Each year, three people die waiting for Cloudflare and Google to verify they are human.

My concern is that Mozilla is too excited about a technology that has inherent downsides and ethical problems, and I would like to see better defaults and clearer risk mitigations.

We used to think that grieving went through five stages: denial, protest, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We no longer really believe in that theory, but when it comes to dealing with the US, many Europeans are however currently busily negotiating with reality.

“People are less weird than they used to be,” claims psychologist Adam Mastroianni. He describes this as “an epidemic of the mundane.”

Tech talk ahead. Short version: I’ve turned off comments and other minor features to improve site performance here because I think AI bots are hogging things. (Bots are automated programs to scrape data from the internet. Little do they know this is a personal website of no consequence.)

What’s going on, Internet? If a song isn’t available on Spotify or Apple Music, a lot of people these days assume it isn’t an official release. I reckon that idea is wrong.

Yesterday morning, I woke up and checked my news app while still in bed. The headlines from ProPublica, The New York Times, and The Guardian loaded instantly: a curated stream of stories updated overnight. I scrolled through, tapped on a few pieces, then switched over to my podcast app to queue up something for my morning gym session. I queued up three new episodes: one from Search Engine, the first episode of the new ProPublica Narrated podcast, and an episode of Revolution.Social.

Elon Musk’s X platform has blocked the European Commission from making advertisements, presumably in response to the €120 million fine for its misleading verification system and overall lack of transparency. We’re grateful to Elon Musk for proving once again why the world needs to log off corporate-owned, centrally-controlled social media platforms and log on to a better way of being online. The world needs an open social web through the fediverse and Mastodon.

I think I have an idea why we're so extremely divided on AI: it's because we have an intuitive sense of who it stands to benefit, and who stands to pay the costs. I think whether you see reason for optimism has a lot to do with which group you see yourself in.

Hey, dipshit! You know what loads faster than your bloated, overengineered mess? Plain, unadulterated HTML. And you know what doesn't break every motherfucking Tuesday? HTML that just fucking works. Why the fuck are you overcomplicating things, you masochistic fuck? You're out here acting like you're building the next goddamn moon landing when all you need is a button and some text.

Hey, dipshit! You know what loads faster than your bloated, overengineered mess? Plain, unadulterated HTML. And you know what doesn't break every motherfucking Tuesday? HTML that just fucking works. Why the fuck are you overcomplicating things, you masochistic fuck? You're out here acting like you're building the next goddamn moon landing when all you need is a button and some text.

Hey, dipshit! You know what loads faster than your bloated, overengineered mess? Plain, unadulterated HTML. And you know what doesn't break every motherfucking Tuesday? HTML that just fucking works. Why the fuck are you overcomplicating things, you masochistic fuck? You're out here acting like you're building the next goddamn moon landing when all you need is a button and some text.

It’s a common adage amongst us Internet weirdos that you should really have your own website. Your own digital space where you are free to express yourself without being beholden to manipulative algorithms or hostile user experiences. We espouse the virtues of owning your data and breaking free from walled gardens and all that, but I think we often forget that the majority of Internet-users are put off by the massive resistance such things come with.

I’m interviewing fellow Indigenous metalheads at a heavy music festival on the Blackfeet Nation, with Russel Daniels (Diné and Ho-Chunk descent), a photographer who’s not into metal.

I've been trying to write this piece for years, really ever since I finished the first version of Open Source Explained (a v2 will drop early next year). Every time I get started I'm just overwhelmed with paralyzing visions of the commentariat accusing me of WrongThink.

By far the most popular npm package I’ve ever written is blob-util, which is ~10 years old and still gets 5+ million weekly downloads.

Alchemists in medieval times apparently believed it was possible to transmute matter into gold—or, at least, were attempting to find out if it was possible to do so through an early, rudimentary version of what would eventually become chemistry.

Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces.

Music is super important to me and has been for as long as I can remember. I grew up "fighting" with my parents for control of the radio on long roadtrips (we didn't exchange blows - "name that tune" was the ring of choice). I raided my dad's library of CDs he'd get sent (he was a youth pastor at the time). I'd exchange mix tapes (on actual cassettes) with my older cousin whenever we saw him. In college napster was a revelation (followed by the attempt to do the right thing with all-of-mp3.com).

It took me by surprise to learn that this post was now a decade old: Last week I decided to leave Spotify. I've been using the service for almost 2 years now, and overall I've really liked it... It's hard to explain why [I'm leaving], but I guess I feel apprehensive about Spotify being in control of how and where I listen to music in ways I haven't been before.

I’ve been thinking about a note from Alex Russell where he says: any time you're running JS on the main thread, you're at risk of being left behind by progress. The zen of web development is to spend a little time in your own code, and instead to glue the big C++/Rust subsystems together, then get out of the bloody way.

“Tabs were great, but we haven’t seen a lot of browser innovation since then.” These are brave words spoken by the CEO of a company that's using Chromium to power their new browser, which, at the time of writing this, they even failed to attribute correctly. I wish I could say I'm shocked, but this is a company led by someone who thinks artists, creators, writers, etc should not be paid for their work.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, released their own browser called Atlas, and it actually is something new: the first browser that actively fights against the web. Let's talk about what that means, and what dangers there are from an anti-web browser made by an AI company — one that probably needs a warning label when you install it.

OpenAI has announced it’s launched a new browser, Atlas, with ChatGPT built in. For those familiar with ARIA, OpenAI outlines what to expect.

Last week, the United States Department of Homeland Security—last seen brutalizing journalists, children, and clergy in the streets of Chicago—joined the Bluesky social internet platform and began, with the White House and other federal agency accounts, trolling and threatening Trump administration political opponents.

I am so tired of hearing about AI. Unfortunately, this is a talk about AI.

I’m trying to figure out how to use generative AI as a designer without feeling like shit. I am fascinated with what it can do, impressed and repulsed by what it makes, and distrustful of its owners. I am deeply ambivalent about it all. The believers demand devotion, the critics demand abstinence, and to see AI as just another technology is to be a heretic twice over.

I was privileged to deliver the opening keynote at this month's FediForum, a conference for people building and supporting the open social web. My talk touched on what's happening now, drew on my experiences building Elgg and Known and investing at Matter Ventures, and gave participants three important questions to ask themselves as they build platforms and serve communities.

Whether I like it or not, the first line of my obituary will probably be that I was the founding editor of Gawker.com, the flagship site of Gawker Media, a sprawling blog network that was put out of business by Peter Thiel and Hulk Hogan in 2016. Nick Denton and I started Gawker in 2002 and I left in late 2003 to go to New York Magazine, so I missed some of Gawker’s greatest hits and biggest misses, but the early ‘00s were what I now think of as the heyday of blogging. (Talking Points Memo was s

The platform era is ending. Rather than build new Twitters and Facebooks, we can create a stuff-posting system that works better for everybody.

I know you’re sick of talking about AI. I am too. This is only a little bit about AI, I promise. Like all my writing about technology, it’s mostly about people.