Monday session
Monday session
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Great interview with Dario Amodei on the Hard Fork podcast. About his disappointment at the AI Action Summit conference in Paris:
If you’re a public official, if you’re a leader at a company… People are going to look back, they’re going to look back in 2026 and 2027. […] Be careful what you say. Don’t look like a fool in retrospect. A lot of my thinking is just driven by — aside from just wanting the right outcome — I don’t want to look like a fool. And I think at that conference, some people are going to look like fools.
Dario always seems the most level-headed of all the AI company CEOs.
Sideloading on Android has improved since I last used it. It’s a pretty smooth user experience now, while still warning enough that you’re outside the usual “safe” app install flow. Good balance that we’ve wanted Apple to adopt for a decade.
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
Good morning so far, deployed a few server bug fixes, submitted a new Android release to Google. Lots to do. SXSW coming up toward the end of the week.
Idea for SNL. A special episode of Law and Order where the cops arrest someone for being disrespectful to Trump,. The prosecutors debate among themselves if they have to do this, no one quits, they don't feel good about it but they prosecute, being assured by the District Att...
Untitled
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?!) 🤪
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.