People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
My niece sent me a self-portrait, which I liked very much.
So I tried an experiment. I pasted her self-portrait and my head shot of myself and asked ChatGPT to render my photo in the style of her art.
ChatGPT renders my headshot in a familiar style. Yair Rosenberg writing at The Atlantic about the arson at the Pennsylvania governor’s residence. The suspect was struggling with his mental health and influenced by attempts to vilify Josh Shapiro over the war in Gaza:
But those struggling with internal demons don’t originate our external ones; they reflect them. In their confusion and pain, such individuals latch on to those already targeted by the broader culture and its preexisting pathologies, showing us not who they are, but who we are.
“You gotta do what you gotta do.”
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
"Dave's not here."
Let’s go back to a website!
In which I answer questions about blogging.
I’ve put a copy of this on my own site too.
An interview about my blog, originally published on the website People and Blogs in April 2025.
Werd I/O
• Ben Werdmuller
I installed the door code keypads today! It took so long before we were ready to install them that UniFi launched a new version that I bought instead, so the back plate is the wrong size. It matched the tall skinny UniFi readers so well, but I like this keypad better so here we are.
Marvel: Avengers Endgame is the most ambitious crossover event in history.
Adrian Tchaikovsky: Hold my beer. Literally.
I keep coming back to this -- ChatGPT is a vast library that comes with its own librarian. And the librarian has read and digested all of it, and can give you useful and usually exactly right summaries (despite what the critics say) in an instant. I've been using libraries my whole life, going back to when I was a child. I worked with card catalogs and non-virtual book collections. Archives of news on film. View ChatGPT on that timeline and you'll see its significance. You didn't write it, I didn't. Each of us may have contributed a little, and isn't that what we want? To help build the base of human knowledge? It gives our lives meaning. Sometimes I wonder how much value people place on themselves and so little on progress. I think we all want our lives to have meaning. Well here you go, it doesn't get more meaningful than this.
I got a US Mail notice to answer a Census form, so being a good American I did. It was a .gov address, and looked like a government form. The initial questions were standard census questions, then they started getting into personal things that I didn't like answering. Then they asked if I was born in the US. That's a really shitty question to ask now. I was glad to see that I could just click Next without answering any question, and they got worse, more invasive, esp considering who the president is, and who he brought with him, so I just closed the page and wrote this post. I would, if I had it to do over again, not answered any of their questions, or maybe stopped at the standard Census questions from years past.
Werd I/O
• Ben Werdmuller
New laptop sticker, from Vintage bookstore and wine bar. Booksellers not algorithms. 🍷
Thinking about AGI. The big step that is missing is personal AI being able to learn when it answers a question. So if I use deep research and my AI goes off and spends 10 minutes researching an answer, all of that should be fed back into the model for later.
We really have to make a decision about the kitchen backsplash tile now! I got two more sample boxes in this week.
To me, Objective-C has always felt expressive and capable, doubly so when I first started using it.
After Swift became popular, I felt kind of guilty still using Objective-C so heavily, but I’m over it. Micro.blog for Mac is all Objective-C. I did two new releases this week.
