FeedCity

Wow, Wicked. They actually pulled it off. So good. 🧹

ran the Spartan Turkey Trot #5k #race in 44:34 @SpartanTurkey5k!2min/mi+ faster average pace than 2023’s #turkeyTrot walk / slow jog of 47:37 on a shortened course (2.86mi).Arrived early for a warm-up and it was the coldest it’s been in years (30-something F). Alternated run/...

Have been doing a lot of different things lately. 3D printing, organizational stuff, and an unexpected side trip to Ireland for work with an interesting new project to work on there. Makes me fear I’m neglecting my website. So many things I want to do here and with the code that powers it.

Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate the holiday. What am I thankful for? Peloton for one. And living in the most beautiful part of the United States, except for all the other most beautiful parts. I know we're going to find our way out of this mess. My hope is we all sta...

I think Thanksgiving is mostly about belonging. I was raised in a culture other than that of either of my parents or my nationality: what they call a Third Culture Kid. With that sort of profile, belonging is hard to come by. As a child, I sounded British but wasn’t; I didn...

So what are the advantages of the Custom Elements API if you’re not going to use the Shadow DOM alongside it?

1. Obvious Markup
2. Instantiation is More Consistent
3. They’re Progressive Enhancement Friendly

adactio.com/links/21579

We have a fairly large set of Micro.blog changes ready to go live. I want to deploy them now but the wiser me knows middle of Thanksgiving is a bad idea. Perhaps tonight, or I’ll push it until the morning. 🦃

Analogously, Trump is Kennedy and Biden/Harris is Nixon. And the social web is 2024, what TV was in 1960. Trump has mastered the new medium. To a large extent, he created the new medium, and the resulting network formed around him. So when Carville says he wants to figure o...

I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online. If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser. Needless ...

Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

adactio.com/links/21577

Every generation or two you hear about a few tech wiener boys who think after getting founders stock at a Silicon Valley company and getting his picture in Business Week or TechCrunch that he should run Africa or make up some country and for a minute tries doing it and no one pays much attention and a generation or two later it happens again, and the conclusion is that being a tech wiener boy doesn’t really prepare you to do anything but make a bunch of money once, be bored, and really nothing else. First time I witnessed this phenomenon was with a few product marketing wünderbrats at Apple in the early 80s, smart people (not kidding) but not nearly as smart as they thought they were. A big part was the serendipity of being in a Hobee’s or Buck's when Steve Jobs or a Kleiner partner was having breakfast after a big IPO.

There will not be a Black Friday sale for Micro.blog. No better time than right now to sign up and subscribe.

New episode of Core Int just in time to queue up for your Thanksgiving travel. We talk about my short vacation last week, working while away, dealing with bugs, Bluesky growth, and the state of the social web.

I may seem easygoing and agreeable on the surface, don’t mind a little friendly competition, but deep down… I do not like to lose.

Wednesday session

What the heck, Austin? In the last few weeks we’ve now made two full-priced offers on houses and not gotten either one. Sigh. 🏡

[Gita Jackson at Aftermath] I love a good treatise in favor of the indie web: "Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to mak...

Ben Werdmuller writes about the fallout from an attempt to train AI on Bluesky posts:

So the problem Bluesky is dealing with is not so much a problem with Bluesky itself or its architecture, but one that’s inherent to the web itself and the nature of building these training datasets based on publicly-available data.

I also like Tantek Çelik’s proposal to add a “no-training” flavor of Creative Commons. I blogged about that a couple months ago.

I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.

And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.

adactio.com/links/21575

Daniel van Strien, a machine learning librarian at Hugging Face, took a million Bluesky posts and turned them into a dataset expressly for training AI models: “This dataset could be used for “training and testing language models on social media content, analyzing social med...