Epic, they are pulling Fortnite from Samsung’s store to protest how sideloading is now disabled by default. And in a way, they’ve sort of been protesting the same thing on iOS for the last few years.
Thinking more about Biden’s address last night and his legacy, it’s remarkable how much he accomplished. Investments in infrastructure and climate, progress on guns. All he had to do was get us through the pandemic and clean up a little of Trump’s mess. Feeling optimistic that we can build on this.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
We're at a huge fork in the road. One fork -- goodbye USA, the other way, we're stronger than ever. We're in a good spot because Trump's tank is empty. He's old, tired, fat, addled, fetid, rotten. You have to work really hard not to see that. If it works, Biden will have stabilized the country, and Harris will erect the guardrails that make sure no one follows in Trump's path, and the Supreme Court gets back into its proper place. They've been overthrowing our society, economy and political system. That all has to be reversed before it does too much damage, and prevented in the future. I want to know why the court can't be expanded, and if Harris will put that in her platform.
Biden's speech might turn out to be a Gettysburg type speech. We hope it does. We have a huge fork in the road, one way -- goodbye USA, the other way 00 USA stronger than ever. We're in a good spot because Trump's tank is empty and he's old and tired and fat and very bad. You have to work really hard not to see that.
Software-wise I realized recently that everything that takes me away from creating really nice writing tools is a waste. I have to do it because there are huge holes in the web as a development platform. And every year it gets worse as new incompatible languages are added, new stacks incompatible stacks built. As a result we have to re-do everything all the time, and never get a chance to create any new user experiences. The market fragments, which is exactly what the tech companies want. It keeps their products from becoming commodities. And like it or not, the politicians and corporations don't want us writing too much, they just want us working, donating to their campaigns, paying taxes, buying their crap, and not getting all agitated about the things they don't care about.
I am optimistic that Trump is headed for the graveyard of history, shortly. First time I've felt like this in a long time.
When (if) that happens, we can use Cory Doctorow's excellent concept enshitification to describe what he did to the American political system.
He also stress tested it, and we would be the greatest fools imaginable if we didn't add some seriously enforceable guardrails to prevent this kind of attack happening in the future. Might work out well to have a lawyer in the White House.
I want a Masto-clone that does not do replies. You can't insert anything under my idea, but you can if you like include my idea, as a link, in yours. This model works. I think by now we know the other way does not work. BTW I use the term Masto-clone interchangeably with Twitter-like. Let's spread the love around.
JD goes as a childless cat lady in the krewe Cretins of Trumpland.
Hey Mister throw me a kitten!I almost used enshitification in a post yesterday.
It's weird that JD Vance goes out with the insults before most people have any idea who he is. Instead of childless cat ladies sticking to Kamala, it's sticking to him, which I'm pretty sure wasn't his intent.
Pretty remarkable how the bots on Twitter have become so abusive. Makes the idea of discourse there pretty silly. Might as well turn it into a one-way medium, for all practical purposes that's what it is.
Evan Prodromou in a post on Mastodon:
If you make a Fediverse explainer, try to show some real communities as the nodes in the network, rather than using software packages and their logos. Companies, local governments, universities, families, friend groups, individuals.
I think this is a good approach. Talking about platforms is also effective, though. If Threads could talk to TikTok, people would get that, even if it’s not as distributed as showing communities. Ideally large platforms would be broken down, e.g. not just TikTok but BookTok.
Another afternoon session
Set the presidential address to record while out tonight so we could watch it fully, without all the noise of news and social media. He hit it just right. Moving. “…one day sit behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office as president of the United States. But here I am.” Thank you, Joe Biden. 🇺🇸
