The question we should continually insist on asking ourselves, both as makers of tools and users of them, is how they can help us improve the flow of love. Do they connect us with each other, and reinforce our instincts to treat each other as moral ends? Do they help us convey our love out into the world through information and interfaces, or help us know when we are being offered any?

I get what he’s saying, and there’s some nice prose here, but to me it seems like a whole lot of jibber-jabber. AI is making even the smartest people in my blogroll a bit loopy.

This shit is gonna make me cry, man. I gotta fucking read this guy’s book.

see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IF1-15J2DWY

In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired MediaWiki’s most influential developer and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.

Is Wikipedia cooked?

The Utah UFO Hunters Investigative Team. Utah UFO reporting and database, UFO Search Group, Utah UFO photo’s, Extraterrestrial contact

Gigantic archive about physical properties of many materials.

So when I see people buying exotic peptides from uncredentialed sources, I don’t see daredevils or lunatics abandoning a system that works. I see people with problems the system isn’t solving refusing to give up on themselves. And when people condemn this, I hear, “You don’t deserve a cure.”

The medical establishment does indeed suck sometimes.

Reporting from Microsoft Gardens, next to Salesforce Beach, Amazon Port, and the Canva Creative Cabana.

This is Cannes Lions, where everything is an advertisement for advertisements, a glitzy, week-long “conference” and “awards show” in Cannes, France. Big tech companies and any major company that buys or sells ads send thousands of their employees here to wine and dine each other on yachts, in bars and cafes, at brand “activations” on the beach, and in chateaus and villas. Cannes is the biggest advertising conference in the world—or at least the most glamorous—where advertising execs and brand execs form the relationships that will ultimately result in billions of dollars of ad spend, and which will shape the way we buy things, the way we’re advertised to, and the way the internet works.

How horrible.

I’d offer the hypothesis that any sufficiently advanced read/write technology will get used for two purposes: pornography and activism. Porn is a weak test for the success of participatory media – it’s like tapping a mike and asking, “Is it on?” If you’re not getting porn in your system, it doesn’t work. Activism is a stronger test – if activists are using your tools, it’s a pretty good indication that your tools are useful and usable.

Rings quite true almost twenty years later. And wow, did no one see what was coming up over the horizon:

User-generated content, on average, is a lot less interesting than professional content. But there are a lot more people creating their own content for fun than those doing so for a living, and in aggregate, that content is at least as interesting.

via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_cat_theory_of_digital_activism

We’re imagining, studying, and building public spaces and public goods on the internet.

The best thing about long-lived incumbent technologies like JSON and XML is that nobody really has to think about them much any more. Except for, I do occasionally, because while I’m not the inventor of either, my name’s on the front of both official specifications. Hey, it’s JSON’s 25th birthday, what a run! And what ever happened to XML? Let’s shake off the dust and have a look.

Bro is still at it. I haven’t checked his blog in a while, so I’m glad to see it’s still alive and well.

An S3 object store so reliable you can run it outside datacenters

Websites don’t have to be so cookie cutter. Make a website that feels uniquely you in under five minutes.

A Wikipediholic, wikiholic, Wikipediaholic, Wikipath, wikiaddict, or wikimaniac (in binomial classification, Homo wikiaddictus or Homo wikidependus), (considered by some to be a subspecies of Homo sapiens), is someone who suffers from Wikipediholism, or obsession (addiction in some cases) with Wikipedia or other wikis. One of the most common characteristics of the condition is the victim reading or editing Wikipedia articles with much more frequency than the average person.

How I found that anyone could register on FIFA’s public Agent Platform, gain access to the Football Data Platform’s Streaming Management panel, and get RTMP ingest URLs and stream keys for every live FIFA World Cup 2026 camera feed. I then spent hours calling FIFA, MediaKind, HBS, CISA, and the FBI trying to get someone to pick up the phone.

A really lovely piece about owning things in our modern, connected age, and how the meaning of that word has shifted into a different kind of relationship.

I was cancelled in November of 2021 after about 4 weeks on the app and, of course, I subscribed for 3 months and Hinge never responded and kept all of my money. I have no idea why I was cancelled. One of the women I dated penned the “Men, Where Have You Gone? Please Come Back” essay in NY Times and let’s just say there was a giant gap between her in person reality and the epistle she wrote. Another woman I dated would leave me voicemails telling me that “Jesus would save me!” Maybe it was she? I think it was the latter person who narced on me because I was beyond saving. Anyway, the apps are expensive and toxic and I would never go back.

This is a hilarious comment.

see: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/20/style/modern-love-men-where-have-you-gone-please-come-back.html via: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/hinge-banning-dating-apps-matchgroup/686445/

People are being banned from dating apps without knowing why.

They should be glad they are. Why do people do this to themselves LOL.

A tiny, anecdotal bit of context for this story:

My dad was an assistant warden at a county prison when I was growing up. Over 30 years ago he sat me down in his office one day and showed me how he could look up anyone he wanted in their databases, which had demographic information, information about criminal records, last known location, all sorts of things in what today would look like a charming ASCII art interface resembling old school dbase (probably written in it). He said he always looked up men my female cousins were dating, and showed me one. Many of his pals were in law enforcement and I got the sense that this was a widespread practice, something they all knew they shouldn’t be doing but routinely did anyway. He tried to convince me that I should get into writing software like this prisonware. I never did that or anything like it. I still feel a little guilty about what I saw that day decades ago.