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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

An update on searching for trans-friendly employers who sponsor visas

Last month I asked to hear from trans-friendly employers who sponsor visas, and provided a simple form for interested employers to reach out. In the process, I heard from many individuals: people who were hoping to find new employment in another country, and people who worked for companies that were

16 Feb 2025

Fediverse

Organizing on decentralized social networks

[Jon Pincus at The Nexus of Privacy] There's an argument that one reason Elon Musk bought Twitter was to reduce its effectiveness as a platform for progressive organizing. Whether you buy that or not, it's clear that the new set of social networks are fertile ground

16 Feb 2025

Technology

Tech continues to be political

[Miriam Eric Suzanne] Every single word of this piece resonated for me, from the underlying discomfort to the realization that AI as it currently manifests reflects a kind of fascist mindset in itself: an enclosure movement of culture and diversity that concentrates power into a handful of vendors. This is

16 Feb 2025

A streak, at last

It’s a small thing, but I broke my Apple Fitness longest streak this week. That means my consecutive number of days that I’ve hit my fitness goals on my Apple Watch has been longer than it’s ever been. Here’s why that’s meaningful: my previous longest

13 Feb 2025

Parenting

Marshmallow Test and Parenting

[Sergey Bogdanov] This is a story about parenting, but also about the importance of considering context inclusively. We've all heard about the Stanford marshmallow experiment, but: "Kids from wealthier families waited longer than kids from low-income families. Not because they had more self-control, but because their environment

13 Feb 2025

Notable Links

What Elon Musk's son in Trump's Oval Office tells us about politics and family

[Jennifer Gerson at The 19th] Musk has been seen with his child, X Æ A-Xii (or "Lil X" for short), at press conferences. But, as Jennifer Gerson notes here, it's not just a photo op. "Musk, a father of 12, is an avowed pronatalist, or

13 Feb 2025

Fediverse

The Social Web Foundation announces its membership in the World Wide Web Consortium

[Social Web Foundation] The Social Web Foundation has joined the W3C: "SWF joins CDT as one of the few civil society organizations that comprise the Consortium. SWF’s membership in the W3C underscores our commitment to promoting an open and federated social web, and our alignment with the W3C

11 Feb 2025

Fediverse

Tumblr to join the fediverse after WordPress migration completes

[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch] This was a very nice surprise to see: "Automattic confirmed to TechCrunch that when the migration is complete, every Tumblr user will be able to federate their blog via ActivityPub, just as every WordPress.com user can today." ActivityPub is the open protocol behind

11 Feb 2025

Releasing all my text under a Creative Commons license

From time to time, people ask me if they can use the content of my posts in another venue or another format. To make that possible, today I released all the text of all my posts under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You’ll see that declaration

11 Feb 2025

Notable Links

A Few Eggs of Advice in These Trying Times

[Oneofthelibrarians at LibrarianShipwreck] Some advice about how to survive this era from LibrarianShipwreck, one of my most favorite blogs on the planet: "So, uh, it’s pretty bad out there! You are probably trying to figure out what the hell to do about it. Here are some words of

11 Feb 2025

Notable Links

The NSA's "Big Delete"

[Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby in Popular Information] The removal of banned terms on both internal and external government websites is going more stupidly than one might have expected: "One example included a job listing page for the Department of Homeland Security that removed language about maintaining an “inclusive

10 Feb 2025

If MSN comments reveal the soul of America, we're done

For a while now, I’ve been syndicating my posts to MSN. You can see Werd I/O’s profile over there. In some ways, this is my normiest network: whereas my Mastodon community is more technical, my Bluesky community is more political and my newsletter subscribers tend to be

10 Feb 2025
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Werd I/O explores the intersection of technology, democracy, and society. It's independently published by Ben Werdmuller, reader-supported, and always free to read.