Tag: tech
#oneaday Day 742: Crash and burn
There is increasing talk of the video games industry staring down an honest-to-goodness crash -- and this time around, unlike the notorious Great Global Video Game Crash of North America from 1983, it looks very much like it could be one that will happen across the world. All this said, I feel like, at this...
Supremacy
Supremacy is a rote retelling of the origins of the AI hype cycle we found ourselves in the grip of. It lines up all the main characters leading the companies driving the technology, steps you through the timeline and offers little insight. It's kind to the people it covers inasmuch as a lack of meaningful, deserved criticism amounts to kindness. The author does, at least, do their part to confirm what appears from the outside to be a borderline religious devotion to the technology at issue. Beyond that? It's background, stated motivation taken at face value and little of interest.
Attensity!
Attensity! is a perfectly fine book, a call to action as relevant now as it was when social media and the larger advertising-backed internet began their decline (years ago, at this point). It's also a fairly shallow read: it names the problem, points to examples, and offers surface-level solutions. Attention, as it's most often measured, is framed around productivity and around commercial and military applications — a useful point, and one that helps explain where we've ended up. That framing was then adapted by the businesses now intruding on, demanding, and abusing it. If you've spent time on the internet in oh, let's say, the last decade, none of this should be revelatory. Framing distraction as attention directed elsewhere, in defiance of authority, is clarifying (as is the notion that paying attention means paying for something with it). Not novel, but a focused way to put it. The case for building school environments that protect students' ability to focus is compelling. Efforts to limit screen time and phones during the day fall right in line with it, but the book never assembles them into a coherent plan. There are useful ideas here, swimming in idealistic prose. Worth paying attention to, but not required reading.
Firefox rendering SVGs as cross-hatched blocks
This has been an ongoing issue for me for some time and I've been unable to wade through the AI-generated search slop to find an answer. Basically, SVGs are incorrectly rendered in Firefox, making a number of sites unusable. Here is the web terminal of my Home Assistant in Firefox: Here is the same screen...
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Owning My Corner of the Internet: Self-Hosting Decentralized Social Media
When do we get a Privacy-Preserving CDN?
The surveillance-capitalism business model that defines the Internet today is only going to get more imposing. The vast majority of our online requests today are serviced and logged by centralized infrastructure - even more centralized than what we probably expect. While our collective hivemind takes rightful pride in the successful pushes that have improved this...
Lifting Mastodon rate limits
I'm a reluctant Bluesky user and a new Bluesky user. I expanded my site's syndication implementation to support Bluesky and updated my links implementation to support tagging authors on Bluesky. Why join now? I'm not totally sure. Indigo launching was a factor. It looked like (and is) a lovely app.
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Cheap x86 Linux tablet speedrun any% [CHEATING]
If Panos Panay really doesn't like this, he can always gift me a new Surface. I'll still install Linux on it, though.
Building the future
Watching the tech hype train while working in the industry has always felt a bit surreal. There's this nascent feeling that what I'm working on, while it pays my bills, either won't amount to much or is potentially a net negative. I'll admit that I'm predisposed to cynicism and will freely cast off jokes at the expense of what I observe. It's easy to do.
Personal site infrastructure, diagrammed
That I even need and have made a diagram of the infrastructure for this site speaks to how over-engineered it is. Yet, while it is ostensibly a personal site, it's a personal site that's replaced many services that I previously used.
Battling bots
I've already blocked entire countries to combat scrapers , I update my robots.txt for well-behaved bots (and 403 any included in the list that access anything other than my robots.txt ). In addition to these steps, I've started blocking traffic from IPs contained in Spamhaus ' DROP and DROPv6 lists.
Why I'm betting on ATProto (and why you should, too)
Social media was supposed to connect us, but most of it has turned into ads, division, and loneliness. I'm betting on ATProto as a way to fix that, and not just for developers. Whether you're a scientist, journalist, or just someone who wants the internet to feel human again, I think ATProto matters for you too.
More Everything Forever
More Everything Forever is an essential read for the modern, tech-empowered dystopia we find ourselves in. Adam Becker methodically examines and destroys the pseudo-religious nonsense of modern tech founders. Mars is a hellhole coated in poison dust that will kill anyone that lands there. Trillions of people living in capsules above the earth is a fantasy. LLMs are synthetic text extruding machines that are as much a through line to AGI as my toaster is to the second coming of Christ. Instead, as a society, we find ourselves in the grip of billionaires suffering from engineer’s disease : A bias of technical professionals who think that their expertise allows them to solve problems in unrelated fields. You can’t debug society and you can’t rebuild it. You can construction participate in it, but tech moguls will not concede that their success took place due to the benefits provided by society. They’re too brilliant, right? (No, they aren’t.) They wall themselves off, talk only to their peers, build their own egos, claim their harebrained schemes are inevitable and lash out when challenged. They’re children, staring down a midlife crisis and don’t know how to handle it. They’re facing their own mortality and none of what they’re pursuing will succeed or improve the lives of anyone else. Regulate tech, regulate business and tax billionaires until they are not that.
Building a Navidrome scrobbling plugin
Navidrome released plugin support a few weeks ago and I've been working on implementing a plugin that scrobbles my listens to my own API endpoint. This has replaced my previous approach of regularly polling a private endpoint that sat unused in Navidrome 's UI. It works better and uses a properly supported mechanism to meet my needs.
Owning your data
Owning your own data is hard . I've been trying to own as much as I can, and my site has become a reflection of that process, both in what I display and discuss. As difficult as it is, there's a freedom in owning as much as you can.
The conditionally open web
I spend a lot of time thinking about the open web. We talk about it a lot. But I'm not sure it exists, at least not in the way it's often described. Embedded within the underlying architecture of the web is an ideal of openness. One can publish anything and one can link to anything.
Getting cited as a source on Wikipedia
I use analytics on this site primarily to see where referral traffic comes from. It's not necessary, but it satisfies my curiosity. One of the most interesting referrals I've received was from Wikipedia.
Blocking entire countries because of scrapers
I use Goatcounter for analytics primarily to see where things I post might get mentioned. I don't get a ton of traffic, nor should I expect to.
AI Has an Image Problem
I spent 2025 going from skeptical to genuinely excited about AI tools. My non-tech friends and family spent 2025 learning to hate them. The AI industry has fumbled this introduction so badly that we've turned a useful set of tools into a cultural flashpoint - but the damage isn't irreversible.
Chip War
God decided where the oil reserves are, we get to decide where the fabs are. Chip War offers many interesting anecdotes about the state of the global chip industry, it's founding and development. It spends much of its time laboring over not only the technology but the interdependence of all the players in it. It is a war, perhaps, but a cold one and one fought via IP theft, sanctions, government subsidies and a détente that exists by virtue of everyone being dependent on TSMC . There's a distinctly American political undertone to this whole book, however. The author repeatedly calls out government subsidies that advantaged foreign chip makers, while having no expressed qualms about American chip makers working with the US military and government. Technology is core to national security, economic growth and the modern digital hellscape in which we find ourselves. I understand the thesis, the motivations of all players and learned quite a bit about the creation of modern chips. I'm less convinced about the geopolitics. Reading this made me think back to reading Apple in China which illustrates Cupertino's reliance on China, but Chip War makes that position on Apple's part look less clear cut (at least where chips are concerned). This is a worthwhile read, but I could've done with more objectivity and less American political boosterism.
2025 in review
2025 was my year of doing ALL the things - speaking at 5+ conferences, starting a podcast, shipping side projects, and somehow not completely burning out. I learned that momentum creates more momentum, perfectionism is overrated, and seeing people in real life again after years of isolation is actually really, really good.
It's Shameful That Apple Has X on the App Store
Apple could change the world overnight by removing X from the App Store. They won't.
Representing groups in ATProto
I wanted to add book clubs to my GoodReads-like app (Collective), but ATProto doesn't have a standard way to handle shared group resources yet. So I'm building opensocial.community—a separate service that manages groups independently from any single app. This means the same book club could potentially work across multiple apps (imagine your book club having both a reading list in Collective AND a discussion forum in another app), and groups can migrate between providers if needed. It's probably over-engineered for my use case, but might help other ATProto developers building community features.