Chris Aldrich
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• Chris Aldrich
People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Bookshelves at Nexus Coffee & Creative in Little Rock. ☕️

Parked at The Root Cafe in Little Rock. Lunch and plotting a change to my route stops so I don’t drive directly into a storm and tornado watch. 🌪️

Here's a prototype of what a story page might look like on our baseline site for WordLand. I did this off on the side as input for the WordPress theme. I find it easier to work on style in a standalone page without much tech that can get in the way of fast iteration.
at Okta

Last night at the hotel, in between basketball, I tuned into some of the Mark Zuckerberg and Satya Nadella conversation at LlamaCon. At one point, Satya said “the web was born on Windows” and it struck me. Digging a little, apparently he has said this before. Hmm… What about NeXT?
at Ride App Pick-up

Codewashing
An Entirely Other Day: The Triumph of Triumphalism
Scratch the skin of wild-eyed AI proponents, and a thick syrup oozes out, made up of the blendered remains of Roko’s Basilisk, barely sublimated Christian end-times thinking, and the mis-remembered plot of that one cool science-fiction story they read when they were twelve. This is the basis for the new order, just like the blockchain was a couple of years ago, and a dead-eyed, low-poly, pantsless rendering of Mark Zuckerberg was a couple of years before that.
“You’re going to be left behind” is only the latest version of “Have fun staying poor.” It’s got every ounce of the smug self-satisfaction that it shouldn’t need if the inevitability it promises were actually inevitable.
Daniel Jalkut blogs about the Help Scout pricing changes. We use Help Scout for Micro.blog too and our costs will go up with this change. Like Daniel, I think the pricing is a mistake. I don’t like costs that are hard to predict.
I was hoping someone would write a post like this one from Andy Masley about AI energy and water use, via Simon Willison. From Andy’s post:
You can use ChatGPT as much as you like without worrying that you’re doing any harm to the planet. Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.
Models are also generally becoming more efficient and cheaper. We shouldn’t ignore the increase in demand for energy, though. It’s an opportunity to reevaluate nuclear and other clean sources of power.
City & State, morning in Memphis. Looks like there’s gonna be bad weather today heading west. ☕️

Dan Moren in his final article for Macworld:
Being a fan of Apple as a company means necessarily grappling with the reality of business itself. Apple is a moneymaking machine in a society built for and around moneymaking machines, and it is in some ways itself trapped in that system.
“AI-first” is the new Return To Office - Anil Dash
anildash.com/2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office/
AI is really good for helping you if you’re bad at something, or at least below average. But it’s probably not the right tool if you’re great at something. So why would these CEOs be saying, almost all using the exact same phrasing, that everyone at their companies should be using these tools? Do the think their employees are all bad at their jobs?
at Portland International Airport (PDX)

at TSA Security Checkpoint B/C

How blogs show their site title
Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
pluralistic.net/2025/04/27/some-animals/#are-more-equal-than-others
The point of AI isn’t to make workers more productive, it’s to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.
Happy anniversary to “the patent that never was”: https://cds.cern.ch/record/1164399/ Thanks, CERN!
Manuel Moreale
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• Manuel Moreale