My family and I went to our neighborhood meeting tonight. It was maybe ~30 people but the mayor of Long Beach came anyway and gave his time to talk to people and answer questions. It was a mostly positive gathering with some hard questions about homelessness and funding cuts for our schools.

In this post, I argue that individual intellectual activity can only be sustained in an intellectual community of other humans. AI dissolves these communities, which in turn makes private intellectual activity rarer.

Many moons ago, I used to post a lot on Twitter about so-called deceptive design/dark patterns that proliferate consumer UIs. There were sites dedicated to these practices and even a spoof by a designer making realistic hostile patterns that were almost eerily realistic.

Millions of Large-Language-Model-generated words have been spilled on craftsmanship in this gilded-age of software development. We now have agents to plan how code will be written, agents to write code, agents to review code, agents to orchestrate and dispatch tasks to other more (or less) capable subagents (these heavily subsidized tokens aren’t going to pay for themselves).

Seasons are changing for technologists, and the industry we work in isn't the same as it was a decade ago. We have new realities and new responsibilities to accept.

I went offline. It wasn't so much a choice at first. I spent much of the summer on the road, which meant that getting online was nearly always a struggle, and so when I didn't have to, I stayed off. And when I did get on—I was working my remote job doing book research—doing work was the focus. I didn't fall prey to the usual distractions of endless scrolling on Instagram and Bluesky, because when weighed against the effort to get and stay online, it didn't seem worth it.

Having the umpteenth argument with someone about em dashes (as usual, they equated em dashes with A.I.; as usual, I bristled) and reading ploum’s lovely Soyez humains, communiquez ! (Be human, communicate!) inspired me to articulate something about the way I write.

In a personal blog post, Baldur Bjarnason describes how he worked in various fields and positions: as an author, publisher, consultant, developer, educator, as well as radio and TV producer. None of these jobs were economically viable in the long term.

Not many people know that the word 'nice' comes from the Latin 'nescius,' meaning 'unaware.' Words don't necessarily mean the same thing they did originally, but somehow, I think that is a little bit of what it is to be nice. You pull your own opinion back – to make space for other people.

A URL is a technical thing: a hostname, a path, a port, an origin, some query parameters, etc.

One day last week, I updated Visual Studio Code. Anecdotally it feels like it asks for updates twice a week now. I’m sure that’s not true, but I feel overwhelmed by app update requests in this vibe-coded world we live in now. A couple of recent updates have really annoyed me.

I’ve been doing more front-end coding this year than I have in a while and every time I come back to write markup and CSS, it feels like there are new tricks. We’re closing in on the 30th anniversary of CSS (already a little past 30 years since Håkon Wium Lie proposed it) and it still feels like actual magic.

There have been various blog posts and social media posts in the last couple of years about people rejecting streaming services and going back to buying music, listening on handheld devices that - gasp - aren't phones. Vinyl's bigger than it's been for years. Multiple colleagues have shown me their CD collections - even cassettes have made a comeback, which makes me wish I still had the incredible glow-in-the-dark Sony Beans walkman I had as a child. I like that some people catalogue their music online, like Hidde and Andy, though I'm not sure I want to broadcast some of the garbage I listen to, or reveal quite how many times I've listened to the K-Pop Demon Hunters Soundtrack (which is a reason I don't use Last.FM any more).

I am building a website, for work. It feels like a radical act these days. I am not using an LLM, I am coding with my own hands, wading through documentation, tinkering, reverse engineering, console logging my way to understanding. Learning new skills, refusing to hand them off to an unthinking machine.

'Alt-text' is short for alternative text, and is used to convey the substance of visual content as text. It is important for people with visual disabilities, though is beneficial for a wide range of people. It is useful for low-speed connections where an image might not load, for searching for an image, for SEO/AIO/GEO, for cases where a link to an image is broken, for understanding context, and for a variety of other gains.

A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.

After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software I’m back to coding in Sublime Text.

Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data to third parties before you even see a consent prompt. This data is in tandem bought, sold, and aggregated by brokers. It has been used to out individuals, track immigrants, and enable prosecution over reproductive healthcare.

I’ve had the pleasure in my career of sitting in tons of different board rooms talking with executives and getting a rundown on different charts and graphs they care most deeply about. As expected, “number chart go up” is always the desired outcome. Number chart go up is good because it makes other number charts go up, specifically stock ticker number.

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.