The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.

If you’re not familiar with the IndieWeb movement, it’s a practical approach to maintaining your presence on the web that emphasizes fully owning your identity and your content. This is especially relevant now, at a time when a growing number of corporations want to own and control those things for you. The IndieWeb ethos seeks to eliminate external influence and control over both you and your stuff.

Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.

LLMs have broken legibility of effort - our ability to tell, at a glance, whether something took a human real work. What happens next?

Standard.site provides a set of lexicons for publishing long-form content on the internet using the same protocol used under the hood by Bluesky.

It's kind of incredible that these days, barely a day goes by that I don't think about AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM, as I'll call it throughout) at some point.

Standard.site provides a set of lexicons for publishing long-form content on the internet using the same protocol used under the hood by Bluesky.

At the moment I am writing this, bad internet bills are being proposed across the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. They're using the usual tactics: they claim they're fighting for kids or fighting security risks, but in general, that's what surveillance and censorship bills have always claimed.

If anyone can build it in a world of generative AI, what, then, are people paying for when they buy software? Why would people buy software?

Let’s review. Token costs are rising. In response, Meta and Amazon have shut down their internal “artificial intelligence” leaderboards; Microsoft has pushed its employees toward Copilot, and away from Claude Code’s rising costs. Uber has already capped its usage of LLMs internally, setting a monthly cap for every employee’s token spending. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the biggest “AI” platforms still borrowing money against hypothetical future returns, and markets are becoming increasingly skittish over America’s big, all-encompassing bet on LLMs. And according to reports from NOTUS and Reuters, major “AI” providers are already having discussions with the United States government, in which they’re laying the groundwork for “too big to fail”-style bailouts.

AI is inher­ently polit­ical tech­nology. If AI works as intended, it will grad­u­ally corrode our liberal democ­racy, risking an irre­versible shift into another polit­ical and economic config­u­ra­tion. Among AI risks, this one deserves more consid­er­a­tion, because it requires no addi­tional condi­tions like malign actors or AI malfunc­tion. AI only needs to amplify existing trends, espe­cially around concen­tra­tion of capital. This damage will occur even assuming that in the near term, AI will broadly improve mate­rial well-being.

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