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Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller

On having good taste

I’ve heard a lot of variations of the quote, “you can’t teach taste” over the years, and haven’t thought much of it. Taste in design, in home decor, in good food, in art — it’s seemed obvious that some people are more attuned than others. Tastes are

04 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

TinyLetter: looking back on the humblest newsletter platform

"That is sort of the original spirit of the internet. [...] What if we made no money? What if money wasn’t even something we were thinking about?" A lovely tribute to TinyLetter, which was shut down recently after 14 years. It was founded by Philip Kaplan - aka

03 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

Tapestry: What About?

A pretty good example of clear, transparent communication about product decisions that might not please everyone - particularly when the userbase culture is heavily steeped in open source. I respect this: "Right now, the core of Tapestry is closed source. We have put some components up on GitHub and

03 Mar 2024

Feeding my Edinburgh nostalgia

All told, I lived in Edinburgh for nearly a decade between my late teens and early thirties. I went there to study Computer Science at the University, stuck around to work in the Learning Technology department, co-founded Elgg, left for a while, and eventually came back to live with my

03 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

Blogging is the medium of incomplete stories

"Journalists write stories about incomplete events but there is always a mandate to write more. To write the next post that shows the breaking news. Authors write books that, when published, cannot be changed. An author can write another book, but the story is in print. No such mandate

02 Mar 2024

Some feels about my non-involvement in the fediverse

I feel more than a twinge of regret that I’m not more involved in the current decentralized social web movement. This is where I came from, after all: I built one of the first open source social networking platforms (and one of the first social networks overall). Decentralized social

02 Mar 2024

Why I won't have a blogroll

Dave Winer has been talking a bit about blogrolls lately: lists of blogs you like to read that typically sit on a sidebar or separate page of your site. I definitely used to have one, back when I had my Movable Type blog a million years ago, and I always

02 Mar 2024

Introducing asides

I’ve set up a new post type, “asides”, on my site. I’ve been kind of worried about writing shorter thoughts here for a while, because all of my long-form blog posts make it into the newsletter in real time, and who wants to receive a 150-word email about

02 Mar 2024

NotableLinks

Generative.

A wonderful playlist from Ethan Marcotte about the state and context of AI and its implications for labor and society. Every quote is a gem; in aggregate it's a strong argument about where we are headed.  #AI [Link]

01 Mar 2024

Some personal updates

I write a lot about the intersection of technology and society here, and lately a lot about AI, but over the last year I’ve written a little less about what I’ve been up to. So, this post is an update about some of that. This isn’t everything,

29 Feb 2024

Platforms are selling your work to AI vendors with impunity. They need to stop.

404 Media reports that Automattic is planning to sell its data to Midjourney and OpenAI for training generative models: The exact types of data from each platform going to each company are not spelled out in documentation we’ve reviewed, but internal communications reviewed by 404 Media make clear that

28 Feb 2024

NotableLinks

Meditations in a journalistic emergency

"The antitrusters are right. The publishers actually do need more power to maintain a workable bargaining position with the platforms, which now dominate how knowledge is transmitted over the internet." This is a coherent argument for how the news industry needs to evolve in the face of unprecedented

28 Feb 2024
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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.