I'm here to give you some details about what happened on Monday of this week that caused Bluesky to go down intermittently for ~1/2 our users for about 8 hours. First, I'd like to apologize to our users for the interruption in service. This is easily the worst outage we've seen in my time here. It's just not acceptable. Second, if you find this work interesting, we're hiring!

Source: pckt.blog

Purpose & goal The goal of this Wotathon submission is to explore the possibilities of NIP-85 and other Web of Trust filters to help parents setting up a trust domain for their children. Our ultimate goal on the long-term would be than we can serve curated / WoT filtered content to parents within our Kubo.watch project. Kubo.watch is a YouTube Kids alternative application where parent can create a digital domain for each of their children. Within this domain you can set trust levels which will define the permissions how a child can interact with things (content), people (profiles aka npubs) and places (relays). Current state View the demo at https://wotathon.kubo.watch.

Source: gitlab.com

The same question.Five different worlds. Ask anything. The same model answers five times — each time instructed to respond as if it were trained on a different climate of data, from bellicose to empathic. Watch how the framing, the tone, and the assumptions change. The question is identical. The training world is not.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

The AX design artifact isn't a wireframe — it's a capability declaration. Instead of designing what users see, we design what agents know and can do. Trust is built through verifiable data, not brand storytelling.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

2025 → 2035 · Agentic Experience Design The same mechanism.A different task bundle. DTP didn't displace designers. It erased their paste-up tasks and handed them new ones. AI won't displace product designers. It will eliminate their wireframing tasks and hand them something harder: designing what systems are allowed to become.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

It's not job loss.It's task loss. When the Macintosh arrived in 1984 — with PageMaker and PostScript — graphic designers did not disappear. Their task bundle mutated. Some tasks evaporated. Some transformed. New ones emerged that hadn't existed before. The job title survived. The job content did not.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

United States · 1860 – 2025 Technology adoption over time Share of households or adults using each technology. Hover over any line to identify it. Toggle eras below to focus.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

Every doc page is nowagent food — one click. Modern documentation platforms like Mintlify have built a "Copy page as Markdown" button directly into their UI. This is not a convenience feature. It is an acknowledgment that AI agents consume documentation — and Markdown is the most efficient format to feed them.

Source: dit-2026-app.john-04e.workers.dev

Style is a finicky thing. Just like that word “taste.” Don’t you think? That’s right. They’re very similar. All you need to know about style is that there are three phases of style where variant 2 is the money: Ahead of style: “Only you see it.” In style: “Everyone sees it.” Out of style: “Everyone’s seen it.” Let’s use this framing for as second. You can see that foundation models are really good at variant 3. They’re terrible at variant 1. And a few weeks after they’ve been trained, they’re able to be “in style” for just a moment and riding variant 2. But it’s a fleeting moment. And style moves on. That’s … natural and okay!

Source: usefulmba.substack.com

During the conference, in a keynote slot that had been specially cleared so that no other sessions would compete for the audience, Bluesky announced attie, a new AI-powered feed creation tool. The tool allows users to describe the kind of feed they want in natural language and have it generated automatically. It also directly competes with Graze, an independent startup that had built a custom feed creation tool on atproto and that was a sponsor of the conference. The developers behind Graze had invested time and money into building on the open protocol, had supported the conference financially, and now found themselves watching the protocol’s primary developer announce a competing product to the entire gathered community. The term of art is “sherlocking”: when a platform incorporates the functionality of a third-party tool, making the independent version redundant.

Source: connectedplaces.online

Leading by example in an open ecosystem doesn't just mean promoting other people's work or deferring to them on features you don't want to build. It means building in public when you're working on projects that overlap with the community. It means reaching out before you ship, not after the backlash. It means treating collaboration as part of the development process rather than as a cleanup step.

Source: trezy.com

Bluesky isn't the only entity in this space with funding. Graze raised $1M in pre-seed, Germ has pre-seed backing. Bluesky raised $100 million. They're the platform. They have resources the rest of us can only dream about. They could be supporting and contributing to the projects that are building on and strengthening the Atmosphere. Instead, this presentation said: we'll celebrate your work, but if we like what you're doing, we'll just build our own version and leave the community to figure out what that means.

Source: trezy.com

And I would like to suggest that slowing the fuck down is the way to go. Give yourself time to think about what you're actually building and why. Give yourself an opportunity to say, fuck no, we don't need this. Set yourself limits on how much code you let the clanker generate per day, in line with your ability to actually review the code. Anything that defines the gestalt of your system, that is architecture, API, and so on, write it by hand. Maybe use tab completion for some nostalgic feels. Or do some pair programming with your agent. Be in the code. Because the simple act of having to write the thing or seeing it being built up step by step introduces friction that allows you to better understand what you want to build and how the system "feels". This is where your experience and taste come in, something the current SOTA models simply cannot yet replace. And slowing the fuck down and suffering some friction is what allows you to learn and grow. The end result will be systems and codebases that continue to be maintainable, at least as maintainable as our old systems before agents.

Source: mariozechner.at

On 10 April 2026, the Facebook Museum will open its doors at the Next Nature Museum (Evoluon) in Eindhoven. We will celebrate this evening during Friday Next, with a programme about our dependence on Big Tech's social media and how we can reclaim it for the community.Join us on a trip down memory lane, exploring the beautiful and ugly sides of Facebook, decide which 'typical' Facebook content we should preserve, and share your own memories of this platform. From April to September 2026, the Facebook Museum will be located in the Next Nature Museum in Eindhoven.

Source: nextnature.org

“Michael Smith generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed those fake songs billions of times,” said U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton.  “Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real.  Millions of dollars in royalties that Smith diverted from real, deserving artists and rights holders.  Smith’s brazen scheme is over, as he stands convicted of a federal crime for his AI-assisted fraud.”

Source: www.justice.gov

What are nsites? nsites are static websites hosted on the nostr network. Your site's files are stored as cryptographic blobs on blossom servers and made discoverable via signed nostr events. Anyone running a gateway can serve your site — no central host controls it.

Source: nsite.run

Code you don't understand becomes someone else's problem. In Open Source, that someone is often the maintainer reviewing your patch. Offloading bad code onto maintainers slows down reviews for everyone. Plus, you miss the chance to learn from the code and grow as a developer. It shouldn't matter what tools you use. But if you submit code, you should be able to explain what it does, why it works, and how it interacts with the rest of the code. Everyone starts somewhere. Even today's top contributors submitted imperfect patches early on. You are welcome here, with or without AI tools. Perfection isn't required, but understanding your code is. Own your code.

Source: dri.es

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