People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The NSA's "Big Delete"
[Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby in Popular Information]
The removal of banned terms on both internal and external government websites is going more stupidly than one might have expected:
"One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland ...
It's past time to wake up
At some point soon we’re going to have to stop business as usual. Remember when we realized Covid was deadly and we’d have to radically change our lives to survive? Most of us did that. We’re going to do that soon re the overthrow of our government and looting of the economy.
It was remarkable watching the SuperBowl last night, you could conclude everything is normal. It’s not. We’re going to have to start shutting down all the services we can to make the point to our fellow citizens that we, the United States, are not coming back from this without major change.
Musk roots the world economy
First, that's just a theory, but I need to get your attention.
Rooting a computer means you own it. You have superuser powers. You can do anything, install or uninstall anything.
Mostly journalism has been reporting "He has our social security numbers." Sigh. That's not nea...
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
If MSN comments reveal the soul of America, we're done
For a while now, I’ve been syndicating my posts to MSN. You can see Werd I/O’s profile over there. In some ways, this is my normiest network: whereas my Mastodon community is more technical, my Bluesky community is more political and my newsletter subscribers tend to be a mi...
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’
[Iker Seisdedos interviewing Judith Butler in EL PAÍS English]
Judith Butler is as on-point as ever:
"Q. It wasn’t just Trumpism. Some Democratic voices say it’s time to move beyond the issue of trans rights in areas like sports, which affect very few peopl...
I didn’t end up watching the Super Bowl. I used the afternoon to unpack boxes and other tasks leftover from moving. But I did really like this ChatGPT ad. It has a little whimsy reminiscent of some Apple ads, while still uniquely its own thing.
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
Ed Catmull on Change
I’ve been really enjoying the book Creativity Inc by Ed Catmull of Pixar, it was recommended to me by my colleague Dave Martin a while back and I finally got around to it. There’s an interesting story in it where George Lucas has asked him to develop a film editing system that was digital. While … Continue reading Ed Catmull on Change →
Untitled
📗 Want to read Relationality: How Moving from Transactional to Transformational Relationships Can Reshape Our Lonely World by David Jay ISBN: 9798889840541
Blue sky writer
The word "blue" as written by a sky writer.This is heavy
We need a word for this, like a spoiler alert, this is heavy, and if you're not in the mood, hit the Back button.
I listened to this week's On The Media podcast, and there's a segment (at [12:51]) you should listen to as background. It says that no one in the DoJ as we go f...
Sunday morning session
Sunday morning session
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
USAID’s reproductive health spending has saved millions of lives. Now it’s gone.
[Jessica Kutz at The 19th]
USAID's defunding will lead directly to women's deaths:
"As of 2023, 67 percent of contraceptives supplied through USAID went to Africa, where some of the leading causes of death for girls and women are related to pregnancy and sex...
Hope folks are having a good weekend. I rolled out a few changes this morning, including this “New Post…” menu option on the Uploads page. Surprised we never had this before.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Donald Trump’s Immigration Executive Orders: Tracking the Most Impactful Changes
[Mica Rosenberg, Perla Trevizo, and Zisiga Mukulu in ProPublica, co-published with The Texas Tribune]
This is a beautifully-designed co-production between ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, illustrating the immigration policies that Donald Trump enacted on da...
Taking RWD To The Extreme — Smashing Magazine
I missed the memo for the outside space at this coffee shop… There are like 20 little kids and families running around here. Not a distraction, just makes me smile remembering how good life was with little kids. The bittersweet irony with parenting is not knowing until years later what you had.
BTW, being in my blogroll means that your posts have a chance of being included in my Little Feed Reader on Bluesky.
I subscribed to Wired because of their famous coverage of the Musk Coup, so I also added its feed to my blogroll so I could see what I bought, and was actually not surprised that they've been hit by the same disease all online publishing has, the need to bait the clicks, and of course not very much of it is hard-hitting.
I'm still fixing bugs in the new Bluesky feature I wrote about yesterday. If the URL of an image has search args, I wasn't getting the type correct and Bluesky rejected it. I used a post about Aaron Swartz's statue unveiled in San Francisco yesterday to test the fix. I knew Aaron of course, he was part of the group developing RSS in the early 00s. He went on to do other things, as did I, and I met up with him again in NYC in the early teens, and then a few months or a year or two (I don't have the exact date of the meetup) he commited suicide. It was a real shock. Now, many years later -- a statue. And the random snarky slogan my test script picked out was really appropriate to the event. It was a tragedy, because an older more confident Aaron would have made a big contribution. I often think about that.