Today’s companies seem to want to use AI for everything, no matter how ill-advised. I guess if I was going to update my book Customers Included I’d have to rename it Just Ignore Them, Some Bot Will Tell You What To Do. The mania for AI – privileging AI fantasies over what customers actually want – is leading companies to spend a fortune on tech solutions that overlook customers’ actual needs. These organizations could make things better for customers without spending a single extra dollar on AI.

Source: buttondown.com

But code eventually matters, as that’s the source of truth for what’s on production. As Alberto Brandolini said: It's developers' (mis)understanding, not domain experts' knowledge, that gets released in production. Now, it’s the developers’ and LLMs’ misunderstandings that are deployed to production, not the expert’s knowledge. Neither the markdown spec. And coding is just one danger. Outsourcing thinking is an even more dangerous path, as: If LLMs are doing everything, then again, what are humans for? Aren’t we cutting the branch on which we’re sitting? LLMs are statistical parrots. They repeat the most possible answer. Which means mediocre. This can still be fine enough for many cases, but for those we want to make a difference for? Definitely not. Just like we’re losing our coding skills by not doing them, we’re losing design skills by not practising them.

Source: www.architecture-weekly.com

I guess there is the big avenue of people who just want to make a group with their friends, or with other florists, and we're already moving in that direction already with NIP-29 groups and growing support for topic, theme, niche and semi-closed relays. I'm happy about it.

Maybe the circumstances that we cover have changed. A lot of people feel let down by what now looks like over-optimism on technology’s impact. Take social media—everyone was thrilled with Twitter in its early days, as well as Facebook and other services. It turned out that there was a lot of toxicity. Don’t you feel that the promise of social media hasn't been met? I think it can be very toxic. But I also learned a lot from it. The biggest thing I would change is to give more sovereignty to people. I do think that Twitter having to be a company was its ultimate downfall. It should have stayed at the protocol level. We should have an open protocol for social media. No company should own it, and we should all be able to build on top of it. That would address a bunch of the problems that have come up.

Source: archive.ph

When you’re following an intentional schedule, your efforts are oriented toward goals that you find important. You also feel a satisfying sense of self-efficacy. These realities engage your long-term reward system, which can override the urges generated by its short-term counterpart, dissipating the drive for quick gratification from activities like glancing at your phone. In other words: The more you organize your analog life, the less appealing you’ll find the digital alternative. If this is true, then maybe the thing social media companies fear most is not some newly-powerful application-blocking software or impossibly strict regulation, but rather a good old-fashioned daily planner.

Source: calnewport.com

Imagine your own product. You likely won’t expect users 5 years from today to navigate 5 pages deep, apply filters and sort data just to try to derive the answer themselves… will you? My hope is that you will embrace the change and have a first party experience where people can ask a question and get an answer. Users can trigger actions with a few words and get results in seconds. AI will be the new steering wheel of the internet, it won’t be navigating pages. Now is the time to invest in high quality components. If you’re not using an AI first component library or thinking about how AI could consume or create user interfaces with your branding then now is the time. You’re not behind (yet) but in today’s world where the world changes every month, it’s best to be ahead.

Source: bitsandbytes.dev

Tech companies may genuinely want to develop AI tools for the benefit of all humanity, to echo OpenAI’s founding mission, and genuinely believe that they need to raise amounts of cash to do so. But to liken raising a child—or, for that matter, the evolution of Homo sapiens—to developing algorithmic products makes very clear that the industry has lost touch, if it ever had any, with what it means to be human. To “train a human”—that is, to live a life—is to struggle, to accept the possibility of failure, and to sometimes meander simply in search of wonder and beauty. Generative AI is all about cutting out that process and making any pursuit as instant, efficient, and effortless as possible. These tools may serve us. But to put them on the same plane as organic life is sad.

Source: archive.ph

“Nothing humbles you like telling your OpenClaw ‘confirm before acting’ and watching it speedrun deleting your inbox,” Yue said. “I couldn’t stop it from my phone. I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb.”Yue also shared screenshots of her WhatsApp chat with the OpenClaw agent, where she implores it to “not do that,” “stop, don’t do anything,” and “STOP OPENCLAW.”Yue said she instructed the AI agent to “Check this inbox too and suggest what you would archive or delete, don’t action until I tell you to.” She said in an X post, “This has been working well for my toy inbox, but my real inbox was too huge and triggered compaction. During the compaction, it lost my original instruction.”

Source: d8f5y1br9yl53p.archive.ph

Assuming you take on this goal, what’s the best way to improve your cinematic cognitive patience? Here are my three suggestions: Keep your phone in a different room. This prevents your short-term reward system from firing out of control with distracting impulses. Watch better movies. If you have a meaningful viewing experience, your long-term reward system will more strongly associate movies with lasting benefits, making it easier to delay gratification in the future. To help get through these movies at first, practice the thirty-minute rule. Before you start the movie, read a review or analysis that helps explain why it’s good. Pause the movie every thirty minutes or so to read another review or analysis. This helps reorient your brain toward a perspective of critical appreciation, allowing you to continually find value and avoid the sense of slogging for the sake of slogging. I appreciate the irony here: I’m suggesting you watch one screen to reduce the distracting impact of another. But it’s become clear to me recently that although many people are fed up with the impact of digital devices on their brains, they don’t know how to push back. Maybe rediscovering the patient joys of movies can be a part of that answer…

Source: calnewport.com

About 9,000,000 profiles/sites were saved. A few profiles ~3000, particularly ones with leading or trailing dashes, were not saved in time. The WARC files are uploaded into the Angering the Hyves collection. Previously, the Wayback Machine did not have pages available because of the evil robots.txt exclusion. Currently, replaying pagination and photo viewing is not working. However, these artifacts are safely recorded within the WARC files. Contact us on IRC for assistance if needed. There is a list of usernames and in what collection they ended up here.

Source: wiki.archiveteam.org

Be a parent. It is not the internet’s job to cater to your lack of parenting by just letting your kid online. Fucking lazy trash ass parents just sit a kid in front of a computer or an iPad and then are stunned when apparently they find bad shit. Be a parent. Be involved in your kids’ life. Raise your children. Don’t make it the internet’s job to do that for you. 

Source: www.techdirt.com

When you always ask AI first, you stop building the neural pathways that come from struggling with a problem yourself. The struggle is where learning happens. The confusion is where understanding forms. Skip that, and you get faster output but shallower understanding.

Source: siddhantkhare.com

To understand how we can replace Google push notifications (FCM) with something open source and decentralized, we need to understand how they work and why they are needed in the first place. This talk explains the mechanics of push notifications and why, despite their potentially bad reputation, they are a more elegant solution than having every app maintain its own persistent server connection. While open-source tools like microG can remove proprietary Google software from your Android phone, the actual notifications are still sent via Google's servers (Firebase Cloud Messaging). UnifiedPush is a framework that allows push notifications to be delivered in a decentralized manner or through self-hosted servers. Numerous open-source Android apps already support UnifiedPush, including Tusky, Ltt.rs, Fedilab, DAVx⁵, Fennec, Element, and many more. The presentation ends with a short demo on how to use UnifiedPush on Android.

Source: fosdem.org

Finally, Health-Thing was named the winner in the Public-Private Partnership category for connecting education, healthcare and young healthcare professionals via a social learning platform.

Source: www.icthealth.org

One internal Google presentation, which is undated, conceded that using YouTube for learning is hard because the platform is distracting and disorganized. It showed an example in which YouTube recommended “Will Ferrell Hilarious Acceptance Speech” from user “cocksandballs123” to someone who had searched for content about “linear equations.”

Source: www.nbcnews.com

One internal November 2020 presentation slide said acclimating children to Google’s ecosystem in school would hopefully lead them to use its products as adults: “You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life.” Another undated slide deck suggested imagining a world where “Parents ask their children ‘Why aren’t you watching more YouTube?’” and “School Administrators shift budgets from Textbooks to YouTube subscriptions.”

Source: www.nbcnews.com

But this became instantly obvious when (nearly) the first slide during the Opening Remarks shouted loudly: "Open Source has always been political". The emotional introduction instantly brought home what Open Source is really about: Activism to break the chains of "big tech". Although big tech wasn't so big when they started the conference over 25 years ago, it is now more required than ever.

Source: derickrethans.nl

Your phone can be a server. Your laptop can be a server. That old Raspberry Pi collecting dust can be a server. Geogram runs station software on any device, turning personal hardware into community infrastructure. Nothing lives on someone else's cloud.

Source: github.com

But software for communication and collaboration seemed to require servers, whose cost grew with the software's popularity, so the question "who runs the server?" became a dilemma for free software projects. Should the project itself run the server? What about when costs grew too high? Should users run the server? But only a small niche of hobbyists have servers! Should an organization run the server? If so, then that organization now controls the data and relationships that make the product useful, limiting the freedom to fork and flee that makes free software so accountable and desirable. Reddit, for example, was once free software, but because forking Reddit's code would never have resulted in anything more than an empty website (since all the conversations and relationships that make Reddit what it is sit on company-run servers) Reddit being free software never gave Reddit's users any real power to hold it accountable. Federation is a proposed solution to this dilemma, but Gmail shows its limits. After all, email is the most well-known federated product, but Google can still build must-have features like spam filtering on the server side, and Gmail controls a user's email address, so exiting Gmail means updating dozens or hundreds of accounts created with that address. Exiting Gmail might be easier than exiting Facebook or Instagram, but no Gmail competitor can make exiting Gmail as easy and delightful an experience as Firefox made exiting Internet Explorer, because Gmail controls infrastructure, where Internet Explorer never did. So while federation does help, we must do better if we want to hold big tech accountable. Regulation is an even weaker proposed solution. Even when regulation works—and a quick look at the media, telecom, energy, or banking industries will illustrate its limits—regulation tends to create a cozy relationship between industry and regulators that makes industries easy targets for government subversion. For example, the highly-regulated telecom industry bends over backwards every time governments want help carrying out unpopular mass surveillance. Is this what we want from big tech? We're building Quiet because we believe that, for a broad and growing class of software, the best answer to the "who runs the server?" dilemma is "no one." Eliminate the server; in terms of accountability, it is a burden and a weakness. By eliminating servers from software's attack surface, software can be more private and secure. By eliminating exponentially growing server costs and the expertise-intensive work of scaling servers, software can be built by smaller teams under less financial pressure to betray users. Most importantly, by eliminating the server operator's control of relationships and data, users will be free to fork and exit, so they will once again have real power to hold software accountable.

Source: github.com

Vibe coding is degeneracy.

Screen Memories is a cycle of nine video works created between 2021 and 2023. It primarily concerns content encountered on social media platforms and the physiological effects of experiencing life through technologically mediated systems. While not explicitly simulating the aesthetics of social media platforms, it attempts to emulate the ebb and flow of a user in the act of doom scrolling.

Source: becoming.press

The bottleneck in Open Source is rarely new ideas or new code. It's people willing to maintain what already exists: reviewing, deciding, onboarding new people, and holding context for years. I have seen projects stall because nobody wanted to do that work, and others survive because a few people quietly stepped up. Maintainers do the work that keeps everything together. If you want a project to last, you have to take care of your maintainers.

Source: dri.es

First, I added content negotiation to my site. When a request includes Accept: text/markdown in the HTTP headers, my site returns the Markdown instead of the rendered HTML. Second, I made it possible to append .md to any URL. For example, https://dri.es/principles-for-life.md gives you clean Markdown with metadata like title, date, and tags. But how did those crawlers find the Markdown version so fast? I borrowed a pattern from RSS: RSS auto-discovery. Many sites include a link tag with rel="alternate" pointing to their RSS feed. I applied the same idea to Markdown: every HTML page now includes a link tag announcing that an alternative Markdown version exists at the .md URL. That "Markdown auto-discovery" turned out to be the key. The crawlers parse the HTML, find the alternate Markdown link, and immediately switch. That explains the hundreds of requests I saw within the first hour. The speed of adoption tells me AI agents are hungry for cleaner content formats and will use them the moment they find them. What I don't know yet is whether this actually benefits me. It might lead to more visibility in AI answers, or it might just make it easier for AI companies to use my content without sending traffic back. I know not everyone will love this experiment. Humans, including me, are teaching machines how to read our sites better, while machines are teaching humans to stop visiting us. The value exchange between creators and AI companies is far from settled, and it's entirely possible that making content easier for AI to consume will accelerate the hollowing out of the web.

Source: dri.es

A world in which software development is reduced to the ersatz management of energetic but messy digital agents is a world in which a once important economic sector is stripped down to fewer, more poorly paid jobs, as wrangling agents requires much less skill than producing elegant code from scratch. The consumer would fare no better, as the resulting software would be less stable and innovation would slow.

Source: calnewport.com

Winamp Skin Museum

Source: skins.webamp.org

With AI, people feel they don’t need to learn programming, writing, or any craft. But I think that’s the wrong conclusion, especially on a personal level. As AI won’t replace human thinking, we will lose the muscle of thinking like we lost the ability to do simple math or remember a phone number as phones and calculators have replaced it.

Source: www.ssp.sh

Notarization is a "security" feature by Apple. You send binaries to Apple, and they either approve them or not. In reality, notarization is about building binaries the way Apple likes it. I don't have anything against notarization as a concept. I specifically don't like the way Apple does notarization. I don't have time to deal with Apple. Homebrew installation script is configured to automatically delete com.apple.quarantine attribute, that's why the app should work out of the box, without any warnings that "Apple cannot check AeroSpace for malicious software"

Source: github.com

To get away from algorithms, away from being locked in and dependent on the platform, away from big tech chasing our attention, back to real connections as opposed to losing our followers with the Death of the Follower. We need open platforms such as Open Social Media and an open web, where the power isn’t in the platform, but in us as the producers. We need to get out of the algorithms, free from big tech, and back to real connections. But how?

Source: www.ssp.sh

We have designed a system that automates a standardised way of writing. We have codified la langue at a specific point in time. What we have left to play with is la parole. No language model will be able to keep up with the pace of weird internet lingo and memes. I expect we’ll lean into this. Using neologisms, jargon, euphemistic emoji, unusual phrases, ingroup dialects, and memes-of-the-moment will help signal your humanity. Not unlike teenagers using language to subvert their elders, or oppressed communities developing dialects that allow them to safely communicate amongst themselves.

Source: maggieappleton.com

This leaves us with some low-hanging fruit for humanness. We can tell richly detailed stories grounded in our specific contexts and cultures: place names, sensual descriptions, local knowledge, and, well the je ne sais quoi of being alive. Language models can decently mimic this style of writing but most don’t without extensive prompt engineering. They stick to generics. They hedge. They leave out details. They have trouble maintaining a coherent sense of self over thousands of words. Hipsterism and recency bias will help us here. Referencing obscure concepts, friends who are real but not famous, niche interests, and recent events all make you plausibly more human.

Source: maggieappleton.com

After the forest expands, we will become deeply sceptical of one another’s realness. Every time you find a new favourite blog or Twitter account or Tiktok personality online, you’ll have to ask: Is this really a whole human with a rich and complex life like mine? Is there a being on the other end of this web interface I can form a relationship with? “Relationship” in the holistic sense – friend, acquaintance, pen pal, intellectual interlocutor, frenemy, drinking buddy, and sure, maybe a lover. Before you continue, pause and consider: How would you prove you’re not a language model generating predictive text? What special human tricks can you do that a language model can’t?

Source: maggieappleton.com

The dark forest theory of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Dark Forest Theory of the Internet by Yancey Strickler Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk. function l(o){const r=document.createTreeWalker(o,NodeFilter.SHOW_TEXT,null);let t,e=!0;for(;t=r.nextNode();)if(t.textContent){const n=t.textContent.replace(/\s+/g," ");e?(t.textContent=n.trimStart(),e=!1):t.textContent=n}}const a=document.querySelectorAll(".intro-paragraph");a.forEach(l); It’s like a dark forest that seems eerily devoid of human life – all the living creatures are hidden beneath the ground or up in trees. If they reveal themselves, they risk being attacked by automated predators. Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and digital gardens . Or make themselves illegible and algorithmically incoherent in public venues.

Source: maggieappleton.com

Entire books can be written about the why of digital preservation in general, and pirate archivism in particular, but let us give a quick primer for those who are not too familiar. The world is producing more knowledge and culture than ever before, but also more of it is being lost than ever before. Humanity largely entrusts corporations like academic publishers, streaming services, and social media companies with this heritage, and they have often not proven to be great stewards. Check out the documentary Digital Amnesia, or really any talk by Jason Scott.

Source: archive.ph

The one thing I can say with absolute certainty about creativity is this – creating is always a journey into the unknown. No two books, businesses, symphonies or technologies are ever created the same way. Computers are things of rules and systems, but creating the computer was a terrifying walk into blind night for Alan Turing. Which is why we respect him, and other great creators, so highly. These great accomplishments that we term “creative”, and the huge contribution they make to humanity, lie on the other side of uncharted oceans of fear. Your chimpanzee-like physiology was simply not evolved to make that journey into fear. That capacity comes from some higher place (sometimes, often, called god…sorry again for those who hate the idea).

Source: damiengwalter.com

For the developer just starting out today, the landscape has shifted permanently. The protection once offered by copyright is dissolving into a sea of AI-generated syntax. The rise of the architect means that your value no longer lives in the files you commit to GitHub. It lives in your ability to define intent, maintain direction, and master the logic of a solution. You can no longer compete on the bricks. To survive and thrive in this new era, you have to compete on vision.

Source: joost.blog

The more you learn about pricing, the less you seem to know. I’ve been nattering on about this topic for well over 5000 words and I don’t really feel like we’re getting anywhere, you and I. Some days it seems like it would be easier to be a taxi driver, with prices set by law. Or to be selling sugar. Plain ol’ sugar. Yep. That would be sweet. Take my advice, offered about 20 pages back: charge $0.05 for your software. Unless it does bug tracking, in which case the correct price is $30,000,000. Thank you for your time, and I apologize for leaving you even less able to price software than you were when you started reading this.

Source: www.joelonsoftware.com

Be humble in your claims and assumptions. It’s great that your solution is based on post-quantum crypto and the most brilliant algorithms. But are you actually solving the problems people have? Do you have concrete experience in that (work) environment? The communications/public relations department of an organization isn’t using Mastodon — and it’s not because they don’t have their own Mastodon server. It’s because they already have to manage seven communication channels, and you’re coming in with an eighth that isn’t integrated into their social media workflow. And if they don’t already have such a workflow, they’re certainly not looking forward to 14% more manual work just to support your Mastodon hobby. So the “pro move” is not to offer a Mastodon server, but (if needed) a Mastodon & BlueSky crossposter. And yes, that hurts ideologically. But we’re here to get people MORE open and LESS big-tech. Not to celebrate our ideals.

Source: berthub.eu

This NIP describes a new event `kind:19999` that can be used for multiple optional and weird forms of profile customization, such as extra colors, extra pictures, preferences and background music.

Source: github.com

I asked the room who had studied economics. Who knew John Nash. Who remembered the tragedy of the commons, famously explored in popular culture through films such as A Beautiful Mind. The tragedy is simple: when everyone only takes, the commons collapses. The tension between takers and makers is real. What makes this moment different is that the European Commission is no longer just a taker. It is becoming a maker. That changes the equilibrium. It creates the opportunity to solve new problems rather than repeat old ones. But that opportunity only exists if we abandon a false separation that still lingers in many discussions.

Source: www.linkedin.com

Also, educate governments to at least also share their stuff on open platforms. So people say we’re not switching to this open platform because we have so much fun on Twitter. Well, people can stay on Twitter if they want, fine, but at least post your messages also somewhere else. Because this lends a lot of credibility to these non-American platforms. Now, the interesting thing is, quite a number of governments have gone to alternative platforms and also have gone away again. Why did it happen? Someone in marketing said, yeah, this is too much work. I have to click twice now. And so what happened is that a marketing department has now made a policy choice [to fully rely on X], and the marketing department is not the place where such strategic decisions should happen. Many people try to get their governments to leave X, okay, and you could do that, but I would far more prefer that they tell governments, fine, be on X, but also be somewhere else, so that if you have an important message to your people, that they can also access it if X has issues with the message (or with you). This goes for X, this goes also for YouTube. Live by example. Let governments be an example that you can (also) be somewhere else.

Source: berthub.eu

Secondly, and we often forget about that: actual marketing and sales. These sound like very dirty words in the digital commons context. Now many people have found that even if you have great software and it is freely available, that people will not automatically use it. Because even if the software is free it takes convincing to change people’s behaviour and choices. And as a very simple example for that, many of us use WhatsApp and the smarter people also use Signal. If you try to convince your friends to also install Signal, they often say no, I’m not going to do it. It’s too much work. Whereas signal is also free and it works exactly the same way. The only thing you have to change is that I now use the blue round thing instead of the green round thing to chat. Still people say no, I’m not going to do it. The role of marketing and sales is to help people deal with this change. That means that even if we come up with the best alternative for Microsoft 365 that is out there, it will not sell itself. It will need advocacy. It will need evangelism to make it happen. This is part of the whole stack.

Source: berthub.eu

Email Ok, email. Email was a digital commons. Anyone could set up a mail server and send mail. Anyone could set up a mail server and receive email. You did not have to ask permission from anyone. Anyone could send email and it would work. It was lovely. But it no longer works like that. But most of you probably do not experience any problem today. Google, Microsoft, Apple have said we will accept maybe 95% of email outside our world, and we will randomly discard the rest unless you are one of the big three or big four [email providers]. So anyone that tries to independently send email right now discovers that quite often it will not arrive. And why will it not arrive? Well the people from Microsoft and I had an interaction a few months ago. They say things like “Yeah, we thought all your emails were spam so we just blocked your server.” And you go like, “I’m trying to send an important email to people. I’ve never sent any spam.” And they go like, “We also did not receive this message because we also think that this is spam.” So you have no real way of interacting with these gatekeepers. Right now if you would say, “I want to be an independent European email provider.” You have to be honest to your users and tell them you’re going to lose out on 5% of your email [deliveries]. And that’s pretty sad. We have lost email as a digital commons. This is not something that anyone can join in anymore. You need permission from the American companies. That’s terrible. I hope that we can address it.

Source: berthub.eu

What is a digital commons? Now we get to the tricky point. What are these digital commons? Well, we heard this morning from the minister that it was this field where everyone could let their sheep graze and stuff, and that’s in the circle right, labeled commons, pasture: I think they also had fights over that and who could put on their sheep there first. So it’s not that easy. But if you want to say, what is a digital commons, you have a far harder time. There are very academic definitions that do not quite help us. I put up a few very, very technical digital commons. Linux, the PostgreSQL database, the SQLite database. Wikipedia, I think we can all agree that these are common resources that are amazing. If the world would end we would only have to store a copy of Wikipedia and that has all our knowledge. This is amazing stuff. OpenStreetMap, if there is a yak path somewhere in Mongolia, it is on OpenStreetMap. And I mention OpenStreetMap specifically because it has use for governments. Governments share cartographic data all the time on their websites. OpenStreetMap is there for us and we [governments] are only using it sparingly. Many government sites have Google Maps on them, which again means that you get these McDonald’s advertisements on your government stuff, if you don’t pay very close attention. I want to mention PeerTube and Mastodon. We put everything on YouTube right now and there are good reasons why people do that. I understand why people stream their press conference on YouTube. But we now also have a project called PeerTube, which was started like 15 years ago by a hacker called Chocobozz. I’m not sure if we know his real name by now. But this is a platform on which, with some investment, we could do all these broadcasts as well and not have to rely on YouTube. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s possible. Mastodon is the Twitter workalike without the celebrities. But if, as a government, you would say, I want to share short messages with people, that would be the place to do it. Because everyone can always join in. You’re not kicked out if Elon doesn’t like you. And you can even send messages there that you don’t like Elon. These are things that are quite clearly where you can say, yeah, this is digital and it is a commons. Because everyone can use it, everyone can take part. These are the things that we like. I mentioned email. I said it’s a former digital commons. Now, there are a few things to say about that. Why is it no longer a digital commons?

Source: berthub.eu

My position on infrastructure neutrality applies universally, regardless of which communities or ideologies are involved: Infrastructure providers (PDS, relays, infrastructure services) should remain ideologically neutral Moderation, curation, and community-building belong at other layers where users can choose their level of engagement Bundling infrastructure with ideology creates power relationships that undermine the goals of decentralization This applies to Blacksky, Northsky, or any other ideologically-aligned infrastructure - Blacksky is simply the most visible example I have no objection to communities organizing around shared identities or values. I object to architectural patterns that make infrastructure access conditional on ideological alignment, because this recreates the centralized control that decentralized systems claim to escape. This distinction matters: I'm not criticizing communities for existing or advocating for their interests. I'm questioning whether tying those communities to infrastructure layers is architecturally sound for systems that aim to distribute power rather than concentrate it.

Source: gist.github.com

During this incident, I decided to test my hypothesis directly. I created an account on the Blacksky PDS (tree.cryptoanarchy.network) to see whether it functioned as open infrastructure or as ideologically-gated access. Blacksky presents itself as community infrastructure - open to Black users and allies. If infrastructure and ideology are truly separate, a new account should be evaluated based on behavior, not on who controls it. I posted exactly one thing: "Hello world." The account was suspended. The irony here is profound: I was blocked by Blacksky's PDS, but the suspension message cites "Bluesky Social Terms of Service" because Blacksky relies on Bluesky PBC's moderation infrastructure. This perfectly demonstrates the layered bundling problem - even "independent" infrastructure providers are tied to centralized moderation services, creating multiple points of ideological control. I cannot think of clearer evidence of infrastructure-ideology bundling than this. An account with no content except a standard greeting - suspended not for any action taken, but presumably for who I was. The infrastructure wasn't neutral. Access was gatekept based on identity and perceived ideological alignment before any behavior could even be evaluated. This is exactly the pattern I was warning about: when infrastructure becomes tied to community identity, access to that infrastructure becomes conditional on tribal membership. "Hello world" becomes a suspendable offense when the wrong person says it on the wrong server. This isn't about whether Blacksky has the right to block anyone they want - of course they do. It's about whether calling something "infrastructure" while gatekeeping it ideologically is architecturally sound for a protocol that claims to be decentralized. The answer, demonstrated here, is no.

Source: gist.github.com

What I like the most about Spiers' blog post is that the early web didn't just enable better conversation. It required it. You had to say something interesting enough that someone would bookmark your URL and come back. Maybe that is the thing worth protecting: not the lack of a comments section, but the kind of friction that rewards effort.

Source: dri.es

The Masters We’re Losing We’re about to face a crisis nobody’s talking about. In 10 years, who’s going to mentor the next generation? The developers who’ve been using AI since day one won’t have the architectural understanding to teach. The product managers who’ve always relied on AI for decisions won’t have the judgment to pass on. The leaders who’ve abdicated to algorithms won’t have the wisdom to share.

Source: leadershiplighthouse.substack.com

Finally, when there’s a “pay”, a “consent” and a “advertising, but no tracking” option, most users switch to the latter. 7 out of 10 people then choose the “advertising, but no tracking” option.This shows that the “third option” (as suggested by the EDPB) is supported by objective evidence: Users accept funding of websites via advertising – but not online tracking.

Source: noyb.eu

Winning companies watch real users struggle with their product. Not Bitcoin enthusiasts who’ll tolerate rough edges, but people who use PayPal and think it works fine. They sit users down, give them a task, and watch where they get confused. They don’t explain, don’t help, just watch. Then they build for how users actually work.

Source: shawnyeager.com

Trust comes from freedom, not lock-in. The exit door you'll never use is exactly what makes you confident enough to stay. It does seem counterintuitive to make leaving easy, but not all SaaS is created equal. With our Open SaaS approach, you get the freedom to grow and the ability to leave whenever you choose.

Source: dri.es