Being nominated once and winning once is great, congrats. But nominated a bunch of times and never winning is worth a lot. Edward Norton: 4 nominations. Ralph Fiennes: 3. Like how LeBron with 10 trips to the NBA finals and “only” 4 championships is still the greatest of all time. (Wait, what?!) 🤪
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
There is nothing like a live performance of Defying Gravity. Even on TV, I still get chills when they nail it. Great way to start the Oscars. 🍿
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Please see Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
It’s Oscars day! I haven’t seen very many of the nominees this year, but of the ones I have, I need to make this recommendation:
Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, nominated for best documentary picture, is brilliant. It’s an under-told part of American history, still highly relevant and ongoing today, told through the lens of its surprising intersection with the jazz musicians of the time. One of those films that I think everyone should see in order to educate themselves. It doesn’t make for a cheerful evening, but it’s all wonderfully done.
It’s available to rent on streaming services right now, and is worth it. If you don’t want to pay to rent, it will hopefully be a part of someone’s streaming library later on.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Warp factor 5, Mr. Sulu
Pro
[Link]
Looking forward to the Oscars tonight. I’ve only seen 4 out of 10 of the best picture nominees — A Complete Unknown, Conclave, Dune 2, and Wicked. Wanted to catch The Brutalist but never got to it. For best animated feature, I like either Flow or The Wild Robot. 🍿
The best revenge is none
Pamela Short: The best revenge is none. Heal yourself, forgive, move on and don't become like those who hurt you.
There's a pragmatic reason for this. I found, when I was young and didn't know better, that getting revenge didn't just hurt the target, it also left me with a d...
Can we like both the open web and AI?
Ben Werdmuller has a good post today about returning to the distributed publishing roots of the web and thinking about how technology should redistribute wealth and power to many people:
It starts with software designed for people rather than for capital. The web once thriv...
Something is wrong with Trump
We can all see it. It is beyond political parties. Beyond ideology. Beyond whether he is corrupt or competent.
David Brooks, on the PBS NewsHour after the Trump and Zelenskyy meeting at the White House:
All my life, I’ve had a certain idea about America. That we’re a flawed...
The web was always about redistribution of power. Let’s bring that back.
Many of us got excited about technology because of the web, and are discovering, latterly, that it was always the web itself — rather than technology as a whole — that we were excited about. The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard.
One America Together, day 2
I tried to get ChatGPT to draw an Amazon ad for the cap. This was the best we came up with, and it's not great. I'd like a model who is more everyday American, but this might help move the idea forward a bit.
One America Together ad. Mike Myers as Elon Musk
Video of Mike Myers doing Elon Musk in last night's SNL cold open.
Myers does Musk almost as well as Musk does Musk.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The web was always about redistribution of power. Let's bring that back.
I’ve seen a lot of this sentiment lately, and can relate:
I miss being excited by technology. I wish I could see a way out of the endless hype cycles that continue to elicit little more than cynicism from me. The version of technology that we’re mostly being sold today...
If I understand correctly, this TechCrunch article is misleading the same way the Bluesky company misleads. There is no benefit to users of either app that they use the same complicated and new structure to communicate, where simpler and established standards would work just as well. There is a way they could make this work. Come up with a plugin architecture and something like an app store, so developers could define new data types, and then we'd really have something. I would probably do an outliner plugin first, then a Markdown plugin.
Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.
Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes
simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/2/hallucinations-in-code/#atom-everything
The moment you run LLM generated code, any hallucinated methods will be instantly obvious: you’ll get an error. You can fix that yourself or you can feed the error back into the LLM and watch it correct itself.
Compare this to hallucinations in regular prose, where you need a critical eye, strong intuitions and well developed fact checking skills to avoid sharing information that’s incorrect and directly harmful to your reputation.
With code you get a powerful form of fact checking for free. Run the code, see if it works.
Watched Away We Go and really enjoyed it. Totally missed this when it first came out in 2009. 📺
What happened in the Oval Office yesterday was as horror-inspiring as the riot in the Capitol on 1/6/2021.
My America is still a democracy and still part of the western world. A pretty great country, far from perfect, but my home. It's rich in all kinds of things, including money. We made a mistake in electing the person we did. Can we admit that and start fixing the mistake now? If not now, when?
GPT-4.5 preview thoughts… and Steve Jobs
OpenAI released GPT-4.5 this week to Pro subscribers and via the API, but it’s not what I was expecting. It is much more expensive, about 15-30 times the cost of GPT-4o. For my simple needs, like figuring out the keywords in a photo or summarizing a web page, older models ar...
Слава Україні!
Слава Україні!