Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
Facing the Looming Threat of A.I., Publishers Turn to Decentralized Platforms
So many great lines in this piece by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic:
By the numbers, the tariffs are less an expression of economic theory and more a Dadaist art piece about the meaninglessness of expertise.
Journalists still sanewashing
We're doing some research into the origins of my family in Germany, learning a lot.
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
Game: Name that naked typewriter
Thursday session
Thursday session
Who knew Bill Gates was such a good blogger? Love this story of Altair BASIC in a quirky, unique design with animating text.
Apple stock getting destroyed today. I feel for small investors who are caught up in this. But also maybe a lesson for Tim Cook and his $1 million donation to the inauguration.
Trump is reckless. You might think you’ll benefit by supporting him, but really you’re just empowering him.
Micro.blog 3.4.5 for Mac
Today’s update to the Mac app addresses a few things related to managing uploads. It’s now easier to upload a new photo, or start a new post from an already-uploaded photo.
These screenshots highlight a couple of the new items:
There are also some bug fixes and little improvements that make using the app nicer.
Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed
• Manuel Moreale
Online counterculture
Had a dream where one of my notebooks had special AI pages. I could write questions on them with ink and answers would appear. Too much ChatGPT on the brain. Also, the future will be just as much The Diamond Age as it will be Her.
Haven’t had coffee or left the house in a couple days after being sick, and those are two of my favorite things to do. Finally outdoors again. The gloomy weather isn’t helping… Need some sun.
You can use the light-dark function in your :root CSS variables
Sorting HTML lists with an atoz helper class
Chris Aldrich
• Chris Aldrich
Ben Werdmuller
• Ben Werdmuller
How to leak to a journalist
Wednesday session
Wednesday session
The latest update to Micro Social adds location check-ins for Micro.blog. Very interesting! There’s so much potential here that we haven’t had time to follow through on, so great to see another app pick up the slack.
Poisoning Well: HeydonWorks
Heydon is employing a different tactic to what I’m doing to sabotage large language model crawlers. These bots don’t respect the nofollow rel value …so now they pay the price.
Raising my own middle finger to LLM manufacturers will achieve little on its own. If doing this even works at all. But if lots of writers put something similar in place, I wonder what the effect would be. Maybe we would start seeing more—and more obvious—gibberish emerging in generative AI output. Perhaps LLM owners would start to think twice about disrespecting the
nofollowprotocol.

