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
Notable links
[Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Hadley Beeman, Daniel Appelquist, Robin Berjon, et al] "Government engagement in digital and Internet governance is needed to deal with many abuses of this global system but it is our common responsibility to uphold the bottom-up, collaborative and inclusive model of Internet governance that
Notable links
[Rachel Leingang at The Guardian] "The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate
Technology
[Jonathan Zeller at McSweeney's] "We do not live in some tech dystopia in which our smartphones clandestinely use their mics to pick up every word we say and then feed us commercial messages based on them. The truth is simpler and not at all alarming: your phone
