“As in Russia, we have let local newspapers and local media die. As in Russia, their place was taken by a few commercial operations. As in Russia, the media are owned by oligarchs, who then become close to government or submit to it (not all of the media in America, of course, are submitting, but… Continue reading

Joan Westenberg is going to “shut down [their] laptop, take a deep breath, step back from the endless to-do lists, and reconnect with what makes me a Goddamn human.“ When you see someone lamenting the effects of focusing too much on “productivity,” there’s almost always some mention of the tools they use. The tools, these… Continue reading

Continuations is a newsletter/blog by Albert Wenger that has a fascinating button at the top right: Collect. What it evidently does is “Mint this entry as an NFT to add it to your collection.” An NFT is a “non-fungible token,” which means that it’s a digital object that’s uniquely identified and recorded in a permanent… Continue reading

A moving and important essay from Max McCoy, in the Kansas Reflector. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luthor King said “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.“ The Internet Archive unveiled a bust of Aaron Swartz. Swartz died 12 years ago by suicide;… Continue reading

David Roth wrote an incandescent piece at Defector: Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government. “…Musk just isn’t a very smart or principled guy, and has been insulated from any accountability by his wealth for long enough that he has liquefied into a slurry of… Continue reading

I don’t mean the design of a spreadsheet; I mean the design of the spreadsheet application. As far as I know, nobody has proposed anything new for spreadsheet apps in ages. But here’s an idea: Ambsheets. A cell can contain multiple “ambiguous” values, making it easier to explore alternatives. Via Simon Willison. Continue reading

Replicating SMS messages in a monolithic silo bought by a delusional megalomaniac, or another monolithic silo owned by an insecure sociopath, or even another monolithic silo not (yet) owned by some ultrarich control freak is not really very useful. Take more time to consider what you write. Take more time to consider what you read… Continue reading

Responding to a hilarious headline, Meta warns that it will fire leakers in leaked memo, John Gruber observes that “company cultures are infused by the personalities of their founders. Meta employees have no scruples surrounding the privacy of internal communications because, by definition, they’re the sort of people who never saw any problem with Meta’s… Continue reading