People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Really strong intro for Tim Walz with the speeches in Pennsylvania today. I’m so impressed with how well Kamala Harris and her campaign have kicked things off. Clear message, but also they are having fun and it’s contagious. 🇺🇸
Love a blog post that starts with a history lesson. Ben Thompson writes about antitrust and the case against Google search. If the cash to Apple goes away, I think Apple will be better off. Just focus on what’s right for users and let search competition happen naturally. But Mozilla will be hurt badly.
We put together a very short survey this week to get some feedback about parts of Micro.blog. If you use Micro.blog, would love your input. Thanks everyone who has already filled it out!
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
It's not partisanship when democracy is at stake
Roadmap for the campaign
Walz is Harris' choice. Picking Shapiro would have been leading with her chin because of Netanyahu. Walz looks older than her but they're actually the same age. And he figured out the right word to get under Trump's skin, so there's that. He just has to say weird in campaign speeches to bring down the house.
Kamala Harris picks Tim Walz. I’m a little surprised, Josh Shapiro seemed like a great choice. I noticed some social posts against Shapiro lately and think that negativity was overblown. But the choice was made, so here we go. 🇺🇸
I’ve enjoyed this season of House of the Dragon but the finale was mostly setup for next season. It all feels dragged out, and there is essentially only one character worth rooting for. Glad they are officially wrapping the show after season 4.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
A re-introduction for Blaugust
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Judge rules that Google ‘is a monopolist’ in US antitrust case
When reporting massacres, imho we should cite the number of people who were shot. It measures of how much violence there was, and how excessive the gun tech used. Many who were injured but not killed have their lives ruined. Their suffering can go for decades.
If you want to keep up on political news, esp at a time when so much is happening so quickly, the best resource I have at this time is the politics tab on news.scripting.com. Here's a screen shot.
AI hallucinations just reinforce that humans should always be involved. Today, AI switched to Python syntax in the middle of JavaScript. Oops! A human would never make that mistake, right? Except that I have definitely typed the wrong language when my brain hadn’t completely switched contexts yet.
I hit a brick wall with some tricky JavaScript and contenteditable HTML. Decided to start over and lean on ChatGPT more. My new workflow: describe the overall problem to AI to get started, test the results, tweak the JS manually to fix problems, then tell AI about my tweaks and continue to iterate.
Did some boring but necessary sys admin work over the weekend. Plugging more holes so dumb problems don’t trip up the servers.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The significance of Bluesky and decentralized social media
Using Micro.blog? Take 30 seconds to fill out this quick survey. I’ve been thinking about the future and this will help inform where we go. forms.gle/PrwkBbsQ1…
The Gods of Logic, by Benjamín Labatut
harpers.org/archive/2024/07/the-gods-of-logic-benjamin-labatut-ai/
Benjamín Labatut draws a line from the Vedas to George Boole and Claude Shannon onward to Geoffrey Hinton and Frank Herbert’s Butlerian Jihad.
In the coming years, as people armed with AI continue making the world faster, stranger, and more chaotic, we should do all we can to prevent these systems from giving more and more power to the few who can build them.
A new path for Privacy Sandbox on the web
This is disgusting, if unsurprising: Google aren’t going to deprecate third-party cookies after all.
Make no mistake, Chrome is not a user agent. It is an agent for the behavioural advertising industry.