I really like Lou Plummer’s list of 15 books which made the most impact on him, which I discovered via Tracy Durnell’s own list: I think you can figure out a lot about a person if you know what books have had the most impact on them. At
Technology
[Plausible Analytics] "We’re real people who have rent to pay and mouths to feed. We make $300 per month from donations from our self-hosted users. It would take us more than ten years of donations to pay one month of salary for our small team. If we cannot
Climate
[Helene Smith at The Guardian] "Barely six months into the job, the mayor of Athens’s top priority is simple: ensuring that the people of Greece’s capital – mainland Europe’s hottest metropolis – survive the summer. After a June that was the hottest on record, the city has already
Fediverse
[Sarah Perez at TechCrunch] "Newsletter platform and Substack rival Ghost announced earlier this year that it would join the fediverse, the open social network of interconnected servers that includes apps like Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, Flipboard and, more recently, Instagram Threads, among others. Now, it has made good on that
Education
[Alec MacGillis at ProPublica] "Voucher advocates, backed by a handful of billionaire funders, are on the march to bring more red and purple states into the fold for “school choice,” their preferred terminology for vouchers. And again and again, they are running up against rural Republicans like Warner, who
My availability has opened up for a handful of consulting engagements in addition to my regular work as Senior Director of Technology at ProPublica. I’ve founded two startups (both based on open-source technology communities that I also founded). I’ve been a CTO, led product, and invested in early-stage
The only goal that really matters is building a stable, informed, democratic, inclusive, equitable, peaceful society where everyone has the opportunity to live a good life. One where we care for our environment, where we champion democracy, science, education, and art, where equality for all is seen as a virtue,
Notable Links
[Becky Chambers] “You’re an animal, Sibling Dex. You are not separate or other. You’re an animal. And animals have no purpose. Nothing has a purpose. The world simply is. If you want to do things that are meaningful to others, fine! Good! So do I! But if I
I’m a natural-born American citizen but never lived here until my early thirties. I have a complicated relationship with the country: I never thought I’d live here until I suddenly did. As it happened, my parents moved back to look after my grandmother, and ten years later, I
Notable Links
[Lydia Kiesling] It took me a long time to get through the first third of this novel. The protagonist is so vapid, her point of view so incurious and at the same time so familiarly American, against a backdrop of obvious imperialism and climate obliviousness, that it was hard to
I’ve spent the week in Florence, Oregon, a lovely little town on the coast. It’s a bit windy and a little cold, but as I’m fond of saying, I lived in Scotland for a decade. I can take it. Frank Herbert came to the town in 1957
AI
[Cloudflare] "To help preserve a safe Internet for content creators, we’ve just launched a brand new “easy button” to block all AI bots. It’s available for all customers, including those on our free tier." This is really neat! Whatever you land on AI scraping, giving site
