People and blogs involved with and about the IndieWeb community, the fediverse, and/or the open web in general.
Enjoying the reporting from The Verge’s Adi Robertson on the Google antitrust trial, covering potential remedies:
Mehta points out a contradiction: the government wanted to exclude a bunch of other search-engine-like services to establish Google had no meaningful search competitors during the liability trial, and now it wants to add new ones during remedies.
In my conversation with Vladimir Prelovac on yesterday’s episode of Timetable, we also talked about whether a remedy could be sharing the search index with other search engines like Kagi.
In order for principles to truly drive the work and serve as a good framework for the outcomes, they have to be debated, opinionated, and painful.
Yes! Design principles aren’t there to make you feel good; they should provoke arguments.
One of the tests that I’ve developed in thinking through writing down principles, design or otherwise, is to ask the question: “versus what?”.
Engaging with AI as a technology is to play the fool—it’s to observe the reflective surface of the thing without taking note of the way it sends roots deep down into the ground, breaking up bedrock, poisoning the soil, reaching far and wide to capture, uproot, strangle, and steal everything within its reach. It’s to stand aboveground and pontificate about the marvels of this bright new magic, to be dazzled by all its flickering, glittering glory, its smooth mirages and six-fingered messiahs, its apparent obsequiousness in response to all your commands, right up until the point when a sinkhole opens up and swallows you whole.
👏👏👏
Frankly, I’d rather quit my career than live in the future they’re selling. It’s the sheer dystopian drabness of it. Mediocrity as a service.
I tried the tab-completion slot machines; not my cup of tea. I tried image generation and was overcome with literal depression. I don’t want a future as a “prompt artist”.
I’m mostly linking this for what it says, but oh boy, do I love the way it says it with this wonderful HTML web compenent.
A somewhat obscure question about how feed readers should handle content:encoded elements in WordPress feeds.
Good services are verbs.
Bad services are nouns.
AI services are whimsical, opaque or vAPId.
Addressing the elephant in the room: adverts appearing on my blog
I wrote a draft post about billionaires and the open web a couple months ago, and the couple folks I mentioned it too have told me not to post it. Good advice. So instead I’m working on a long blog post about Sam Altman, a topic which can’t be at all controversial. 🤪
Tickets are available to The Talk Show Live from WWDC. No Apple execs as guests this year. John Gruber:
This year I again extended my usual invitation to Apple, but, for the first time since 2015, they declined.
I’m excited about this. It’s good to mix it up and get some different perspectives.
From yesterday, at the Texas State Capitol.
Looked at Threads for the first time in months. I haven’t missed it. I’m glad we have automatic cross-posting to Threads from Micro.blog, but I don’t personally need it and I rarely hear from people who use it. Maybe it works perfectly, or maybe other folks have lost interest in Threads too.
Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed
• Manuel Moreale
Steve Klabnik blogs about how AI views online have become extreme and frustrating to read:
What is breaking my brain a little bit is that all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized. This isn’t a “the middle is always right” sort of thing either, to be clear. It’s more that both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true.
I’ve been following the news of late, and it is particularly depressing. Professionally, one of the things I hate the most is that philosophy of tearing everything down and then figuring out how to rebuild it, instead of coming up with a thoughtful and well researched plan and then slowly and deliberately implementing it. Not even getting into their views on why or what should replace it, the current US administration seems to want to tear everything down instead of coming up with a plan and then carefully executing.
My interview with Kagi founder Vladimir Prelovac is now up! You can listen on the web or subscribe to Timetable wherever you get your podcasts.
Thursday session
