Train crossing at Cherrywood.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users
[Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users]
An important announcement from Bluesky:
"We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures,...
> Writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life. — Maria Popova, 18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian
Writing is the best means I have of metabolizing my own life.
— Maria Popova, 18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian
The Weather Out There - Long Now
I really liked this short story.
Contrasting headlines on AI
Interesting contrast today in how two newspapers have covered the same story. I cancelled my NYT subscription this year, but I happen to see the news item pop up in my timeline.
The New York Times:
Biden Administration Outlines Government ‘Guardrails’ for A.I. Tools
A natio...
We rolled out a new zoom for photos on the web. Thanks @vincent for working on this! It turned out really well. Here’s a quick demo video.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The web and I
Mathew Ingram has posted some smart reflections inspired by Netscape’s thirtieth birthday:
I don’t think an ancient serf seeing an illustrated manuscript for the first time in the 11th century would have been any more gobsmacked than I was at Netscape. Yes, there were ...
This always feels good!
This always feels good!
Last night from Mattie’s at Green Pastures.
Making the website for Research By The Sea
UX London isn’t the only event from Clearleft coming your way in 2025. There’s a brand new spin-off event dedicated to user research happening in February. It’s called Research By The Sea.
I’m not curating this one, though I will be hosting it. The curation is being carried...
As AI gets better at helping with coding, I think it’s going to feel similar to the productivity boost going from assembly language to Pascal or C. Or maybe from C to Ruby. Development becomes more about orchestrating lots of modules that AI handles the busywork implementation for.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Supernatural Detective's Field Guide
I love this sort of thing:
"Usborne's The Detective’s Handbook and The Guide to the Supernatural captivated my imagination in equal measure. This site is an imagined combination of those books – an engaging thematic prompt for me to overcome the quandary of 'what to draw?'. The order and frequency of new chapters will be random - the intention is to have a bit of fun with it!"
The web needs more whimsy, and this is so incredibly well-executed. (Well, maybe not incredibly - Jon Hicks's work is reliably amazing.)
Absolutely I plugged this into my feed reader so I can follow along. I'm already delighted.
[Link]
I don’t really understand what consistency models are, but nice to see OpenAI sticking to their bizarre lowercase letter naming. 4o, o1, and now sCM.
Back in 1994, I would never have guessed that the computing future 30 years later would still have so many modal dialog boxes.
Jason Fried says version 1 is for you:
v1 is for us. No one else. Others will use it, many will resonate with it, but ultimately, v1 is ours. It’s sacred ground. There’s an eternity to change, tweak, modify, grow, expand, and adjust for everyone else, but there’s only a fixed amount of time to make that perfect version 1 for us.
The only thing I’d add is that sometimes v2 and v3 are just for us too. Micro.blog does a lot of things and the only way it works is that I don’t add features I won’t use myself.
Glass houses, throwing stones, etc. I gripe about ActivityPub’s chattiness but just fixed a bug that caused way too many activities to be sent out for some posts in external feeds, as if they had been edited. Need better tools to peer into the system to see what it’s actually doing.
If only voters understood that government isn't a TV show.
Wednesday session
Wednesday session
Whenever I search for recipes and get back so much search-optimized filler text and ads, explaining the background of every ingredient instead of just showing me the recipe, I want to start my own recipe blog. Today I actually registered a domain for this. Have a recipe to share? I can invite you.
The weakest link in Micro.blog’s server infrastructure remains our two Redis servers, which often get up to the breaking point of memory usage. That blew up today and I just finished restoring it. 48 GB memory is not enough, but I’m hesitant to do another upgrade… Need to trim the bloat instead.