Last week, the Safari team formally expressed their opposition to the WebMCP API. In Safari’s explanation of why they oppose WebMCP, they captured something I’ve been trying to articulate.

I’m often asked to edit friends’ or coworkers’ writing, anything from emails to short stories to documentation. Recently, someone asked me how I edit. What am I looking for? How do I know what changes to make? That made me stop and think about what I’ve been doing semi-instinctually.

The current gold rush in civic tech is around HR1 work requirements implementation. Vendors are pitching states on systems to help them comply with the new federal mandates. The pitch sounds like operational efficiency, reducing burden on caseworkers, helping eligible people stay on benefits through the new verification gauntlet. What’s being built is administrative burden as a service.

There are about a thousand and one debates about the ecology of AI, the ethics of AI, the governance of AI. As the technology advances, the debate with the slipperiest footing is on the actual efficacy of AI: does this work for this application? Or for this one? Ultimately, whether LLMs “work” as a technology or not doesn’t matter. The function of a system is its output, and no matter what utility individuals find in the tech, the widespread adoption and deployment should be considered and regarded firstly as a threat to the labor force.

The determination to move away from the addictive doom-scrolling of social media has given me pause, given me space to look around at how I use the internet and figure out where I get most value and where I WANT to get it from.

It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes.

This is a story about music, backups, nostalgia and, I guess, the iPod touch.

I encountered a proposition that original form and style are the aspects of writing that an LLM cannot mimic, thus human writers may start innovating on form as a way to compete in an oversaturated writing market (and demonstrate their humanity).

In Yesterday’s IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. (See longer description on their website.) TL;DR: They are pushing Search more into the “here’s your processed answer” direction that “AI Overviews” have established (you know, those AI snippets in current Search that are wrong about 10% of the time). So they are mostly giving up on the paradigm of providing links to information.

When I was living in the UK, one of the more common responses people had to me being Icelandic – beyond the strangely common “I hate Björk” refrain – was some comment about Vikings or Norse mythology.

I can relate to the original meaning of this old term that means to be good citizen of the internet.

L cleaned out her childhood email account a few weeks ago and forwarded me something I wrote to her in 2013. It's a masterlist of curated links from across the internet that I created and sent to a list of my friends at age 11. In spirit it is nearly identical to the types of link round-ups and blogrolls I see all over the internet these days, my own blog included.

I'm at a birthday party, and while most people here also work in tech, there's always a Guy with a Real Job. You know, a physical job, building some or other thing people need. And this Guy always asks some variant of the same question: aren't you worried AI is taking your job? I glance around and see a few faces turning around toward us, rolling their eyes ever so slightly before returning to their previous conversation. Yes, this question again.

The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.

Following the 2017 inauguration of Mr “grab ’em by the pussy” the world was treated to a deluge of alternative facts. Few were prepared for the new era of “you can just say things”. The rule books were torn to shreds. Whilst liberals were angsting over decorum, the techno-fascists were rising up. When America decided for a second time that a pedo-in-chief was preferable to a woman, all pretence fell away.

Tommy Robinson tweets an image of soldiers walking into the ocean on D-Day. Britain First’s co-leader produces imagery of Muslim men laughing at sad white girls on public transport. An AI-generated song combining kitsch schlager pop with crude racial stereotypes makes it into the German top fifty and becomes number three on Spotify’s global viral chart. Benjamin Netanyahu conjures a vision of an ethnically-cleansed Gaza connected by bullet train to the equally ephemeral Neom. Keir Starmer’s Labo

When the people of Monterey Park found that their local government was going to approve a 250,000-square-foot data center just 500 feet from their homes, they organized.

My dear friend sighs, slides her phone across the table between us so that it’s just beyond her reach, and insists that she wants to fall in love the old-fashioned way. She has said this many times within the past year—at parties, at group dinners, at a nearly pitch-black dive bar in Brooklyn while a singer performed a serviceable cover of “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” which slotted seamlessly into our own feelings of loneliness and longing. My dear friend is saying it again today, over a lunch

The number of screenshots of Claude conversations is going up in my life and it’s beginning to have an impact on my general mood. Most of the time it’s well-intended; coworkers working through a problem with a chatbot before bothering me or someone exploring unconventional ideas before bringing it to a broader audience. Both of those situations seem considerate. A tool for thought, as it were.

On July 8, 1989, a young music fan named Aadam Jacobs, with a compact Sony cassette recorder in his pocket, went to see an up-and-coming rock band from Washington for their debut show in Chicago.

As someone who prefers using services via their websites, I’ve gotten terribly jaded lately. Almost everyone wants me, and by extension, you, to use their darn apps to consume content and off their web versions.

TL;DR: Armed with new powers to rein in the worst excesses of mobile's duopolists, antitrust bodies around the world are struggling to find their footing, and an incurious tech press is letting it pass with nary a nod. Browsers are app stores, but that perspective is almost entirely absent from the antitrust conversation.

I just read Anil Dash’s recent piece, Endgame for the Open Web, and I think it is important. He is right to point out that the open web is under pressure from powerful companies which have grown rich by extracting value from open systems and are now increasingly hostile to the norms that made those systems possible in the first place.

Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that.

You must imagine Sam Altman holding a knife to Tim Berners-Lee's throat. It's not a pleasant image. Sir Tim is, rightly, revered as the genial father of the World Wide Web. But, all the signs are pointing to the fact that we might be in endgame for "open" as we've known it on the Internet over the last few decades.

What does it actually mean to build a better web, and what do we owe each other in doing so? A response to the 32-bit Café thread about trust, onboarding, and the distance between knowing something is wrong and doing something about it.

human.json is a lightweight protocol for humans to assert authorship of their site content and vouch for the humanity of others. It uses URL ownership as identity, and trust propagates through a crawlable web of vouches between sites.

The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect of AI is a pretty well documented phenomenon: The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is a cognitive bias describing the tendency of individuals to critically assess media reports in a domain they are knowledgeable about, yet continue to trust reporting in other areas despite recognizing similar potential inaccuracies.

Scroll fade is that oh so wonderful web design experience where elements fade in as they scroll into view. Often with a bit of transform on the Y-axis.