Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Media
[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
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
Notable links
[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
Technology
[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
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.
Technology
[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
Technology
[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
AI
[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
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
Business
[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
Fediverse
[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
AI
[Open Society Foundations] "In February 2024, the Open Society Foundations issued a call for applications for a convening in which selected participants would share their visions of an AI-mediated future." I thought this, from the concluding observations, was telling: "Participants were generallyreluctant or unable to articulate exactly