Matt has some smart reckons on the relationship between time and technology:
The factory bell, the railway timetable, the telegraph wire, the always-on smartphone — each imposed a new temporal discipline, each produced its own characteristic form of exhaustion, and each was eventually (partially, imperfectly) domesticated through a combination of regulation, design, and collective action.
Bobbie says:
Craig actually has had a profound impact on my career, in a way he probably doesn’t remember and certainly didn’t expect. Maybe 15 years ago I bumped into him at a party in a back yard in Brighton…
That was my party!
There’s a power imbalance at work here that’s hard to ignore. Large “AI” companies, the ones with billions in venture capital, send their bots to harvest free content. Not only from big publishers or Wikipedia, but from small, independent websites, too. But we, the people running these sites – often as passion projects, as ways to freely share what we’ve learned, as digital gardens we tend in our spare time – we’re the ones paying for the bandwidth and server resources to handle all those additional requests while those companies profit from the training data they extract. It’s an asymmetric battle: small systems absorbing the demands generated at an entirely different, industrial scale.
My social networks are currently awash with Deep Blue:
…the sense of psychological ennui leading into existential dread that many software developers are feeling thanks to the encroachment of generative AI into their field of work.
There are two wolves inside you…
My Builder side won’t let me just sit and think about unsolved problems, and my Thinker side is starving while I vibe-code. I am not sure if there will ever be a time again when both needs can be met at once.
Laura’s classic book is now a web book that you can read for free online.
A browser-based RSS reader that stores everything locally. There’s also a directory you can explore to get you started.
Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.
Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.
See, I’ve always compared that building pressure of need-to-blog to being constipated (which makes the resultant blog post like having a very satisfying bowel movement), but maybe Brad’s analogy is better. Maybe.
The promise of AI – the promise AI companies make to investors – is that there will be AIs that can do your job, and when your boss fires you and replaces you with AI, he will keep half of your salary for himself, and give the other half to the AI company.
That’s it.
That’s the $13T growth story that MorganStanley is telling. It’s why big investors and institutionals are giving AI companies hundreds of billions of dollars. And because they are piling in, normies are also getting sucked in, risking their retirement savings and their family’s financial security.
Now, if AI could do your job, this would still be a problem. We’d have to figure out what to do with all these technologically unemployed people.
But AI can’t do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to save anyone money.
Ah, the circle of life!
I always enjoy reading Jay’s newsletter, but this was a particularly fun trip down memory lane.
There’s a link to an old post by Jeff Atwood who said:
A blog without comments is not a blog.
That was responding to an old post of mine where I declared:
Comments should be disabled 90% of the time.
That blog-to-blog conversation took place almost twenty years ago.
I still enjoy blog-to-blog conversations today.
Matthias responds to my pondering about the point of “likes” and “shares”:
I like to think of Webmentions not as a measure of popularity. To me, they measure connection. Connection to individual people and connection to the community as a whole. Webmentions let you listen into the constant noise out there and, just like a radio telescope, pick up scarcely audible echoes of connection.
A fascinating look at the importance of undersea cables, taken from a new book called The Web Beneath the Waves.
I write here for you, not for the benefit of building the machines producing a firehose of spam, scams, and slop. The artificial intelligence companies have already violated the expectations of even a public web. Regardless of the benefits they have created — and I do believe there are benefits to these technologies — they have behaved unethically. Defensive action is the only control a publisher can assume right now.
Rob has redesigned his site and it’s looking gorgeous.
I really like the categories he’s got for his blog.
I wanted to quote an excerpt of this post, but honestly I couldn’t choose just one part—the whole thing is perfect. You should read it for the beauty of the language alone.
(This is Anthony Moser’s first blog post. I fear he has created his Citizen Kane.)
I like the idea of adding this to personal websites:
Mastodon shows an “Alt” button in the bottom right of images that have associated alt text. This button, when clicked, shows the alt text the author has written for the image.