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Online Safety and the “Great Decentralization” – The Perils and Promises of Federated Social Media

[Samantha Lai and Yoel Roth at Tech Policy Press]

"Decentralized social media platforms offer the promise of alternative governance structures that empower consumers and rebuild social media on a foundation of trust. However, over two years after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter sparked an exodus of users seeking new homes on the social web, federated platforms remain ill-equipped to meet the threats of abuse, harassment, coordinated manipulation, and spam that have plagued social media for years. Given the porous nature of decentralized services, these limitations will not just affect individual servers, but reverberate through the social web."

Most major decentralized and federated platforms don't have the necessary tooling "for scalable management of harmful content and conduct — or even the enforcement of their own rules."

For some, of course, this is by design: the same version of "free speech" which animates Elon Musk and in effect prevents speech from anyone except for in-groups and the loud and powerful. To have truly free speech - where people from vulnerable communities can have a voice and real debate can be held without threat of violence - there must be trust and safety and moderation.

The piece rightly calls out IFTAS for the great work it's doing in this area. More must be done - which in part means convincing federated communities that these ideas are important.

Unfortunately a common attitude is that "we don't have these problems" - a common refrain when your bias makes you blind to your lack of inclusion. As many Black users found when they joined Mastodon and were asked to hide the details of their lived experiences under content warnings, or when people told them that these were American-only experiences (which, of course, they aren't), a predominantly white and male Fediverse that seeks to maintain the status quo rather than learning and growing can be quite a conservative place.

This is an important piece, and an important finding, which everyone working on decentralized tech should pay attention to.

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US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’

[Hannah Devlin, Tom Burgis, David Pegg and Jason Wilson at The Guardian]

Quite a disturbing new startup coming to light in The Guardian:

“The footage appears to show experimental genetic selection techniques being advertised to prospective parents. A Heliospect employee, who has been helping the company recruit clients, outlined how couples could rank up to 100 embryos based on “IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants”, including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness.”

Eugenics is a discredited, troubling idea, and the startup’s claims are akin to junk science, even if the underlying data was drawn from UK Biobank, which seems like a great resource when used for good. Still, the startup is clearly out there offering its services, while using a regulatory arbitrage strategy (operating between jurisdictions to exploit legal differences and finding ways to exploit loopholes in the law) that isn’t a million miles away from techniques used by startups like Uber, and throwing up all kinds of ethical questions in the process.

A major figure in the startup is Jonathan Anomaly (his real name), who has been advocating for “liberal eugenics” for some time:

“Anomaly is a well-known figure in a growing transatlantic movement that promotes development of genetic selection and enhancement tools, which he says should not be confused with coercive state-sponsored eugenics. “All we mean by [liberal eugenics] is that parents should be free and maybe even encouraged to use technology to improve their children’s prospects once it’s available,” he told the podcast The Dissenter.”

Of course, eugenics isn’t controversial or unethical solely when it’s forcibly done by the government. As the article notes:

“Katie Hasson, associate director of the Center for Genetics and Society, in California, said: “One of the biggest problems is that it normalises this idea of ‘superior’ and ‘inferior’ genetics.” The rollout of such technologies, she said, “reinforces the belief that inequality comes from biology rather than social causes”.”

Enough ink has been spilled on science fiction stories that describe the effects of exactly this startup’s mission that the founders should have understood they were building a biotech torment nexus: something that was described in fiction as a technology that must never be built for the good of humanity, lest we fall victim to both intended and unintended consequences. Regardless, if someone can build it, they eventually will, and here we are.

There’s a related ethical question raised here, which related to who, exactly, should have access to biological research data. It turns out that UK Biobank also gave access to its database to a race science group. Should it have? Or should there be ethical safeguards on these databases? I’m more inclined to say that knowledge bases should be as open access as possible, but the implications for use by eugenicists and racist groups are pretty dire.

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Republicans, young adults trust news on social media about as much as news from national outlets

[Kirsten Eddy at Pew Research Center]

The lede is a little buried here behind some pretty shocking top-line stats:

"Today, 37% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents say they have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites. This is nearly on par with the 40% of Republicans who express this level of trust in national news organizations."

"[...] Adults under 30 are now nearly as likely to have a lot of or some trust in the information that comes from social media sites (52%) as from national news organizations (56%)."

Okay, but what's fascinating is that both groups trust local news outlets a great deal more. These have been systemically underfunded and are often run on a shoestring, but there's something about the local voice that really matters.

My suspicion - which is really just a hunch, so take it with a pinch of salt - is that it's because local news outlets don't tend to deal as much with abstract partisan politics. They're not going to comment on what Trump said now, or perceived shortcomings in the Harris campaign.

But, of course, local politics really matters. So it's interesting to think about what might happen if there's more investment in the space - something that initiatives like Tiny News Collective, the American Journalism Project and The Lenfest Institute are already thinking hard about. We need diverse, mission-driven outlets like Open Vallejo and Mission Local to spring up across the country.

My question as a technologist is how platforms, and more pointedly, open protocols can support these newsrooms. How can technology help great local journalists find the reach and make the impact they need, on their terms? And how can journalists, technologists, and product thinkers work together to shine a light on local politics and improve life in communities across the country?

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You should be using an RSS reader

[Cory Doctorow]

Cory Doctorow discusses how he reads writers like Molly White:

"This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface. It is my secret super-power."

I agree. I start every day in my RSS reader (I maintain a very simple live list of my subscriptions over here) and it's one of the best tools I use. I rarely miss a news story from a publisher I care about - whether that's a newsroom, an individual, or an organization. And nobody's getting in the way to try and predict what I should be interested in.

RSS is free, open, well-established, and easy to use. More people should be using it. Even you.

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Far-Right Extremists Embrace Environmentalism to Justify Violent Anti-Immigrant Beliefs

[Abrahm Lustgarten at ProPublica]

"For a generation, conservatives — not just the far right, which Crusius appeared to identify with — had propelled the notion that climate change was a hoax fabricated so the government could impose new restrictions on the economy and society. Yet Crusius hadn’t denied climate change at all. Instead, he seemed to claim its impacts were themselves arguments justifying his violence."

Abrahm Lustgarten has written a sobering piece about the far right's embrace of climate change as a root for anti-immigrant and eugenicist sentiments. We can see this playing out among conservative groups across the country: in a world where resources are becoming more scarce, preserving "white European ideals and beliefs" becomes a part of "preserving the purity of [America's] ecology".

Ecofascism has been with us for a long time, and unfortunately has long been a subset of climate movements. But as the planet heats up and climate discussions become less hypothetical and more immediate, these conversations are becoming louder, too.

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My solar-powered and self-hosted website

[Dries Buytaert]

"I'm excited to share an experiment I've been working on: a solar-powered, self-hosted website running on a Raspberry Pi."

Lovely!

The key seems to be a Voltaic 50-watt panel and 18 amp-hour battery, which run to around $300 in total. That's not a lot of money for something that can theoretically run in perpetuity.

I've been wanting to make my own website run on fully green energy for a long time, and it's hard to find a web host that does this directly rather than through trading carbon credits, which I'm deeply suspicious of. (The exception is Iceland, where geothermal energy is common.)

I wonder what it would take to productize something like this and make it an all-in-one home server solution? Or to put your wifi router and modem on solar? (Assuming your whole house isn't on solar, that is, which mine sadly isn't.)

This also seems fair:

"It may seem unconventional, but I believe it's worth considering: many websites, mine included, aren't mission-critical. The world won't end if they occasionally go offline. That is why I like the idea of hosting my 10,000 photos on a solar-powered Raspberry Pi."

I feel the same way.

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Underrepresented journalists most impacted by layoffs, says new report

[James Salanga at The Objective]

"Layoffs in journalism since 2022 have disproportionately impacted people of marginalized genders and people of color, according to a new report from the Institute of Independent Journalists (IIJ). It collects data from a survey with 176 journalist respondents who had undergone a layoff or buyout since 2022."

This mirrors the impact of layoffs in tech, and likely other industries. In 2023, Prism reported that:

"Recent surveys have found that women, people of color, disabled workers, and other marginalized groups are disproportionately affected by mass layoffs in tech despite being underrepresented in the industry. According to Harvard Business Review, companies rely heavily on position and tenure when deciding on cuts, which translates to wiping out “most or all of the gains they’ve made in diversity.”"

This is damning in itself, but also suggests that many diversity gains were in positions closer to entry level than management level.

The irony for journalism is that it's the diverse members of newsrooms who can help them find broader audiences by ensuring that diverse perspectives are represented both in coverage and in management decisions. For a declining industry, it's a self-sabotaging thing to do. But, again, it says a lot about the demographics of the people who make the decisions.

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Is Matt Mullenweg defending WordPress or sabotaging it?

[Mathew Ingram]

Mathew Ingram's overview of the WordPress drama continues to be updated with new information. The hole just seems to be getting deeper and deeper. As he says: it's a mess.

"It's pretty clear that Matt sees what he is doing as protecting WordPress, and forcing a no-good corporation to cough up some dough after years of taking advantage of the community (he says he has been trying to negotiate with WP Engine for more than a year now, while WP Engine says it gives back to WordPress in a number of ways.) To some observers like me, however — and to some other longtime members of the WordPress ecosystem — it looks like Matt has dragged the WordPress community into a legal mess with a variety of unforeseen and potentially serious consequences."

I still don't fully understand what prompted this sea change in how Matt has addressed the wider community, including WP Engine. I have this ongoing sense that there's another shoe left to drop, whether it's relating to stalling revenue at Automattic and pressure from its board (pure conjecture on my part, to be clear), or something else entirely. Without some strong motivating factor this just seems to be self-sabotage.

At this point I'm really curious to see what's next. All this drama has also made it clear that for the kind of CMS WordPress is - more of a framework than an out-of-the-box solution at this point, but with a strong ready-made editing and administration experience - there aren't many alternatives. That's not to denegrate other projects like Drupal, etc, because I think they're different kinds of CMSes. Ghost is much more narrowly focused, too. I think if WordPress had a real competitor in its space, this might all be playing out differently.

(If I was WP Engine and had run out of options to de-escalate, I'd be going ahead and forking WordPress right now. And what a mess that would be.)

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It feels like 2004 again.

[Anil Dash]

Anil Dash makes a pertinent observation about the current state of the web:

"At the start of this year, I wrote The Internet Is About To Get Weird Again, which began by calling back to the Internet of 2000. In thinking more about it, though, we more closely resemble the Internet of a few years later, where the crash of the dot-com bubble and the stock market had the same effect that the popping of the crypto bubble did: the casuals who were just trying to make a quick buck are much less likely to jump in the pool."

I agree.

The way I've been thinking about it is: There's everything to play for. We understand what can go wrong. We understand many of the needs, although we should always go out and learn more. But for the first time in a long time, the internet isn't calcified: there isn't a sense that the platforms people use are set. Anyone can come along and build something new, and it's absolutely possible for it to catch on.

And, as Anil says, the spirit of the web is more intact than it has been in a long time. Gone (hopefully) are the Wall Street-esque folks who are here to make a bunch of money; instead, we're left with the people who genuinely care about connecting and creating and making something good. That's what powered the web's heyday, and that's what has the potential to make a difference now.

Let's go make good stuff.

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WordPress.org’s latest move involves taking control of a WP Engine plugin

[Wes Davis at The Verge]

The feud between Automattic (or more specifically, Matt Mullenweg himself) and WP Engine is getting bonkers:

"WordPress.org has taken over a popular WP Engine plugin in order “to remove commercial upsells and fix a security problem,” WordPress cofounder and Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg announced today. This “minimal” update, which he labels a fork of the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin, is now called “Secure Custom Fields.”"

What appears to have happened is this:

  1. WP Engine was banned from the WordPress plugin portal.
  2. A flaw was found in its popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin and patched - but because it was banned from the portal, WordPress users couldn't get an automatic update.
  3. Rather than seed the patch, Automattic forked the plugin, renamed it, and took over the upgrade path in-place.
  4. All WordPress users of ACF that upgrade via the portal will now get Automattic's version, which removes all commercial ties to WP Engine.

Technically, Automattic (or anyone) can fork any open source plugin - that's what open source is all about. But seizing the upgrade path and swapping for the new version in-place in the portal is a pretty rotten move.

ACF is well-used in commercial sites and is often provided by agencies as a bedrock for their customizations. This isn't some sideline: for many users, ACF makes WordPress significantly more useful.

It's an existential issue for any open source plugin contributor. Again, forking is well within anyone's rights - but replacing the upgrade path is something only Automattic can do.

This is only muddied by the fact that the portal is technically owned by Matt alone, rather than Automattic. But the lines are blurry at best.

Whereas the feud had previously not created a risk to WordPress's functionality, for many serious users this is now a big problem. A stable platform with solid upgrade paths is a huge part of why people choose WordPress. Whatever's going on behind the scenes, this altercation has created huge risk for anyone who's thinking about making the leap (and, at the same time, may open up opportunities for other open source CMS vendors).

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Insecure Deebot robot vacuums collect photos and audio to train AI

[Julian Fell at Australian ABC News]

"Ecovacs robot vacuums, which have been found to suffer from critical cybersecurity flaws, are collecting photos, videos and voice recordings – taken inside customers' houses – to train the company's AI models."

So in effect these robot vacuums are tiny spies inside your home, sending details about your living space and potentially your family to some centralized data store.

This must be some terrible breach, right? A mistake? Code that should never have made it to production?

Not quite:

"The Chinese home robotics company, which sells a range of popular Deebot models in Australia, said its users are "willingly participating" in a product improvement program."

"[...] It also states that voice recordings, videos and photos that are deleted via the app may continue to be held and used by Ecovacs."

So, obviously, this is bad. The thing is, if any device is recording this kind of footage and sending it to a centralized datastore, it's reasonable to assume that it will eventually be compromised, either by a third party or the vendor themselves. It's not good that this is happening, but unless footage remains on your home network and never makes it to the internet, every device should be considered a security risk.

It's worth considering which devices could be quietly sending data to someone who can see them, and what implications that might eventually have. A simple rule of thumb is that if it's physically possible, someone will eventually do it.

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Why Reach journalists are being asked to write up to eight articles per day

[Charlotte Tobitt at Press Gazette]

"Paul Rowland wrote in an email to staff on 27 September that article volumes were being talked about “a lot in newsrooms at the moment” and blamed, in part, the volatility from previously huge traffic referrers like Google and Facebook."

"A separate email, sent by Birmingham Live editor Graeme Brown last month, suggested journalists should file at least eight stories per day unless they were newsgathering outside of the office."

Referrals from Facebook are down from 50% of traffic to 5%, and every newsroom is seeing similar declines from both social and search. But this is an insane way to deal with it: asking every journalist to file eight stories a day is a way to drive quality through the floor and exacerbate a downward spiral.

You can't just keep doing what you're doing but more of it. This change requires a rethink of platform and more ownership over newsroom technology: it's time to actually innovate around what it means to publish on the web, and to, finally, move from "audience" to "community".

To be blunt: every newsroom publishing on the web that doesn't do this will go away.

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Waffle House Index labels Hurricane Milton red, closes stores

[Ben Kesslen at Quartz]

"Waffle House, the iconic American restaurant chain with over 1,600 locations known for cooking up Southern breakfast food, has developed an advanced storm center FEMA consults with."

Stores in the path of Milton were closed in advance of the storm, which is rare for Waffle House, which is often the last store standing.

It's been sophisticated about storm predictions and response since Katrina:

"The chain also developed the Waffle House Storm Index, which was started after former FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said, “If you get there and the Waffle House is closed? That’s really bad. That’s where you go to work.”"

As Pat Warner, a member of "the Waffle House crisis management team" said in the article, it's not about the extra sales Waffle House gets when it does re-open, often using generators and other emergency equipment. It's more to do with how this integrates the stores with their communities. They wouldn't do it if there wasn't a positive uplift for the business, but it comes across as a genuine desire to help.

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Forums Are Still Alive, Active, And A Treasure Trove Of Information

[Chris Person at Aftermath]

"Over the years, forums did not really get smaller, so much as the rest of the internet just got bigger. Reddit, Discord and Facebook groups have filled a lot of that space, but there is just certain information that requires the dedication of adults who have specifically signed up to be in one kind of community. This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment."

What an amazing index of indie forums still going strong on the web.

I'd love to do a survey of what they're powered by, and in turn, I'd love to read interviews of the product / engineering leads for each of these platforms. Are they individual developers, keeping the lights on out of love? Are they thriving companies? Something else? I'm fascinated that there's these corners of the web that haven't changed all that much in decades, but are full of life, supported by platforms that surely must have to evolve to deal with threats and abuse at the very least.

I love all of it. This kind of thing is what makes the web great.

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Earth’s ‘vital signs’ show humanity’s future in balance, say climate experts

[Damian Carrington at The Guardian]

Meanwhile, while we're all paying attention elsewhere:

"More and more scientists are now looking into the possibility of societal collapse, said the report, which assessed 35 vital signs in 2023 and found that 25 were worse than ever recorded, including carbon dioxide levels and human population. This indicates a “critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis”, they said."

And:

"“Climate change has already displaced millions of people, with the potential to displace hundreds of millions or even billions,” he said. “That would likely lead to greater geopolitical instability, possibly even partial societal collapse.”"

And:

"The assessment concludes: “Only through decisive action can we safeguard the natural world, avert profound human suffering, and ensure that future generations inherit the livable world they deserve. The future of humanity hangs in the balance.”"

In a world where everything seems amplified and like it's from some kind of comic book version of reality, making it hard to engage with it as actual truth, it's imperative that we don't gloss over this. We all have to change, and we all have to demand change.

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Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster

[Charles Duhigg at the New Yorker]

"As the tech industry has become the planet’s dominant economic force, a coterie of specialists—led, in part, by the political operative who introduced the idea of “a vast right-wing conspiracy” decades ago—have taught Silicon Valley how to play the game of politics. Their aim is to help tech leaders become as powerful in Washington, D.C., and in state legislatures as they are on Wall Street."

This is a major change - it wasn't so long ago that journalists were remarking that tech was hopeless at influencing Washington.

That's not always a bad thing, but it sometimes very much is - for example when Silicon Valley lobbies politicians against crypto protections, or against privacy legislation, or prevent rideshare drivers from receiving standard workplace benefits.

What is certainly true, which this article takes pains to point out, is that tech is now one of the most powerful cohorts in politics. Future Presidencies - perhaps including this next one - will be chosen in large part based on tech's agenda. That's a new normal we need to get used to, and tech workers who care about equity need to deeply understand.

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The blogosphere is in full bloom. The rest of the internet has wilted

[ John Naughton ]

"If you log into Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, you’ll find a constantly updated note telling you how many years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds the blog has been running. Sometime tomorrow morning the year field will switch to 30."

Running a blog for 30 years is no small feat. Dave Winer's Scripting News is a big deal that has an enduring community which he's built from scratch over that time.

This also resonates:

"In my experience, most journalists failed to understand the significance of the blogosphere. This was partly due to the fact that, like Dr Johnson, they thought that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money”, and so bloggers must be weird."

My position: everyone should blog. Every new voice adds something new to the conversation. And long-term bloggers like Dave have shown the way.

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If Harris Wins, Whether She Keeps Lina Khan Will Be Extremely Telling

[Karl Bode at TechDirt]

"The Harris campaign has remained largely silent on whether Khan will be allowed to stick around. And it remains entirely unclear whether Harris will continue Biden’s support of something that, for once, at least vaguely resembles antitrust reform and a crackdown of concentrated corporate power."

Many tech leaders - the article calls out Reid Hoffman - have put open pressure on Harris to let go of Khan. FTC leaders often change between administrations, but I agree the premise that Lina Khan has actually done a pretty good job - and certainly better at anti-trust than we've seen in decades.

That's important because tech hasn't been a sideline industry for a long time. It's integrated into every aspect of how we live our lives and learn about the world. We should care about how much power an individual tech company (and its backers) can get, both to protect a competitive market and to ensure no one company has outsized influence on our democracy.

And as Karl Bode points out, it will say a lot about Harris's Presidency:

"Right now, Harris is remaining ambiguous about whether Khan will be allowed to stay at her post; allowing voters to fill in the blanks using vibes and their imagination. Whether Khan is kept in office, or replaced with yet another cookie cutter careerist, should prove pretty immediately telling in the new year."

We may find out soon.

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Rules for Resters

[Ben Werdmuller on Medium]

I find myself returning to this piece I wrote on Medium about building downtime into your work and lifestyle. It's important:

Eight years into working in America, I’m still getting used to the macho culture around vacations. I had previously lived in a country where 28 days per year is the minimum that employers can legally provide; taking time off is just considered a part of life. The US is one of the only countries in the world that doesn’t guarantee any vacation at all (the others are Tonga, Palau, Nauru, Micronesia, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands). It’s telling that American workers often respond to this simple fact with disbelief. How does anything get done?! Well, it turns out that a lot gets done when people aren’t burned out or chained to their desks.

When was the last time you took a real lunch hour? I don't think I've had one in at least five years. That's not a good sign.

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You Can’t Own The Social Web

[Bix Frankonis]

Bix Frankonis does not agree with my analysis of the Fediverse and the Social Web Foundation. For him, much of the issue relates to appropriation of the "social web" name:

"Like many trade groups, this one is named and self-described in a manner deliberately meant to capture and colonize an entire area. To become, in effect, synonymous with what its name names. It shits on twenty-five years of the web."

He's obviously entitled to his opinion, but I personally think it's a stretch to say that it shits on 25 years of the web. Of course there was a social web before the Fediverse - I'm a long-term indieweb participant and an even more long-term blogger. But I don't think that precludes this name, which is more of a bet on one embodiment of the future of the social web.

But here's what I really love: this conversation is playing out across platforms, across blogs, and across sites. In many ways, it's an illustration in itself of what the web is, and why blogging remains wonderful.

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Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer

[Andrew Schmelyun]

Following my piece about reading the news on paper, I came across this post from Anrew Schmelyun:

"I recently purchased a dot matrix printer from eBay, and thought it would be a great excuse to have a custom "front page" printed out and ready for me each day. So, that's what I built!"

What a neat idea: he's called a few APIs (the New York Times, Reddit, Open-Meteo, and so on), installed it to run on a Raspberry Pi, and connected it to an old-school dot matrix printer to create a kind of Telex newspaper each morning,

I'd thought about doing this with an e-ink display, but honestly, why not just print it out?

I think I would want to pick some different news sources (the NYT is no longer my go-to) and leave out Reddit in favor of links that my contacts had shared on, say, Mastodon, but this is really fun. I might try and put together something similar, albeit with my existing laser printer rather than a dot matrix setup.

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Solving the Maker-Taker problem

[Dries Buytaert]

"Addressing the Maker-Taker challenge is essential for the long-term sustainability of open source projects. Drupal's approach may provide a constructive solution not just for WordPress, but for other communities facing similar issues."

Dries lays out a constructive approach to crediting open source contributors. There's no stick here: just a series of what amount to promotion and status levels in return for making contributions like "code, documentation, mentorship, marketing, event organization" and so on.

I've certainly had to deal with the maker-taker problem too, although not at the magnitude that either Drupal or WordPress need to consider it. When I worked on Elgg, the open source ecosystem was relatively underdeveloped, and I don't remember it being much of a problem. In contrast, Known plugged into a significantly more advanced ecosystem. The solution Dries lays out makes a ton of sense to me, and I wish we'd done more along these lines in both cases.

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How to share your access to media with family and simultaneously sweep the annual nerdy nephew of the year awards

[Matt Haughey]

"A couple months ago I was hanging out with my aunt, and she mentioned her cable+internet bill was around $250 per month. I thought that was insane and that I should do something about it. She's a 75 year old retiree that watches baseball and the hallmark channel, and she shouldn't have to pay as much as a car payment every month to do it."

What follows is a very smart way to share media profiles with a family member who doesn't live in your house, using Tailscale as a way to make them seamlessly appear like they're a part of your household.

Tailscale is easy-to-use and is virtually magic. I use it across my devices, and recommend it to others. This is a use case that makes a lot of sense.

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Bop Spotter

[Bop Spotter]

"I installed a box high up on a pole somewhere in the Mission of San Francisco. Inside is a crappy Android phone, set to Shazam constantly, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It's solar powered, and the mic is pointed down at the street below."

As surveillance goes, I'm into it. I appreciate the commentary:

"Heard of Shot Spotter? Microphones are installed across cities across the United States by police to detect gunshots, purported to not be very accurate. This is that, but for music."

I don't give it much time before someone figures out where it is and tries to mess with it, though.

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How the UK became the first G7 country to phase out coal power

[Molly Lempriere and Simon Evans in CarbonBrief]

"Remarkably, the UK’s coal power phaseout – as well as the closure of some of the country’s few remaining blast furnaces at Port Talbot in Wales and Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire – will help push overall coal demand in 2024 to its lowest level since the 1600s."

The UK aims to fully decarbonize its power supplies by 2030. That involves phasing out gas power in under six years: a big milestone and an ambitious goal, and one it hopes will be a case study for other nations.

Meanwhile, the US continues to limp along, generating around 60% of its electricity from fossil fuels. In light of accelerating climate change, that's a figure we should be truly embarrassed about.

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