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Mozilla exits the fediverse and will shutter its Mastodon server in December

[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch]

"Mozilla is exiting the fediverse. Though the concept of the open social web, also known as the fediverse, has been picking up momentum ever since Meta last year introduced its first-ever federated app, Instagram Threads, Firefox maker Mozilla on Tuesday announced it would be ending its experiment in running a server on the fediverse. The server, Mozilla.social, today connects users with the Mastodon social network, an open source rival to Twitter/X. It will be shut down on December 17."

I wish Mozilla had taken a more ambitious approach to the fediverse, rather than running a Mastodon instance for a handful of people. An organization of its size could have prototyped different kinds of social media on the fediverse, or incubated disparate projects running on the protocol. It could even have experimented with adding social functionality directly to Firefox. Instead, precisely none of that happened, and its instance was apparently used by 270 people or so.

Sarah Perez points out that this isn't the only initiative that's been shuttered recently:

"Among those products affected by the pullback were its VPN, Relay, and Online Footprint Scrubber, in addition to its Mastodon instance, the company said at the time. Meanwhile, its virtual world Hubs was shut down."

Mozilla itself has a lot of potential but never seems to quite realize it: it doesn't seem to be very good at building a joined-up product strategy, which has led its existence to become increasingly at risk. The vast majority of its funding (nearly 90%) has come from Google's payments to the organization in exchange for being the default search engine pick - and now that's under threat.

There's a need for a mission-driven organization with Mozilla's values that executes more fearlessly, where product voices hold more weight vs open source engineering discussions. But, right now, I don't think it exists.

[Link]

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HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION (leaked PDF)

[Simon Willison]

"Whether or not you enjoy MrBeast’s format of YouTube videos, this leaked onboarding document for new members of his production company is a compelling read."

It really is fascinating. It's also really badly written, which says a lot about the priorities MrBeast instills in his team. Simon points out that video is ingrained in the culture:

"Which is more important, that one person has a good mental grip of something or that their entire team of 10 people have a good mental grip on something? Obviously the team. And the easiest way to bring your team up to the same page is to freaken video everything and store it where they can constantly reference it. A lot of problems can be solved if we just video sets and ask for videos when ordering things. [...] Since we are on the topic of communication, written communication also does not constitute communication unless they confirm they read it."

MrBeast will be studied for decades to come: a piece of the culture that, like him or not, is genuinely new. This document is a key to understanding what he does.

[Link]

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Open Call: Join the Open Social Incubator | Media Economies Design Lab

[Media Economies Design Lab at University of Colorado Boulder]

"The Media Economies Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder is launching a 5-month process of mentorship and peer-to-peer learning, empowering veteran community builders to adopt emerging open social networks."

This seems like a wonderful initiative for the right people, as well as for new social networks. The incubator covers a broad set of networks that include the fediverse, Matrix, Bluesky, and Nostr.

From the site:

"Participants will meet as a full group monthly and receive ongoing, 1:1 project-specific technical support as they seed and grow new communities using open social media tools of their choosing. Participation is fully remote and all sessions will be conducted in English. All participants should commit to making strides toward community-building in open social media by the end of the program. Completion of the full program, from November 2024 to April 2025, will be compensated with a stipend of $3,500 USD."

No prior experience is needed.

I love that the Media Economies Design Lab is doing this. I'm very curious to see the cohort as it emerges!

[Link]

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Apple Vision Pro’s Eye Tracking Exposed What People Type

[Matt Burgess at Wired]

"Today, a group of six computer scientists are revealing a new attack against Apple’s Vision Pro mixed reality headset where exposed eye-tracking data allowed them to decipher what people entered on the device’s virtual keyboard. The attack, dubbed GAZEploit and shared exclusively with WIRED, allowed the researchers to successfully reconstruct passwords, PINs, and messages people typed with their eyes."

Fascinating stuff. This attack doesn't work with a normal laptop or device because we tend to look at the screen as we type instead of the keys. But on the Apple Vision Pro, your gaze is your pointer. By tracking what you're paying attention to, attackers can understand exactly what you're typing, including sensitive information.

Apple has patched the problem, presumably by making its virtual avatars just a little bit more dead in the eyes. But as more eye-based interfaces roll out, more exploits will surely be discovered. As we reveal more of ourselves in virtual space, more of our secrets become apparent, too.

[Link]

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Reconsidering my car

1 min read

I have an electric car. All in, between car payments and insurance, but exclusive of the money it costs to actually charge it, I spend around $800-850 a month. That’s a ton of money!

For all that cash, I must do a lot of driving, right?

Absolutely not. I mostly work from home, take public transit into the office when I do go in, and I end up probably making eight significant journeys a month (where a “significant journey” is 25 minutes or more of total driving).

Which means each journey costs me around a hundred dollars.

It’s an insane use of funds. It makes zero sense. So I’m looking at selling my car and either switching to a lower cost model (I like driving an EV) or just going without for a while.

If I was commuting for hours a day, or going on frequent road trips, sure. But while the latter was a part of my lifestyle in California, it doesn’t seem to be a thing for me in Pennsylvania. So maybe it’s time to cut.

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Obviously I'm voting for Harris

3 min read

Vote!

It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that I plan to vote for Kamala Harris. Just consider the alternative: who he is, what he stands for, what the world might look like if he gains another four-year term.

Last night’s debate performance may have sealed the deal for many voters. It’s hard to say exactly if this happened, but one sign is that stock in Trump Media plummeted after his debate performance, an indication that traders are spooked about his prospects.

It probably also won’t surprise long-term readers to know that Harris is too close to the American political center for me personally. As someone whose worldview is steeped in European norms, I find the American political center to be right-wing: conservative by anyone else’s standards. So I’d prefer her to be further to the left on a range of issues from fracking to immigration, and particularly on foreign policy, where she’s held what I consider to be an alarmingly militaristic stance (promising “the most lethal fighting force in the world”). I don’t entirely like that she’s a candidate Dick Cheney feels comfortable endorsing.

Still, we must take America as it is, not as we wish it to be. I want to live in an open, inclusive country where I don’t need to worry about my child succumbing to gun violence, where public transit is abundant, with functioning welfare that ensures nobody falls through the cracks, and where everyone has access to healthcare that is free at the point of use. One where its citizens care about the welfare of people from other countries as much as they care for their own neighbors. That America doesn’t exist; I might as well say that I’d like to ride Pegasus or be able to travel through time. All those things are important, but we can only get there incrementally. Harris is obviously the candidate that brings us forwards, not backwards.

Trump is the human embodiment of the dying gasps of the 20th century. He is a window through time to another era. Some people find that comforting, perhaps because they benefitted from the values of that time; others see it as a threat. Some people look back on the 1950s and think of white picket fences and charming Americana; others, myself included, think of segregation, police violence, McCarthyism, and deep-seated bigotry. It depends on your perspective — most specifically, whether you’re a white man or not.

This isn’t a partisan decision. That would involve differences in tax policy, fundamental details in how the country is run. This is a decision about culture, and what we want not just America but the world to be. Do we accept the criminal landlord who refused to rent to Black tenants, was found guilty of sexual assault, and looks up to Viktor Orbán because he is “feared”? Or do we want to be something else?

I know where I stand, and it’s worth making it clear. I’m ready for us to be past this moment in history. I’m done with listening to Trump’s endless lies and bigoted rhetoric. Obviously I’m voting for Harris.

Whoever you support, if you’re an American citizen, you should make a plan to vote in this election too. You can check your voter registration status here.

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How Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris and Walz is a masterpiece of persuasive prose: a songwriter’s practical lesson in written advocacy

[David Allen Green at The Law and Policy Blog]

"In essence: this endorsement is a masterpiece of practical written advocacy, and many law schools would do well to put it before their students."

This is a fascinating breakdown of Taylor Swift's endorsement of Kamala Harris: not just the what of her endorsement, but the linguistic how. As David Allen Green says, it's worth studying.

It comes down to this:

"The most effective persuasion is often to lead the listener or reader to making their own decision – and to make them feel they are making their own decision."

Taylor Swift's endorsement really matters, and was clearly planned carefully. This wasn't a dashed-off Instagram description, and I'll certainly be learning from it.

[Link]

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Big tech is painting itself as journalism’s savior. We should tread carefully.

[Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos at NiemanLab]

"To survive, journalism must continue to embrace technology. But doing so should never cost newsrooms their independence. News organizations should prioritise building direct relationships with their audience to reduce reliance on third-party platforms. They should also stay informed about evolving regulations, and actively participate in policy discussions shaping the future of the news-tech relationship."

Exactly.

There are good points made here about paying for news technology. My belief is that there's value in sharing resources between newsrooms. Building and supporting technology as a commons could help newsrooms further their goals while staying independent. This shared model also prevents newsrooms from each developing the same commodity technology, which across the industry is a huge misuse of resources.

Clearly, too, a strong independent social web benefits both newsrooms and news consumers. A strong fediverse helps empower newsrooms to build direct relationships. Newsrooms should support this movement.

Regardless of the solution, it's good to see these topics being brought up in the news space. These represent the problems and the existential threats: now it's up to the industry to act.

[Link]

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Going open-source as a VC-backed company

[Lucas da Costa at Briefer]

"Some people call our strategy "open-core" and that's technically right. Still, I'd rather say that we have two pieces of software: one that is open-source and another that is not. I think that's more honest because we're not trying to hide the fact that we're selling a non-open-source version of our software."

This is a pretty honest take on open sourcing a product in a VC-funded startup, which needs to maintain a certain level of valuation growth to justify its investment.

Someone in edtech once told me that if I held back any of a product I was building that they would tell their substantial network not to use it. I don't think that's fair: I'm not sure there's much to be gained by making features that are mostly used by wealthy companies free. This is particularly true when owning your licensing means you still retain optionality to provide a lower-cost or zero-cost license for certain organizations.

I also like this reason for open sourcing their core product:

"Finally, by going open-source we commoditize our competitors' core functionality. This means they now have to compete against us in terms of innovative features, performance, and price, all of which are usually not their strong suits, let's be honest."

When executed well, and used against high-priced enterprise software in particular, this approach deflates closed-source business models and can be a real competition lift. I like that Briefer is naming that.

The one piece I don’t agree with is this:

"Open-source helps us manage Briefer's roadmap along with our users because there will be more of them, and because they'll have access to the source code. That way, they can help us figure out where to go, and help us get there by implementing what they need."

My experience in open source is that it doesn't absolve you from needing to keep a tight hand on the product steering wheel. Your open source community can actually muddy the water here, because open source users aren't always the same thing as customers, and may need a different set of features or functionality. Maintaining a coherent product vision is harder in open source, not easier.

Still, this was a lovely post to read, and I appreciate the open thinking. It certainly made me want to check Briefer out.

[Link]

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One Thing You Wish People Better Understood About Venture Capital

[Hunter Walk]

"I asked some investor friends to share, as the title suggests, one thing they wished people better understood about venture capital. There were no ground rules other than to specify that ‘people’ could be founders, politicians, LPs, etc and that it would be default attributed but anonymous if they desired."

Hunter Walk's ongoing series of inside perspectives from venture capital is brilliant: both nuanced and real. I didn't spend long as a mission-driven investor - two years - but many of these perspectives resonate.

I wish I'd read these before I started my investment journey: so much more of this job is about building funnels and ensuring that your portfolio has adequate opportunities for follow-on investment. You need to have a point of view / thesis on the future of technology and applicable markets, for sure, but there's much more on-the-ground sales work than is popularly discussed.

If you're raising money - or investing - they're worth checking out. It's an ongoing series, so I recommend just subscribing to Hunter's blog for more.

[Link]

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Faster Filing With Tree View: A Step Forward for Large Writing Projects

[iA]

"In a text editor, chapters are files. Organizing your files is work, but in a large text body it’s essential work. Your book or thesis will grow from it and get stronger as you clarify the structure. With iA Writer 7.2, structuring large writing projects has become a lot easier."

In other words, my favorite text editor just got a big upgrade for anyone writing large projects (hey, that's me!).

I've long been an iA Writer superfan: all my blog posts are written in it, and I use it as the starting point for most meaningful documents. This new update brings it into direct competition with Ulysses, another markdown text editor I love. I've been using iA Writer for short-form writing and Ulysses for longer-form writing (I have a very large book draft in there right now). But now, potentially, I can do it all from one app.

What it doesn't seem to do - yet - is the kind of file re-ordering that Ulysses excels at, so I can move scenes and chapters around each other with ease. From this post, it sounds like that will come:

"Tree view is the first step toward a document outline. Tree view is the technical foundation for offering a more detailed view of the document structure. All we can say for now is that it will work very much like tree view, just inside the document."

It's all great work. This level of care and attention in a text editor really matters. I'm grateful that iA exists.

[Link]

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A conversation with myself about immigration

What's your ideal place to live?

12 min read

Immigration papers

What is your ideal place to live?

I grew up in Oxford, England, which has radically colored my view of what a home can look like. It’s hardly a city at all — one girlfriend derisively called it “a village” — but sits close enough to London that you can get there in under an hour. It’s surrounded by green space.

The city itself is home one of the oldest universities in the world, around which other prominent universities, learning institutions, NGOs, and businesses have sprung up. The result is that the place is filled with bookstores, music, theater, art and culture, but even more importantly, there is a constant influx of people from all over the world: not as tourists, but as temporary residents. This diverse population has brought new ideas, cultures, cuisines, and ways of living. Being from somewhere else is completely normal.

You don’t need a car to get around. There’s adequate public transit (even if it’s getting more expensive), but it’s also incredibly walkable. Bicycle paths are everywhere, and arguably bicycles are the easiest, fastest way to get around.

Being a university town, ideas are important. Assuming they are delivered in good faith and are well-considered, diverse ideas are considered seriously. There is little dogma beyond the idea of the university itself. There are certainly no established lines that you need to arrange yourself behind.

Most of these things are true in London, too, of course, and I’ve more recently found it in cities like New York and San Francisco. New York in particular has become one of my favorite places in the world: a space where all kinds of people literally live on top of each other. It’s a vibrant space where everything feels possible, while also being one of the safest, most walkable cities in the world (with a surprising amount of green space). I don’t think I’d risk cycling around it, but people certainly do.

There are a few things that make these spaces great: green spaces, walkability, public transit. But I think the most important is their diversity, and therefore their openness to immigration and different ways of being.

The inverse describes places I don’t want to live in: car-driven spaces where people generally have the same shared heritage and the same ideas, with little public transit and low connections to the outside world.

So you’re pro-immigration?

I am, but I think of immigration as a means to an end. I’m not as much pro-immigration as I am anti-monoculture. The goal isn’t to have lots of immigrants in itself; the goal is to have a broad, inclusive society, which implies a vibrancy, and in turn requires different cultures, ideas, and ways of living to present themselves.

There’s plenty of research that shows how beneficial this can be: it pushes up wages and economic activity, and particularly for populations that are becoming older on average (that’s us), provides younger workers.

Selfishly, it’s also more comfortable for me. I don’t like monocultures in part because I am never part of one: as a third culture kid with parents who have different nationalities and grew up in a third place, I can’t be by definition. As well as white American and Northern European, my heritage is Jewish and Indonesian. Monocultures necessarily exclude me, and I don’t feel safe in them; they make me feel like an Other.

While middle class residents see a net gain, there is a growing body of evidence which may show that immigration can harm working class populations in a host location by displacing them from work and affecting their wages. That can’t be overlooked, and questions need to be asked about how they can see a net gain too. I think the solution relates to funneling more of the net gains from increased economic activity into better social programs, free education, and better social infrastructure overall.

I don’t think the goal can be to preserve monocultures. Communities do gain overall if there is immigration. Those communities are qualitatively better places to live as well as statistically more prosperous. And it’s simply not where the world is headed: global transit and communications are cheaper and more available than ever. Even if we all decided we hated immigration and wanted to be inward-facing societies forever, the cat is out of the bag. Instead, then, we need to make sure everyone sees the benefit from it.

So you’re a socialist?

It depends on your definition! I think there’s a lot to be gained from social infrastructure: public healthcare, education, and transit, social programs like welfare, and ways to life people up who fall through the cracks.

Knowing that low-income people may not always see the benefit from immigration, I think we need to provide stronger structures to lift everyone up, which include universal healthcare, accessible, high-quality education, and reliable, frequent public transit. We can fund those through stronger taxes for the wealthiest in our society (many of whom are also in favor of this), by collecting taxes from people and businesses who already owe but don’t pay, as well as efficiency gains in how we provide existing services. There’s been plenty of work to show that the numbers do add up and these are perfectly possible things to provide.

But if you’re asking me if I believe in fully centrally-planned economies? No. Everyone should be able to start a business or work for themselves, and I don’t think government is best placed to innovate.

What about crime?

Most violent crime is caused by poverty, and migrants are statistically much less likely to commit it. The stereotype of immigrant populations coming in and ruining the place is a racist myth, and increasing the base quality of life for everyone through better social infrastructure will reduce crime. Take San Francisco: although crime in the city is generally overstated by the right-wing press, a radically widened divide between rich and poor has resulted in more car break-ins, shoplifting, and similar offenses. Those are not things that would happen in a city where everyone was able to live comfortably.

The most egregious crimes are white collar, where financial losses are significant. Preventing these and effectively collecting taxes from people who should be contributing will help provide for the people who are truly feeling the squeeze.

Clearly, in any given society, there need to be sensible laws and enforcement of them. The biggest gains, though, are not created through draconian policing. They come from stronger social infrastructure that genuinely protects people. If people cannot afford to live, they will do what they need to in order to survive. Where this has to do with immigration — potentially at low income levels — more help must be provided.

What about refugees?

Europe in particular has received an influx of refugees because of ongoing wars. That can’t be an externality: if you fund a war, taking on refugees from that war is a reasonable thing to expect. That’s not a comment on whether those wars are right or wrong; it’s simply an inevitability.

Meanwhile, countries like Britain that spent centuries invading the rest of the world, often oppressing them violently, are now complaining about immigration and refugees. All I’ll say about that is that the world is interconnected: actions have consequences.

And that interconnectedness goes further. Our actions and inaction with respect to global trade and the effects of the climate crisis are also creating refugees. We’re all implicated, and of course we should have a duty to deal with the human consequences. Not only that, but I would argue we have a fundamental duty to help other human beings — while accepting that not everyone agrees. Like so much else in this conversation, it comes down to our values and priorities.

What if I like living in a monoculture?

You do you! Monocultures will always available. I’m just not interested in living in one, and the evidence shows that they will always be poorer than open, inclusive societies. I think people who vote for them thinking that it will lead to a better life for them are unfortunately mistaken.

The country where I grew up voted to legally prevent me from living there again in a referendum in 2016. It has proven to be an economic and cultural shot in the foot: Brexit was a disaster, and only 31% of Britons now say they were right to leave the EU.

Also, seeing seas of Trump supporters at conventions holding up signs saying “mass deportations now” is pretty chilling. Qualitatively, that mindset — only people like us are allowed! — is something I truly fear, not least because that always means that people like me are never allowed. That’s taken us to some dark places in the past, but it’s also simply not a recipe for a nice place to live.

So you’re playing the Nazi card?

A lot of people call people Nazis these days. In itself it’s become a cliché that can be a barrier to further discussion. I do tend to agree with Mike Godwin, the author of Godwin’s Law, who said that it does not apply to describing Trump. But I get that people are easily triggered by it.

I think there’s always, by definition, a kind of fascism inherent in wanting to live in a monoculture. Fascism deals with in-groups and out-groups; similarly, monocultures, by definition, need to maintain conformity. It’s not that people in those places are goose-stepping in militaristic parades (generally speaking), but that’s also not what Nazism is actually about. The death camps came later; it started with narrowly defining who belongs and who doesn’t belong. To put it another way, Nazism started by enforcing a monoculture: while not every monoculture leads to fascism, fascism always begins with enforcing conformity.

I’ve written a lot in the past about how I’m uncomfortable with the ideas of patriotism and nationalism. Both seem arbitrary: the idea of being proud of the place you happened to be born in is random. I think it’s better to be proud of ideas and of values. But ultimately patriotism is fairly benign: if you want to be proud of your town, state, or country somewhere that you happened to be born in or have adopted as home, whatever. It’s not my thing, but please enjoy.

Nationalism, on the other hand, describes identification with your country of origin to the exclusion or detriment of that of people from other nations. It inherently implies harm. The question of who does and doesn’t belong is actually quite complicated (I have a British accent; I have British cultural touchpoints; my hometown is Oxford; I do not hold citizenship; am I British?). In itself the question leads to a toxicity that can poison a community: in considering who belongs and who doesn’t, we needfully set ourselves up for having conversations about how to exclude people.

Similarly, the question about who is and isn’t a Nazi isn’t actually very useful, and hangs the discourse on a very superficial question. It’s also more complicated than it appears: Hitler’s policies regarding Jewish people was in part based on American Jim Crow laws. The Nazis weren’t some aberration in history: they were a part of a continuum, very much in line with what was happening elsewhere, and we’ve learned that similar ideas can crop up anywhere if the conditions are right.

So I’d rather just ask: what is the society we want to create? What are the values that are important to us? I can tell you that mine are about inclusion, a broad definition of belonging, and vibrant diversity, where social structures are intentionally created that allow everyone to live a good life, where ideas and expression are open, where there is no state violence, and where anyone can innovate or create a business if they have a good enough idea.

I don’t want to live in a monoculture, and will vote and make decisions on that basis. If you do, you should vote and make decisions on that basis. If the overwhelming will of the people is that monocultures are good, I will march, rally, protest, and vote in opposition to that idea. And should the monoculture decide that it needs to label the businesses created by people like me — or people like anyone — or to label the people themselves as Other, if it decides to forcibly deport them, if mobs or police go looking for them like they did for my ancestors, if it decides that it must put people into camps like the one my father spent the first few years of his life in, if it decides to burn down communities as was done to my great grandfather’s village, then I will fight, and fight hard, and I promise you there are many, many others who feel the same way. None of this is new.

In the end this comes down to who gets to be a part of the future, and fundamentally, I believe the future should be for everyone.

And, to bring this conversation back to its initial question, that’s my ideal place to live: somewhere that’s for everyone, culturally and ideologically.

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The 19th wanted to ‘normalize’ women in power. In 2024, it’s dreaming bigger.

[Elahe Izadi at The Washington Post]

I adore The 19th. It's making big moves, and that's good news for everyone.

"What [Emily] Ramshaw and fellow co-founder Amanda Zamora started in January 2020 — a newsroom with just one reporter and no website — has grown into a digital operation that has raised nearly $60 million and employs 55 people. And in a sign of its growing ambitions, the 19th has now hired veteran news executive LaSharah Bunting, CEO of the Online News Association, as its first vice president, a role created to build up the 19th’s fundraising and budget operations."

It's also grown an endowment, which allows it to have a safety net and continue to grow and experiment. The ambition for the endowment to underwrite the newsroom's operations is meaningful: this would represent a fund designed to allow reporting on gender, politics, and policy to be undertaken sustainably. I don't know of any other similar fund in media.

Not mentioned here but extremely relevant: the amazing work Alexandra Smith, its Chief Strategy Officer, has been doing to redefine how to think about audience and reach on a fragmented web.

These are all signs of a forward-thinking newsroom that isn't content to simply accept the status quo - and, crucially, plans to stick around.

[Link]

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Threads is trading trust for growth

Engagement farming

Yesterday the Internet Archive lost its appeal in the digital lending case it’s been fighting for the last few years.

In March 2020, the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, launched a program called the National Emergency Library, or NEL. Library closures caused by the pandemic had left students, researchers, and readers unable to access millions of books, and the Internet Archive has said it was responding to calls from regular people and other librarians to help those at home get access to the books they needed.

It was a useful program, and the archival has merit, but publishers argued that the Archive overstepped, and the courts eventually agreed.

Regardless of the merits of the case, I believe the Internet Archive is an obvious public good, and an outcome like this has the potential to do it real harm. This opinion led me to post an offhand comment on Threads:

People who follow me tend to also be at the intersection of tech and media, so I figured extra context wasn’t needed. They were on it. And I figured that anyone who wasn’t clued in probably didn’t care and could just keep scrolling.

Which, uh, is not how it went down.

The Threads algorithm apparently surfaced my post in the feeds of a bunch of other people with a wholly different set of interests, who were — inexplicably to me — incredibly angry that I hadn’t provided any further context.

A whole bunch of people apparently forgot they can, you know, just Google something:

Unhappy about posting without context

Explain the situation in your opening post!

But the comments that really surprised me were the ones that accused me of engagement farming. I’ve never received these before, and it made me wonder about the underlying assumptions. Why would this be engagement farming? Why would someone do this? Why would they assume that about me?

I am not very engaging

Muted for failed engagement play

Engagement bait!

I'm making this platform worse

It might have something to do with Meta’s creators program, which pays people to post on the platform. The idea is that popular influencers will lure more users to the platform and it can therefore grow more quickly.

The amounts are not small: a single popular post can earn as much as $5,000. It’s an invite-only program that I am not a part of; it looks like you need to be an existing Instagram influencer to be asked. While I’m a lot of things, that is very far from being one of them.

Because the program is not available to all, and because it’s unlabeled, it’s not clear who is a part of it and who isn’t. So anyone could be trying to farm engagement in order to make some extra money. And because anyone could be, it becomes the default assumption for a lot of people. If you had the opportunity to make an extra $5,000 for a social media post, why wouldn’t you? And as a result, trust in peoples’ underlying motivations has disintegrated. Everyone must be just trying to get as many views on their posts as possible.

Over time, this has the potential to become pernicious, eroding trust in everything. If X has fake news, Threads is assumed to have fake views: engagement by any means necessary.

To be clear, if I was a part of the program — which, again, I’m not — I wouldn’t do anything differently, except to clearly announce that I was part of the program. I’m not an entertainer, an influencer, or a public figure. Like most of us, I’m just some person posting offhand thoughts into a social media app; anything else feels, honestly, disingenuous and like far too much work. But now I understand how fast trust has eroded, I wonder if the ability to build authentic communities on the platform is hanging on by a thread.

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Founder Mode

[Paul Graham]

"In effect there are two different ways to run a company: founder mode and manager mode. Till now most people even in Silicon Valley have implicitly assumed that scaling a startup meant switching to manager mode. But we can infer the existence of another mode from the dismay of founders who've tried it, and the success of their attempts to escape from it."

Please forgive the Paul Graham link: this is a genuinely good point about running companies. And I don't think it's limited to startups: the dichotomy isn't between "founder mode" and "manager mode", but between purposeful companies built to be communities aiming at a focused goal and institutions that can move slower and less efficiently.

Skip-level meetings should be normal. Flat hierarchies are good. Everyone in a company should have the ability to have the ear of the CEO if they need it - and, likewise, the CEO should be able to freely talk to anyone in a company. A good idea can come from anyone; people with exceptional talent can show up anywhere on the org chart. Less regimentation and less bureaucracy allow those people to flourish - and, in turn, allow the organization to make better choices.

It's also a representation of what matters to an organization. Hierarchies emerge from people who care about hierarchy and chains of command; flatness emerges from people who just care about getting stuff done. The latter, in my view, always makes for a better place to work.

[Link]

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I like the way you like it like that

[Ghost]

"It's a simple thing, but it's kind of a big deal. With this milestone, Ghost is for the first time exceeding the functionality of a basic RSS reader. This is 2-way interaction. You publish, and your readers can respond."

This is a big step: a Ghost publication puts something out on the web, and then anyone on any ActivityPub-compatible network (Flipboard, Mastodon, micro.blog, soon Threads) can respond and the publisher can see it straight from their dashboard.

This is not just limited to Ghost: any platform can implement this using ActivityPub without asking anyone for permission. And they will. Expect to see this functionality across both publishing and social networks within the next few years. Anyone who doesn't have this functionality will be left out - it'll more be about the level of sophistication with which they implement it, and the nuances of how they make it right for their respective userbases.

The web, finally, is becoming social. Let's go.

[Link]

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Being quietly radicalised by being on holiday

[Matt Webb]

"The EU may (or may not) be making technology policy missteps, but they are gently and patiently promoting a certain way of life which feels globally very, very special, and fundamentally counter to the hypercapitalism found elsewhere." 

I love Europe, and this is a large part of why. It's not the business environment or any ability to enrich myself in a measurable way; it's not about the politics, which are going in directions that I'm not always on board with (I think it's falling off a dangerous cliff with respect to press freedom, for example); instead it's about the lifestyle, which is in my opinion markedly better.

The bottom line is that I want to live like a European, not an American. I don't want to own a car; I don't want to have to pay for healthcare; I don't want to care about my 401(k) or work hard to avoid sugar in my food. I don't want to work ten hour days. That might be anathema to some Americans - what's wrong with hard work, after all? - but, objectively, it's killing us.

This, too, feels incredibly right:

"A company that makes not too much profit but is the collective endeavour of many people is a good company, surely? Or rather, it occupies as many people as it requires and allows those people to enjoy a relaxed life."

Co-signed to infinity.

[Link]

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No one’s ready for this

[Robin Rendle]

Robin Rendle on Sarah Jeong's article about the implications of the Pixel 9's magic photo editor in The Verge:

"But this stuff right here—adding things that never happened to a picture—that’s immoral because confusion and deception is the point of this product. There are only shady applications for it."

Robin's point is that the core use case - adding things that never happened to a photograph with enough fidelity and cues that you could easily be convinced that they did - has no positive application. And as such, it should probably be illegal.

My take is that the cat is out of the bag. The societal implications aren't good - at all - but I don't think banning the technology is practical. So, instead, we have to find a way to live with it.

As Sarah Jeong says in the original article:

"The default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after."

In this world, what constitutes evidence? How do we prove visual evidentiary truth?

There may be a role for journalism and professional photographers here. Many newsrooms, including the Associated Press, have joined the Content Authenticity Initiative, which aims to provide programmatically-provable credentials to photographs used by a publication. This will be an arms race, of course, because there are incentives for a nefarious actor to develop technical circumventions.

Ultimately, the biggest counter to this problem as a publisher is going to be building a community based on trust, and for an end-user is finding sources you can trust. That doesn't help in a legal context, and it doesn't help establish objective truth. But it's something.

[Link]

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'This Is What the US Military Was Doing in Iraq': Photos of 2005 Haditha Massacre Finally Published

[Brett Wilkins at Common Dreams]

"After years of working with Iraqis whose relatives were killed by U.S. Marines in the 2005 Haditha massacre, American journalists finally obtained and released photos showing the grisly aftermath of the bloody rampage—whose perpetrators never spent a day behind bars."

These pictures, now published by the New Yorker, were covered up and obstructed for almost 20 years, presumably in an effort to present an image of America as a benevolent intervener. They are graphic and disturbing in themselves, and revealing of the real impact of America's impact overseas.

As Common Dreams notes:

"The Haditha massacre was part of countless U.S. war crimes and atrocities committed during the ongoing so-called War on Terror, which has claimed hundreds of thousands of civilian lives in at least half a dozen countries since 2001. One of the reasons why the Haditha massacre is relatively unknown compared with the torture and killings at the U.S. military prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq is that photos of the former crime have been kept hidden for decades."

One of the reasons this kind of sunlight is important is so that Americans can be aware of what its military foreign policy is truly enabling in the rest of the world. I hope we can change tacks and become a genuine force for peace and international democracy, but I don't believe that's where we are or where we have been.

As always, I recommend Vincent Bevins's excellent book The Jakarta Method to help understand what has been done in our name. I wish it could be taught to every American citizen.

[Link]

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The secret inside One Million Checkboxes

[Nolen Royalty]

"On June 26th 2024, I launched a website called One Million Checkboxes (OMCB). It had one million global checkboxes on it - checking (or unchecking) a box changed it for everyone on the site, instantly."

This story gets deeper from here: how he found a community of teenagers secretly writing to each other in binary using the checkboxes in the site is lovely.

[Link]

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Silicon Valley’s Very Online Ideologues are in Model Collapse

[Aaron Ross Powell]

""First, there’s what I’ve referred to in the past as the “Quillette Effect.” Because we believe our own ideas are correct (or else we wouldn’t believe them), we tend to think that people who share our ideas are correct, as well." This whole piece is worth your time."

This whole piece is worth your time: a dive into why some of Silicon Valley's leaders seem to be disappearing down an ideological morass, using AI model collapse as an analogy. These are ideas that turn to themselves again and again to infinity.

There's a lot to be said for getting out of Silicon Valley and seeing the bubble from the outside. But you've really got to do that for yourself - or have something really catastrophic do it for you.

"The problem with model collapse is, once it goes too far, it’s difficult to correct. The solution to model collapse is to train on better data. But accomplishing that, and undoing the rapidly radicalizing right-wing ideology of these titans of the Valley, means undoing the structural causes of that self-referential and self-reinforcing cascade. And that’s no easy task."

I have no idea what would bring that about.

[Link]

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Labor union disapproval hits 57 year low, per Gallup survey

[Emily Peck at Axios]

"70% of Americans said they approved of unions, per Gallup's most recent poll, conducted in August."

This represents a giant change in American society: labor unions haven't been this popular since 1967. But at the same time, union membership is at a record low, at just 10%.

In other words, Americans want unions but aren't typically members. We're likely to see more and more union organization attempts over the next few years, and workplaces that are unionized may have competitive advantages over workplaces that aren't in terms of attracting workers.

Because unions have been so suppressed, managers likely also need a refresher (or a from-scratch lesson) in terms of what is legal and illegal when it comes to dealing with unions in the workplace.

Bottom line: they're not going away. And likely quite the opposite. Whatever your position on unions (I think they're an important force for worker rights), they are going to increasingly be a part of the organizational landscape.

[Link]

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What I've learned about writing a book (so far)

It's a writer. On a laptop. Which is not how I do it.

Some things I’ve learned about me and writing recently:

  1. I’m impossibly distractible. It’s a learned behavior: I check all my social networks, take a look at my email, fall down Wikipedia rabbit holes. Writing on the iPad seems to help me a lot. Those things are there too, but they feel relatively inaccessible: I don’t have a Threads app, for example, and using it on the web on that device feels like a chore. I know, I know: those things do work fine on an iPad, but shhhh, I’m getting a lot of mileage out of convincing myself that they don’t.
  2. Tiny goals help. I started using Todoist earlier this year, which is the first to-do list app that fits with the way my brain works. I have a lot of things I need to keep track of, and it’s been a huge relief across work and my life to have a list that I can keep referring to. These days, my Todoist “today” list drives my day as much as my calendar does. So it was easy to add a daily recurring “Write some novel words” task. I get to check it off if I make any progress at all; the trick is that once I start making some progress, momentum usually keeps me going until I’ve written a meaningful amount. I’ve even started logging supplementary tasks if I have a thematic idea that I want to experiment with later (today’s is a scene transition that I want to play with).
  3. I’ve got to make do with the late evenings. Between taking a toddler to and from daycare, working at ProPublica, and dealing with everything I need to in the house, the only real time I have to make progress is late at night once everyone else has gone to bed. I’m exhausted by that time of night, but to my surprise, this routine has been effective for me: I settle in the living room with my iPad, and off I go. The ergonomics of slouching on my sofa with a tablet balanced across my knees are horrible, though.
  4. I can’t stay completely serious. It turns out that I’m most motivated by my sense of humor. I tried to write a serious book, I really did, but the ironies and observations kept coming, and what I’ve wound up with is a serious topic and what I hope is a gripping plot, wrapped up in irony and a delight in poking at incongruities. Hopefully readers will find it more fun than self-indulgent; I’m having fun with it, and I hope they do too. When I have written more earnestly, I come back to my draft and instantly hate it. There’s detail in irony; it reveals truths that writing point-blank seems to miss.
  5. Not a single soul will get to see this until I have polished it within an inch of its life. I got a plot suggestion from a writing tutor and it set me back six to nine months. The suggestion was good, but it meant reworking what I’d done so far. I lost momentum on the first draft and found myself stuck in editing mode, working on the same chapters again and again. Lesson learned. We can make substantive changes later, once the whole thing is committed to the page.
  6. It’s not blogging. I’ve been blogging since 1998. Although I can always use proofreading and an editing pass, this muscle is fully-developed for me. I feel very little cognitive barrier to getting a blog post on the page, and I feel like I can do it quickly. Writing a book, on the other hand, requires much more craft: it’s like chiseling a story out of rock. I didn’t study this, and I am not a great sculptor. I wrote a lot more fiction when I was younger but dismissed it as a career path, even though it's where my heart truly lay. Only recently have I given myself permission to treat it as important. I’m under no illusions that I’m good at it, but I’m going to try anyway, because here’s what keeps me going:
  7. I love it. That’s what matters most, in a way. I love making something substantial, and I love being in a creative flow state. I’m often cackling at ideas as I furiously write them down. I’m petrified of sharing what I’ve done later on, but I’m putting that out of my mind. For now, it doesn’t matter. For now, I’m just telling myself a story, and I’m enjoying it a great deal. What happens to it afterwards is a story for another time.

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*Online Participation Disclaimer

[Heather Bryant]

Arguing that it's harder to just be a human online, Heather Bryant has published an online participation disclaimer:

"The following disclaimer applies to participation in discourse as it relates to my individual experience as a human being in a global online community and the collective communication occurring therein. This disclaimer is intended to acknowledge the complexities, challenges and sometimes human incompatibility with discourse occurring at potentially global scale."

Honestly, this disclaimer feels universal: it's something that I would feel comfortable posting on my own site or linking to. It's both very complete and a little bit sad: these things should be commonly understood. In some ways, these clauses are obvious. But by naming them, Heather is making a statement about what it means to participate in online discourse, and what the experience of that actually is for her.

It's worth reflecting on everything here, but in particular the "some things for some people" and "spheres of relevance" sections hit home for me. It's a commonly-held nerd fallacy (forgive me for using that term) that everything is for everyone, and that everything is relevant for comment. The conversational equivalent of inviting people from multiple facets of your life to the same party and assuming it'll all go great.

It's worth asking: if you had such a disclaimer, would it be any different? What do you wish was commonly understood?

[Link]

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Productivity gains in Software Development through AI

[tante]

Tante responds to Amazon's claim that using its internal AI for coding saved 4500 person years of work:

"Amazon wants to present themselves as AI company and platform. So of course their promises of gains are always advertising for their platform and tools. Advertising might have a tendency to exaggerate. A bit. Maybe. So I heard."

He makes solid points here about maintenance costs given the inevitably lower-quality code, and intangibles like the brain drain effect on the team over time. And, of course, he's right to warn that something that works for a company the size of Amazon will not necessarily (and in fact probably won't) make sense for smaller organizations.

As he points out:

"It’s the whole “we need to run Microservices and Kubernetes because Amazon and Google do similar things” thing again when that’s a categorically different problem pace than what most companies have to deal with."

Right.

[Link]

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