This shakeup of Siri leadership is surprisingly close to WWDC. Makes me think we won’t see major changes this year, just a refinement of last year’s strategy with Siri and AI.
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html
Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale.
This matches my experience with The Session. In fact, while I had this articl...
Senator Chris Murphy: "How on earth are we going to ask the American people to take risks for us when there's a 5-alarm constitutional fire and we need them to be out on the streets, with hundreds of thousands of people if we're not willing to show courage and take risks ourselves."
Command and control
I’ve been banging on for a while now about how much I’d like a declarative option for the Web Share API. I was thinking that the type attribute on the button element would be a good candidate for this (there’s prior art in the way we extended the type attribute on the input ...
Podcast: We still need universities. 21 minutes.
Using ChatGPT for tech support
If you aren’t sure how to ask for help with software, try first asking ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to help figure out what’s going wrong. It has infinite time to help, and won’t mind if the problem turned out to be a random browser plug-in that was misbehaving.
It often suggests trying things you might not have thought of.
I use it myself esp as often is the case there’s no one who can or is willing to work for me for free. I’m already playing it $20 per month, and for that I get as much time as it takes.
Really good for organizing your approach to a problem.
Had a good run for a few months on uptime until today. I’ve upgraded one of our servers to prevent this particular meltdown from happening again.
We still need universities
Another permanent rant -- about how universities can be reorganized to do more for us, and we need places where lots of people come face to face to learn and build things, but let's go back to school every ten years.
I went to Harvard in 2003 wanting to bring the minds of H...
Bad timing, had a major server failure this morning. Micro.blog is back online and I’m restoring a few things now. 😔
A thread I wrote on Bluesky about how the RSS world, an earlier instance of the writer's web, was overtaken by Twitter and why, which boils down to this -- the reading platforms wouldn't work with each other. So Twitter made subscription one click. And RSS made sites include ...
Really positive reaction to my post about adding European web servers for Micro.blog. Thanks everyone! This is the first step, excited to explore more.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Time to ditch US tech services, says Dutch parliament
[Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register]
In the wake of the French and German governments joining forces to build an alternative to Notion and Google Docs, the Dutch government has passed eight motions to avoid US software and move to a home-grown stack.
""With...
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Vivian Jenna Wilson on Being Elon Musk’s Estranged Daughter, Protecting Trans Youth and Taking on the Right Online
[Ella Yurman in Teen Vogue]
This interview with Musk's daughter Vivian Wilson is everything.
"The Nazi salute sht was insane. Honey, we're going to call a fig a fig, and we're going to call a Nazi salute what it was. That sht was definitely a Nazi salute. T...
I like Jeff Nichols' piece, but I don't agree that the writer's web is blogging. I think it's bigger. Blogging is part of the writer's web. Today's writing network is much more powerful, the software tools are stronger, and new UI standards have evolved. Things like Digital Ocean, Markdown, Font-Awesome and Node.js didn't exist last time we took a serious look at writing on the web. The web with all its features is still here. WordPress has created a strong foundation to build on, at least as good as the social media platforms, but better because it's of the web, with no limits. We've got the beginning of a new platform, one where developers compete to create great writing and reading environments, and we don't need federation because the web takes care of that.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
The war on encryption is dangerous
[Meredith Whittaker in the Financial Times]
A great op-ed from Meredith Whittaker, President of Signal on the ludicrous demands by the British government for Apple to backdoor its encryption:
"Imagine a government telling a car company to secretly weaken th...
Micro.blog adding European servers
Starting today there is a new option for customers who want more flexibility for where their blog is hosted. When Micro.blog publishes your blog, it runs your blog posts through Hugo, creating static HTML files that are hosted outside of the main Micro.blog platform. Those f...
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
Rides. New turban shell.
More tomorrow.
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
Radiohead
It’s so funny that my random re-engagement with Radiohead re-emergence coincides with them doing a new entity that might mean something. I did a poll on Twitter and people preferred OK Computer to Kid A 78%!
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
You’re Not a Criminal, But You’re Going to Jail: My ICE Detention Story as a Canadian Citizen
[Jasmine Mooney]
A nightmare account from a Canadian citizen detained by ICE:
"I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over the...