Commentary on links that caught my attention around the web.
Notable links
[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
Technology
[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
Notable links
[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."
Labor
[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
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