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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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The toll of America's anti-trans war

[The 19th]

"To understand how the anti-trans agenda could reshape all of our lives, The 19th set out to examine how the laws and rhetoric behind it are impacting Americans."

My friends at The 19th dive into how the wave of anti-trans legislation and rhetoric is impacting American life.

This is a vital conversation: 177 anti-transgender bills have become law since 2021. The country has been swept into a red wave of bigotry.

These laws have implications for everyone. As The 19th describes its rationale behind this series:

"To understand how the anti-trans agenda could reshape all of our lives, our reporters have set out to examine how anti-trans laws are impacting the lives of Americans, whether or not they are trans. The goal is to connect the dots that will show how these laws, intended to target a small minority, are rewriting the future for all of us, and for generations to come. This is the Toll of America’s Anti-Trans War."

[Link]

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Telegram messaging app CEO Durov arrested in France

[Ingrid Melander and Guy Faulconbridge at Reuters]

"[Telegram founder] Durov, who has dual French and United Arab Emirates citizenship, was arrested as part of a preliminary police investigation into allegedly allowing a wide range of crimes due to a lack of moderators on Telegram and a lack of cooperation with police."

At face value, this seems like an enormous deal: the idea that a social network operator should be arrested for not moderating and not cooperating with the police seems like a precedent with implications for a great many platforms.

Telegram has been blocked in Russia since 2018. While it's unlikely to be blocked as such in the EU, it's plausible to see a world where it's removed from app stores and made harder to access.

Decentralized platform builders in particular will be watching this carefully: what does this mean for people who are building censorship-resistant and governance-free platforms overall?

Of course, at the same time, we may not have all the information yet. We'll have to watch and see.

[Link]

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A Developer's Guide to ActivityPub and the Fediverse

[Martin SFP Bryant at The New Stack]

"How do you get started if you want to integrate your own software with ActivityPub? [Evan] Prodromou has written a new book on this very topic, and we caught up with him to explore the practicalities of linking up with the fediverse."

I'm convinced that ActivityPub is the underlying standard that all future social software will be built on. Evan is one of the founding parents of the fediverse, and this article is a great overview. His new book will be an invaluable resource for everyone who wants to embark upon this journey.

[Link]

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Start-up incubator Y Combinator backs its first weapons firm

[George Hammond at the Financial Times]

"Y Combinator, the San Francisco start-up incubator that launched Airbnb, Reddit, Stripe and Coinbase, is backing a weapons company for the first time, entering a sector it has previously shunned."

Specifically, its a low-cost cruise missile startup, which the Financial Times reports would be suitable for use in a potential war between the US and China. The cruise missiles are 10x smaller and 10x cheaper than today's alternatives, but presumably still murder people.

Also from the article:

"There is “a very interesting situation where geopolitical heat and the end of zero-interest rate policies have made people become more pragmatic,” said the founder of one start-up that was in the same group of YC-funded companies as Ares. [...] “People support builders doing cool, hard stuff.”"

Very interesting indeed. Certainly, you can make money by selling weapons of war. But should you? And in what world is killing people "cool stuff"?

Silicon Valley's origins are in large part military, of course, so this shouldn't be too much of a surprise. But for a while there, in the wake of the this-is-for-everyone radical inclusion of the web (which was not a military creation), it seemed like tech was heading in a different direction. It's disappointing to see that this was ephemeral at best.

[Link]

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I love Reeder despite this persistent niggle

2 min read

I love hanging out in Reeder. I subscribe to thousands of feeds, and it handles them well for me. But it does make it hard for me to prune them once I’m subscribed.

I found myself looking at this screen this afternoon:

Reeder

And I thought to myself: you know what? I don’t need to be subscribed to Axios. This isn’t the kind of article I’m looking to consume on a regular basis.

So, uh, how do I unsubscribe from it?

There’s nothing here that allows me to unsubscribe from the feed while I’m looking at this post. There’s also nothing that tells me which folder it’s in, so I can go looking for the feed and unsubscribe it there. I’m actually not really sure where I filed it. And I can’t search for feeds by name. Sure, I could have a better, more organized system, but really, I could use more help.

This contextual menu also doesn’t help me:

So until I go through my subscriptions folder by folder, I’m stuck reading pieces about the Harris campaign mocking Trump, which, to be honest, I really don’t care about.

Regardless, it’s my favorite feed reader. But I come up against this issue surprisingly regularly.

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Thoughts on a new image for the fediverse

1 min read

This proposed image for the fediverse is good; I like it a lot.

But I don't know that the combative language on this site is helpful. The Meta iconography isn't right, I agree, but there's something off about calling them “a large corporation that is joining in as late” (sic).

For one thing, Meta is early; for another, it seems to me that we want companies to participate? I don’t think seeking ideological purity is useful (and run the risks of the movement shooting itself in the foot).

Whatever you think about Meta’s goals for participating, I do also think Meta’s presence gives the network a sort of legitimacy that it was otherwise struggling to achieve. That’s a net benefit: we must grow the network.

I also agree with the point, made by Chris Messina, Manton Reece and others, that the right phrase is the social web, not the fediverse. The web is the network.

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Is the Open Source Bubble about to Burst?

[Tara Tarakiyee]

"I want to talk about three examples I see of cracks that are starting to form which signal big challenges in the future of OSS."

I had a knee-jerk initial reaction to this post - what open source bubble?! - but Tara Tarakiyee makes some important points here about our dependence on open source code and how that might change over time.

The through line to all of them is about money. The OSI's new "open source AI" definition is loose because AI vendors likely couldn't make money otherwise (although whether they can make money anyway is still up for debate); source-available licenses have become prevalent because it's easier to sell commercial licenses and therefore make a living building software; much open source software was precariously funded through European Commission Next Generation Internet grants, which are now evaporating.

While we can stand for pure open source values all we like, the people who build open source software need to make a living: food must go on the table and they need a roof over their heads. Ideally their compensation would extend beyond those basic necessities.

This has been the perennial problem for open source: how can it be sustainable for the people who build it? We're not launching into a post-monetary Star Trek future any time soon. In the meantime, people need to be paid for their work, or open source runs the risk of being a hobbyist-only endeavor.

People won't pay for software that they don't need to pay for. I suspect open-core, which opens the core of a software platform while monetizing high-value extensions, is the best answer we can hope for. But even that might not be realistic.

[Link]

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Andy Jassy on using generative AI in software development at Amazon

[Andy Jassy on LinkedIn]

Andy Jassy on using Amazon Q, the company's generative AI assistant for software development, internally:

"The average time to upgrade an application to Java 17 plummeted from what’s typically 50 developer-days to just a few hours. We estimate this has saved us the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years of work (yes, that number is crazy but, real)."

"The benefits go beyond how much effort we’ve saved developers. The upgrades have enhanced security and reduced infrastructure costs, providing an estimated $260M in annualized efficiency gains."

Of course, Amazon is enormous, and any smaller business will need to scale down those numbers and account for efficiencies that may have occurred between engineers there.

Nevertheless, these are incredible figures. The savings are obviously real, allowing engineers to focus on actual work rather than the drudgery of upgrading Java (which is something that absolutely nobody wants to spend their time doing).

We'll see more of this - and we'll begin to see more services which allow for these efficiency gains between engineers across smaller companies, startups, non-profits, and so on. The dumb companies will use this as an excuse for reductions in force; the smart ones will use it as an opportunity to accelerate their team's productivity and build stuff that really matters.

[Link]

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More Unoffice Hours

Hello!

Back in May, I announced Unoffice Hours, inspired by something Matt Webb had established with his community. Anyone could book a 30 minute meeting with me, for any reason, on a Friday. No money, no strings, no expectations.

It’s been a wonderful experiment. I’ve met a host of new people who were new to their careers; had fascinating conversations with people I’ve been a huge fan of for years; and I’ve caught up with old friends and acquaintances.

It wasn’t without its glitches: there were a few times I had to move calendar slots around because of unexpected travel. There were also vastly more people who wanted to sign up than I had slots for (a nice problem to have!), so sometimes sessions were booked months out. Towards the end, there were a few no-shows, which isn’t perfect, but also isn’t too big a deal. On balance, the conversations were meaningful, and it was absolutely worth it.

So let’s do it again.

I’ve been a 2X startup founder, early-stage investor, software engineer, engineering lead, CTO, and CEO. I’ve taught product design to teams around the world, and I’ve built large-scale end-user open source projects. I’m deep into the fediverse and care deeply about the open web and ethical tech policy. I’ve also been trained in leadership coaching.

Here are some topics it might be interesting to chat about:

  • Feedback on a project you’re working on (startups, software, a writing project)
  • Following up on something I’ve written in this space
  • Product and technology strategy in the public interest (news, education, libraries, other mission-driven organizations)
  • The open social and indie web
  • Fostering a collaborative organizational culture
  • Saying hello

If you’d like to chat, book a 30-minute session here!

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What We Learned In Our First Year of 404 Media

[The 404 Media team]

"In the last year, we learned that the technical infrastructure exists now for even non-technical journalists to build a sustainable site that can receive money from subscribers. [...] If you are a journalist reading this thinking about going out on their own: the tech is there for you to do so with very little know-how needed."

404 Media has been a new shining light in technology journalism. That it's worked out for them, having invested a thousand dollars each at the outset, is delightful.

And then there's this:

"The biggest challenge that we face is discoverability. To the extent possible, we don’t want to have to rely on social media algorithms, search engines that don’t index us properly and which are increasingly shoving AI answers into their homepages, and an internet ecosystem that is increasingly polluted by low-quality AI spam."

So to counter that, they're building community. Which just so happens to be what every single newsroom should also be doing.

Here's to another year of 404.

[Link]

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The FTC’s noncompete agreements ban has been struck down

[Jess Weatherbed at The Verge]

"A federal judge has blocked the Federal Trade Commission’s ban on noncompete agreements that make it difficult for workers to join their employers’ rivals or launch competing businesses. The ruling prevents the FTC’s ban on noncompete agreements from taking effect on September 4th, though the agency could still appeal the decision."

This is such a blow. Non-competes are already illegal in California; they're inherently anti-worker and are also very clearly a hindrance to innovation.

Hopefully the FTC appeals. The judge's argument that it would cause "irreparable harm" is nonsense: any business that has to protect itself by not allowing its workforce to go work for a competitor is obviously not competitive at what it does. Instead, businesses should seek to do good work and create conditions so that workers don't want to leave in the first place. The solution is a better workplace, not legal restrictions that prevent people from finding a different employer.

[Link]

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Using AI to feed my toddler on a road trip

Intersecting freeways

This past week I embarked upon two long car drives — from Philadelphia to Cape Cod and back again — with an almost-two year-old. He’s a remarkably good traveler who takes everything in his stride (as long as he has his puffy stickers and you agree to put Elmo on the radio from time to time).

The biggest challenge was finding places for him to eat well: restaurants that wouldn’t bat an eyelid at a toddler doing toddler things at the table, that also would have the kinds of food that he likes. (Yes, I packed snacks. But sometimes it’s time to sit down for a real meal.)

We made it work, but it was always a bit of a guessing game. Would X chain or Y mom-and-pop accommodate his needs? I found myself wishing that there was some kind of app that would just recommend somewhere to go — particularly as he could get hungry at a moment’s notice, and faffing around with restaurant reviews while I was driving was an impossibility.

So out of interest, once I returned, I asked ChatGPT for recommendations:

Find a restaurant suitable for attending with a toddler in Elkins Park, PA. Please just return the restaurant name and address; don't share any other information.

It returns:

The Creekside Co-op
7909 High School Rd, Elkins Park, PA 19027

That’s pretty good! Creekside is a local marketplace and brewery near where I live that absolutely is suitable for hanging out with a toddler.

I tried it in a few locations. In the part of Cape Cod where we were staying, it suggested the Moonakis Cafe, which is a superb choice. In the part of Oxford, England, where I grew up, it suggested The Victoria Arms — again, no complaints whatsoever. I’d eat there with my little one in a heartbeat.

So what if I want to make this a simple app, starting on the web?

It turns out that you can replace the name of the location in the query with its GPS coordinates, which simplifies matters a great deal. You can get the user’s current location via the web geolocation API: you can then plug that straight into the query, make an API call, and forward the user directly to a Google Maps view for the restaurant. Reverse geocoding APIs, which take latitude and longitude and return a human-readable name, are also available, and might be useful — but they tend to cost money, and the API call to ChatGPT is already an expense.

More refinements are possible, of course. Most crucially, it would be helpful to know if a given restaurant is actually open; on a road trip, it would also be very useful to find restaurants that are close to the freeway. I wouldn’t mind seeing a top 3 or top 5 list with the relative merits of each one. And being able to plan a trip around toddler-friendly eating spots in advance would be gold.

What’s sort of neat about the technology is that this is all actually very feasible — in an hour or two. Using AI as an engine in this way cuts out a lot of development time, not to mention the need to gather your own database. There are obviously ethical issues related to how these models were trained, which are sure to be litigated for years to come. But here we’re not creating any new content or replacing an artist: we’re making it easier to find our way to a local business.

The next time I’m on a road trip with my little one and I see that he’s starting to get hungry, I’ll be able to hit a button on my phone and get directions to a nearby place that will probably be appropriate for him to sit down and eat at. I think that’s cool.

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Fediverse Governance Drop

[Erin Kissane]

"Back in the fall, I wrote about a research project I was diving into with Darius Kazemi. Now, after a few months of prepping and conducting interviews with people who run Mastodon and Hometown servers about how they govern their parts of the network and then many more months of analyzing and writing up what we found, we’re releasing our findings. We found so much."

This is an impressively in-depth report by Erin Kissane and Darius Kazemi, which has some important conclusions about how moderation can work in a federated system (including the not-insignificant conclusion that it can work). There's room for more tooling, and better communication between instances - but this is all doable stuff.

The shorter satellite documents - opportunities for funders and developers who want to serve this ecosystem and a quick-start guide to fediverse governance - are super helpful, too.

[Link]

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