People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Reading Sea Of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.
Reading Sea Of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel.
I've cracked the code for adding OpenGraph data to Bluesky posts. The key was I learned how to do the equivalent of a View Source on a Bluesky post so I could see how others did it. I tried Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, none of them even understood the question of how to get Bluesky to add the data. I was amazed to learn that each developer has to do it for themselves, that this isn't something they built into their server. Anyway, I'm halfway there.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem
[Dan Hon in MIT Technology Review]
The always-brilliant Dan Hon on DOGE:
"We’re seeing in real time that there are no practical technical measures preventing someone from taking a spanner to the technology that keeps our government stable, that keeps society running every day—despite the very real consequences.
So we should plan for the worst, even if the likelihood of the worst is low."
The suggestions that follow - identifying risks, working together, standing up and saying "no" - are all sensible and needed.
[Link]
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
'Reboot' Revealed: Elon Musk's CEO-Dictator Playbook
Another thing to watch while you still can, The Lives of Others, about life in East Germany during the Cold War.
The AI world would have done much better with a president like Biden than we will with Trump. AI is a very potent tool for surveillance. Completely changes the game. And if it were just Trump and not Musk we'd have a chance, but Musk and Thiel fully understand the power, and probably already have all the code written, they just need the database records to scan and now they have all of them. Eventually we'll be talking about the "peaceful uses of AI" as we do about nuclear tech. But just saying that will get you punished.
Love this photo from Stephen Hackett of his notebooks. Also very smart to have digital copies. I’ve scanned some of my old journals in but not all of them. Really want to finish that task because it makes me very nervous to lose the journals.
This is cool: a new sidebar plug-in by Leon Mika for the Bayou theme.
Spots 7-10 for the NBA play-in are shaping up to be very interesting! Spurs look good. Blazers have won their last 9 of 10 games. Warriors and Mavs will both look a little different for the rest of the season. 🏀
I saw a bit on CNN that was like the Dean Scream, an extended clip of how awkward Chuck Schumer is at a rally. It was used to shame a Democrat who was doing a great job of explaining the danger, Sen Murphy of Connecticut. I switched to basketball in disgust, thinking these people, CNN, are not serious. This problem isn't on the Dems, it's on all of us, and it always was. To pin it on the Dems is to say it's hopeless because right now they're just our representatives in Congress and some of our state governments. We have a big problem and we probably can't dig out of it, but if we have any hope at all, orgs like CNN have to stop being such idiots. Every so often I see a spark of brilliance over there, and then one of these things happens. What's more depressing, Trump or CNN? CNN by a lot. And the NYT and all the rest of the broken media. We are all in the same boat.
In January I started an online diary where I list each of the apps I manage, as I work on them. When I work on one, I move it to the top. The notes are brief and to anyone but me might seem cryptic. But at least you can follow what I'm doing. No I don't plan to do an RSS feed for it. It's just a place to keep track of all the things I work on, for people who I work with, and most important, me.
Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed
• Manuel Moreale
P&B: Lou Plummer
I’m the guest on the latest Hanselminutes podcast! It was great talking to Scott. We covered a lot in just half an hour: blogging, domain names, social networks, the fediverse, POSSE, discovery, and the Micro.one launch.
If you're feeling stressed
if you're feeling stressed, hum a few bars of alice's restaurant.
i find it very calming and satisfying.
it's a nice place we can always go home to!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM
just remember --
you can get anything you want
at alice's restaurant!
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The Key Figures Working Alongside Elon Musk at DOGE and in the Trump Administration
So many nails and staples.
Micro.one and Micro.blog onboarding is not very good. And yet new people join every day and start blogging. Welcome! We’ll make it better. Thanks for jumping through the hoops to get here.
Inoreader adds support for Bluesky. This uses the API, not the RSS feeds, so there’s more flexibility in how they can integrate the content:
Bluesky content is displayed in our custom microblog layout, designed for platforms like Bluesky, Facebook, and Micro.blog that don’t follow the traditional headline + content format. It’s a clean, streamlined reading experience we’re sure you’ll love!
Manu Moreale blogs about how we label people, how we define them based on large groups instead of who they are:
The moment you started using these definitions, you lost me. Not because I’m offended by them, but because it saddens me to see the complete annihilation of individuality which is what makes us uniquely interesting. The moment you decide to simply label someone as anything, you prime yourself to be incapable of recognizing that there’s a lot more beneath the surface.
People are complicated. If we oversimplify, we risk only highlighting our differences instead of what connects us.