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Computah: Make it a link: New features were successfully added to the blog using Claude Cowork, enhancing functionality and organization despite some unintended design changes.

“When you gaze long enough into Instagram, Instagram gazes back into you.”

A friend shared the Embroidered Computer, an 8-bit programmable computer made with traditional embroidery techniques that mimics the processing power of a 1950s mainframe without silicon.

Claude is launching an AI watermark, one that users can’t opt out of (but can easily outsmart). As internet god Notopoulos wrote, “Claude’s watermarking poses the question: Are you willing to proudly own that you write with AI?” More: What is an AI watermark and how do they work?

I can’t believe it’s mid-August. I’m terribly behind on my reading list. Still, I did want to draw attention to this entertaining and extremely shareable article on the glory of Record Head, a legendary record store in Milwaukee. Make sure to watch their public access TV commercials at the link.

The knitting community is one of the great deliberative communities of the internet, and as they’ll happily tell you, knitting and fiber arts are closely tied to industrial and computing history. It’s really hard to pull one over on knitters online, because they have a deep and different …

Winer on the purpose of web standards: “I find that most standards that come out of the standards bodies aren’t developed by implementors or with them in mind. They avoid trying to solve any specific problem, rather focusing on the elegance and flexibility of the format. This makes …

I found this American Affairs article on the insidiousness of ad tech quite relevant. It focuses on foreign propagandists’ exploitation of social media, but it’s just as instructive for thinking about ad tech as tech, channel and product, and its entwinement with social media as …

Garbage Day uses Jimothy to trace how virality works on the internet of 2026. Related: this story on how the algorithm has prevented us from producing a single “song of the summer.”

UW–Madison communication professor Catalina Toma argues that technology-mediated communication more often supports human connection and well-being than harms it, provided people use it intentionally.

I watched “Obsession” with my teenager last night, and dare I say, I liked it as a little genre story, a morality play about romance, relationships and consent. I also enjoyed the practical horror effects.🍿

A colleague hosted a nice discussion of the work of David Dylan Thomas, who advocates for using human-centered design concepts to bring humanity back to tech. New and novel approaches abound, especially on whether and how to let engagement metrics drive decisions on design teams.

This is a pretty good Tiktok breaking down the historical, cultural and religious meanings invoked in the “computah” memes. An important rule of the internet: the best memes are intertextual.

Scheduled send as alibi? Nice try, Costanza.

Parents wanting stakes lower than a smartphone: consider a kid-friendly Wi-Fi landline, which looks and works like an old corded phone but runs over your internet connection, giving kids the independence to get connected safely. Alternatively, get a VOIP phone through your ISP for ~$10/mo.

Finished reading: We’ll Prescribe You a Cat by Syou Ishida 📚

The Atlantic takes on the prevalence of the “it’s not X, it’s Y” construction in AI-generated writing, highlighting the semantic roles in sentence construction that differentiate ideas for clarity. Chatbots seem to like this construction, despite how clunky it sounds to the human ear.

Henry Rollins and Ian Mackaye have taken on a critical calling: preserving the legacy of The Cramps for posterity.

Finished reading: Yesteryear A Novel by Caro Claire Burke 📚

rss.chat is a new, free social network service that uses RSS to create a federated social feed that looks and feels a lot like OG Twitter. See also: the launch of HyperTexting, another RSS-based app that centralizes the open web in a way that feels a little like Google Reader (complimentary).

Clothing technology: tracing a history of pockets from ancient coin purses to tie-on pouches to today.

A cool article from Cap Times on how language translation serves as a trust-builder for local government in an era of mistrust.

With global temps at peak in several areas of the world, the BBC covers how critical tech infrastructure is impacted by high heat.

If you’re looking to be depressed, see this early research from Business Insider on the social implications of GLP-1 usage and how it may impact relationships in the home and workplace.

Dan Hon made me laugh with “carbon-based chauvinism.”

I found this piece from an anthology celebrating 50 years of women’s studies, which explores the intersection of scholarship and publishing practices over time.

I too am dismayed at the sudden lack of cottage cheese in the local supermarket (I take mine as a snack, dusted with EBTB). The shortage hits hardest in the lactose-free section, where six of us appear to be competing for five tubs, and I have started to recognize their faces.

Among other disappointing SCOTUS announcements today: Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit Alleging Roundup Weedkiller Caused Cancer. In a previous life, I worked in the same college as a cancer researcher who developed twenty years of conclusive research that Roundup causes cancer in dogs by studying …

I’ve been on vacation, which means I’ve been reading my fool face off. I’ve also caught several great live shows lately, including an incredible set by Australian no-wave noise band Party Dozen. It’s a two-person band and the saxophonist sings directly into the bell of her …

Finished reading: The Mixed Marriage Project A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy Roberts 📚

A deeply nerdy (complimentary) look at the history of Markdown. And more on Markdown, its function and legacy from Anil Dash.

Finished reading: Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy 📚

Finished reading: A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle 📚

Finished reading: My Mother’s Daughter - Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past by Tracy Clark-Flory 📚

“How internet misogyny parallels ‘real-world’ harassment” is a 2007 paper in the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism by my old co-blogger, Jill, on her experience being harassed online by peers she knew IRL. Many parallels to current attitudes, all enabled and accelerated by …

Another old article on the emotional toll of being an internet personality and a woman with a platform in the public sphere. I’m quoted briefly: I intentionally broke my social presence when I stepped away, which gave me necessary peace but made it harder to claim my work in this arena over …

A cathartic read.

It’s a pleasure to read such a deft writer. Currently reading: My Mother’s Daughter - Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past by Tracy Clark-Flory 📚

I followed the discourse on this one, but the book itself was much more sad than I expected. I did appreciate her thoughts on the pressure of balancing a public persona with the reality of being a messy and unfinished person, as we all are. Finished reading: Adult Braces by Lindy West 📚

This one was okay. It felt like a series of earnest blog posts without a real throughline. Finished reading: Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell 📚

I attended the Clayman Institute’s talk on Gender, Power and Artificial Intelligence earlier this month. They now have the session shared on YouTube for posterity. There are many topics and ideas here to chew on as this AI moment develops, and I recommend giving their angles some …

There are enough common signs of AI writing now that the subject has its own Wikipedia page. Via John Gallagher’s latest on “template rhetoric.”

The Pope provides a vision for living with artificial intelligence (gift link).

Major changes coming to Google Search. Question: What search engines do we like in 2026?

The Harris digital campaign head does a post-campaign autopsy of the conditions that impacted the DNC’s 2024 presidential strategy, with lessons learned. I enjoyed this read because it was so close to the work that there are relevant takeaways for other public marcomms practitioners.

After listening to the talk yesterday, I was reminded of this article describing a journalism model for using AI that shared some parallels with D’Ignazio’s research.

Some media and ad-tech operations hire “clippers,” people who cut and distribute high volumes of short video across social platforms, to manufacture cultural relevance. The strategy in short: volume generates attention, and attention confers legitimacy.

Gender, Power and AI: Wrestling for the soul of the network, again: Stanford’s Clayman Institute ran a virtual panel this morning called “Gender, Power, and Artificial Intelligence,” with Safiya Noble (UCLA), Catherine D’Ignazio (MIT), Angèle Christin (Stanford), and moderator Genevieve Smith, a Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. The …

How early blogging tools like Movable Type made reverse-chronological posting the path of least resistance, killing the curated, librarian-style personal homepage and locking the whole web into the chronostream.

More on personal websites as digital gardens.

Did poptimism kill rock n’ roll?

“Two things can be independently true about social media. First, there is no evidence that using these platforms is rewiring children’s brains or driving an epidemic of mental illness. Second, considerable reforms to these platforms are required, given how much time young people spend on them.”

For those who love to post, a guide to the Internet of the future.

Garbage Day on whether Bluesky was a net negative for left politics. I’d argue the most important thing Bluesky did/does is technical, by producing the AT protocol that underlies it, thereby building out the federated web. Distribution channels come and go, so consider posting at your own …

A look at the national decline in student test scores. It’s important to consider this alongside global trends in education as well.

Some contemporary thoughts from Ana Rodrigues on the perennial question of being a “woman in tech.”

Added a Wayback link preserver plugin to the site. This lightweight code detects broken external links on the blog and shows clickable Wayback Machine fallbacks so readers can still access the content. Handy when we’re working on the indie web where the web is fragile.

Finished reading: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 📚

Reflections on teaching fiction writing in the age of AI, from a professor with ten years of classroom experience teaching writing at MIT.

Read this alongside The Bluest Eye. Finished reading: On Morrison by Namwali Serpell 📚

Reading Timothy Chester’s reflections on last week’s Canvas incident. As institutions increasingly outsource the technical load to cloud service teams, IT incident response becomes about communication.

Why I'm broadly skeptical of device bans in K-12: Watching a local phone ban policy snake through the community this week. Like others have already said, my concern is mostly related to enforcement, as we know enforcement for all school policy lands unevenly across school populations at the expense of Black students. But also, my experience is that …

It’s like the phrase “turtles all the way down,” but turtles are marketing.

A new group is attempting to map influence in the AI industry, with the goal to “produce a structured, shareable, and dynamic resource that identifies who is working on what, where the gaps are, and which partnerships might form across ideological and organizational lines.”

A new study suggests that people who use AI for writing are more able to detect AI writing than automated scanner tools. My current LLM pet peeve is how they use language like load-bearing, structural and legible to describe most ideas.

A quarter of the way in and already exhausted/confounded. Currently reading: Adult Braces by Lindy West 📚

“Amazon has launched a new feature that uses AI to generate a short, podcast-like audio segment where two AI ‘hosts’ discuss the merits and reviews of a specific product.”

I’m seeing grunge icons L7 in concert with Amyl and the Sniffers this summer and have been reading a lot about the ’90s indie rock era in the meantime. One frame I keep encountering positions grunge as regional punk musicians navigating a global, corporate pop mainstream – awkward, …

It looks like Wordpress has produced a short-form blogging app that duplicates the model we are trying over here on the even-more-indie web. I might give it a spin.

I’m reading about trends in book and phone bans in American public schools, and reminded that reading novels was once considered an idle and immoral pasttime, just as internet use is today. This 2016 article from JSTOR goes into the history of reading books and the fear that it …

“A.I. is less regulated in America than sandwiches,” said Mr. Tegmark, who is also a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “You can’t open a sandwich shop without having your kitchen inspected. But you can release an A.I. girlfriend for 11-year-olds and that’s fine.”

Adventures in AI: I asked a Claude agent (new Opus, Pro plan) to build a Google Doc template with multiple tabs, using an existing doc as reference. It failed three times over two days, burned thru tokens, never worked with Drive. Eventually it spat out text for me to paste into a doc I made myself.

Some initial review suggests that a staggering amount of Substack content is written by AI.

If folks want quality first-person writing about age and aging, I highly recommend the newsletter magazine Oldster, which explores “the experience of getting older, and what that means at different junctures.” Bonus: Oldster is run by Sari Botton, formerly the longtime essay editor of …

NYT writes about the surge of “slopaganda.”

Finished reading: Even the Good Girls Will Cry A ’90s Rock Memoir by Melissa Auf der Maur 📚

Fellow Madisonians, someone pulled together a website ranking local businesses in Madison by how local they are (by what criteria, idk). In my experience, this is one way we’re likely to see AI used in the next couple of years, via prototyping and/or executing ideas that result in dynamic websites.

Digital humility stitch: A new AI tool puts typos back in your emails, so they don’t look like they were written by AI.

Centaurs and Cyborgs on the Jagged Frontier by Ethan Mollick in 2023: “On some tasks AI is immensely powerful, and on others it fails completely or subtly. And, unless you use AI a lot, you won’t know which is which.”

Last night I had dinner with a friend in tech who recently attended a training on AI and analytics, where they made the observation that we’re in the “Napster era” of artificial intelligence. It’s an imperfect comparison but useful to consider.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen two family court cases where one party submitted full AI chats — prompts and colorful complaints included — as formal filings. The complaints wouldn’t pass muster with a real lawyer, but the conflict was nurtured by AI nonetheless. One was dinged for wasting the …

I’ve posted a couple of times about instances I’m aware of where people are using AI in pro se court cases, especially family courts. A new study shows evidence of increasing numbers in pro se cases at the federal level, exacerbating existing bottlenecks. Many trade-offs abound here.

A professor asked students to self-report AI usage on their homework, leading to lots of confusion and uproar. Points aside, it’s clear people want more clarity up front about when and whether to use LLM tools. In the meantime, treating students like they’re guilty until proven innocent …

I missed this 2025 article by Noah Hawley on Vonnegut, war and the atomic bomb, and it is worth the time.

What does it mean for the culture when everything (everything!) is content, even war and mass shootings?

Timothy Chester offers some thoughts on the place of AI-assisted software development in a modern research university, and suggests that just because you can doesn’t necessarily mean you should.

Mindy Seu on It’s Been a Minute talking about the history of women on the internet.

Out: Twitter on a vape. In: AI-powered crypto vape. Is this real? Who can tell anymore.

Was gifted a jar of gorgeous fresh maple syrup.

Morels for dinner.

Maris Kreizman on AI pressures building in the publishing industry, particularly how it impacts writers and editors: “It’s not an ideal environment for productivity, let alone for making art.”

A nostalgic read on how music nerdery bloomed online.

More on user-generated content marketing and how it works. UGC is a powerful example of “social proof,” where people’s parasocial tendencies are leveraged to boost brand credibility and conversions. This is the consumer psychology behind celebrity and influencer sales and …

Watching the fallout: Fans discovered that the band Geese benefitted from a hefty marketing campaign. Folks are debating whether this makes Geese a “psy-op” or merely “sell-outs”, to use an old term of art. Meanwhile the marketing firm behind the push is getting a ton of …

I’m following a guy in TX who is using AI to write and illustrate children’s books whole cloth, then self-publishes using Amazon, and getting recognition in his region as a laudable children’s author. The books are categorically not good. It’s like people are rewarding his content strategy.

Tom’s Hardware on Mythos and marketing hype. Additional commentary from Michael Corn, asking whether Mythos coverage reinforces or establishes perceptions about cybersecurity.

Garbage Day on what makes something cool to Gen Z, and how this is impacted by the degradation of “pillars of coolness” in previous generations like culture rags and MTV. GD predicts that “cool” will be measured by lack of polish and “how many human beings left their …

Finished reading: Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor 📚

What the internet was made for: A Chicago music fan secretly recorded over 10,000 live concerts from Nirvana to Sonic Youth to Spoon, and has made them all available online.

Taste the Music is a new audio series exploring why artists are driven to create. The first episode features storytelling and songwriting by friend of the blog Whitney Mann, where she chronicles her experience getting “the yips” onstage, and how she worked through it and picked up her guitar again.

Deepfake nude culture and its impact on American teens.

I once worked in a role where I keyed million dollar manufacturing orders into SAP, information that directly fed into factory specs for a manufacturing facility based in another country. Our regional office fed into a massive, global electrical engineering firm that ran on small margins …

Amid renewed calls for the death of feminism, or of millennial feminism or whatever (TERF alert), I found this old victory lap from the era where it looked like new media had permanently paved the way for a newer, fresher publishing industry. It also tips the hat to Jezebel’s place in the …

Poell argues AI is entangled with platform capitalism through shared infrastructure, reinforcing concentration of the market. The hype obscures local realities of adoption, putting public alternatives in the position of proving their existence alongside advocating for their place in the market.

I’m collecting mentions of the old blog while they still exist bc lot about this cohort is hagiography written well after the fact. I don’t think I saw it way back when, from the first time I “quit blogging” in 2006 by Rebecca Traister. As ever, a big part of social media is …

Pulling from some old communication theory while I am thinking about blogging and the indie web, and especially thinking about Dallas Smythe, who argues that mass media doesn’t produce content but audiences, packaged and sold to advertisers. On social media, users aren’t just the …

While poking around for some examples of media coverage of the early blogosphere, I found this mention from the time Liza Jervis of Bitch Magazine did a guest stint at Feministe. For context, Feministe hosted regular guest blogging seasons where we opened our comparatively gigantic platform to much …

Seeing a lot of discussion about trade-offs related to vibe-coding.

Angst about data center development continues to grow in the Rust Belt.

This post and the accompanying graphs have been a trending topic on social all weekend, particularly on Twitter/X, which is negatively implicated in the findings. In short, social media looks weirder than ever.

Silicon sampling is the practice of using LLMs to run surveys without talking to any people at all.

Innovations in scamming: Folks are predicting that AI will supercharge scams alongside any technical and administrative innovation. Here’s one example of an unethical use of AI, where an internet-based GLP-1 hub used AI to generate fake product images and before and after photos of smiling patients.

Enh: Describing the development of agentic AI as a natural evolutionary transition naturalizes specific design choices made by specific people at Google et al. It makes it harder, not easier, to find out why this path? Who decided? What was not built?

I heard a good talk on “slow brain” activities this week and have been thinking about that alongside indie web practices. I’m not alone: how to leave your feed and go exploring again.

A collection of articles that answer the question, “Why have a personal website?”

Testing a new feature I created using a mix of open source code and Claude, hoping I didn’t break my own site. I pulled together a dynamic link library using a Hugo partial and some shortcode that automatically catalogs all of my outbound links into sortable lists.

Just ran across Paul Robert Lloyd’s talk on using tools and approaches from the indie web to build the Internet we want. Talking points and slides at the link.

Playing with a link archive that produces a sortable list of each of my outbound links. An okay start.

The cost of moving to token-based access to tech, rather than seat-based licenses based on employee headcount.

If digital millennials are interested in what was being written about them when they were going off on Tumblr, they should read “Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age” by Jessalynn Keller.

Another cool and relevant resource related to digital feminisms, “Digital Black Feminism” by Catherine Knight Steele. This work pulls narratives from existing literature about Black women’s technology beginning in the 19th century, linking ideas, fields and methods across the work of …

While poking around for other academic sources on feminist blogs, I found this article from 2016, “The Trouble with White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism and the Intersectional Internet.” The complete article is embedded in the page.

In 2007, S&F Online dedicated an entire issue to feminist blogs with essays on race, anonymity, access and audience. The blogs are mostly dead links now but the academic record holds up. Important names: Clancy Ratliff, Tedra Osell.

The first woman I found online was Shelley Powers of Burningbird, around 2000-2001. Then, if you wanted to read women writing about technology (or anything else) with any critical depth, you had to go looking because those writers were not respected or recognized by brick and mortar institutions.

“Last mile” issues around AI in Harvard Business Review. Digital technologies work best in optimal environments, while most real world environments are nonoptimal and arguably non-optimizable.

An observation on feminist writing and Jezebel: Throughout history, a lot of time and energy has been spent mediating how and whether certain kinds of people talk to one another. The feminist blogosphere, for all its faults, was the first time lateral, public, unmediated conversation happened among …

Being a writer for pay is an unusual and vanishing proposition, according to Baffler. “Fifty-six percent of the respondents rely on side jobs to survive.”

Dip into the Diffusion Bias Explorer to explore how the text-to-image models like Stable Diffusion v1.4, Stable Diffusion v.2 and DALLE-2 represent different professions and adjectives.

What Midjourney (AI) thinks university leaders look like. Of course, the technology reflects old ideas about expertise and leadership, but AI adds the ability to reproduce these biases times infinity.

Another AI writing tell that annoys me is the preoccupation with describing what “exists,” and what is “structural” or “architectural” to an ephemeral idea. LLMs seem tuned to describing physical presence and connections even where they aren’t appropriate …

Several years ago, NPR’s Code Switch did a great episode on Black Republicans and how they come to their politics. A good listen on partisan politics and how they intersect with complex identities and life experiences.

A couple of weeks ago I had an interesting convo with Jessica Grose on Threads about the rise of the “Luddite teen” trend. I largely suspect neo-Luddism is a class-related trend and will not be durable. In short, I remain unconvinced that the concern of white collar professionals and …

From 2024: Siva Vaidhyanathan, Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia, on the durable limits of Haidt’s “The Anxious Generation.”

Looking at early feminist blogs and how they previewed the social critiques and economic problems present within today’s attention and publishing economies. What is old is new again.

From 2024, Anil Dash on why everyone needs to rethink Substack.

A new playlist titled “Digital Animal” explores the human relationship with technology and digital culture through a diverse selection of songs, highlighting the emotional complexities and societal implications of our tech-driven lives.

In which the author summarizes artificial intelligence functions that might be reasonably regulated.

On the intersection of memoir, feminism and the Internet pile-on.

A write up on sycophancy in popular chatbots.

Many years ago, a writing professor told me to get out of academia and go live a life, so I’d have something beyond my own circles to bring back to the commentariat. Prescient advice then. It might be even more prescient for someone who seems wildly content speaking from an extraordinarily …

Regarding dinergoth, a rebrand of an old trope: “Alt kids are the social fabric of the most economically depressed, culturally conservative corners of America and have been for a very long time.”

A roundup of news stories on Meta and Google’s losses in court this week, where their social media business practices were found harmful to children’s mental health and in violation of consumer protection law.

“This is a 300-page voyage of zero discoveries. It’s an addiction memoir that doesn’t end in sobriety. It’s a cult memoir that ends with a spirited defense of the cult leader.”

Finished reading: Bog Queen by Anna North 📚

“The movement, they said, was more than one man.”

That was fast: Afroman cleared of charges. Also noticed that in an amicus brief, the ACLU argued that the deputies’ lawsuit was a classic SLAPP approach, referring to a type of lawsuit that seeks to discourage criticism of public officials by burdening individuals with lawsuits in retaliation for …

Speaking of autoethnographies, I just heard about Dorothy Roberts’ latest and it looks intriguing.

The belief that LLMs are intelligent is based on the idea that language and intelligence are equivalent. From November, this article from The Verge argues that idea is a misnomer, instead arguing that we should think of language as a cultural tool we evolved to share our thoughts with one another.

On AI and the value of “taste” in Silicon Valley. As a pretentious hipster reformed, I welcome the return of bad taste as a social dealbreaker. Except for when bad taste is good.

I’m watching the feminist writer scene go hard on some recent books: Jamilah Lemieux’s Black. Single. Mother. and Lindy West’s Adult Braces. Both books were published on March 10, and both authors are talented, with impressive bylines, with significant followings baked in. …

Rapper Afroman is going ultra viral this week as his “Lemon Pound Cake” trial plays out in the news. He captured the raid on security cameras in his home and used the footage in a series of songs, videos and merch. He ultimately did not face charges after the search, and argues (with evidence) that …

More discussion on how “last mile” problems suggest that stories about massive AI disruption of jobs are hyperbole.

This writer suggests that LLMs used to be pretty cool and creative — read: exceedingly weird — and that corporate tinkering to prepare the tech for a broader market took away some of the magic.

The “stochastic parrot” argument against LLMs has some rhetorical limits.

Podcast: The kids in ICE detention.

I misused PESOS below, c’est la vie, I’m doing a POSSE model. Here’s someone smarter than me on POSSE v PESOS.

Anne Helen Peterson on the erosion of good, stable, sustainable jobs.

Turned on a couple of micro.blog site features: if you’re reading this feed on a social site (Mastodon, Bsky, Threads), I’m posting from micro.blog and syndicating out from there. Replies from federated social sites (Bsky, Mastodon) are now syndicated on my site as comments under my blog posts.

My digital presence has been deliberately fractured for years, so I’m watching how this site stitches together my breadcrumbs through SEO, with the serious stuff and throwaway asides alongside the occasional hilarity. Currently one of my top Google results.

Big internet controversy over dress codes in chain restaurants.

Just experienced my first thundersleet.

Author Margaret Atwood plays with Claude and reports back on her experience.

On the many failures of social media companies to act with pro-social ethics.

Pulling everything she’s ever posted back to her own website: Lisa Charlotte Muth flips POSSE to PESOS, “Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site.”

A gift link from The Atlantic, a reporter is given $10k to spend on emerging betting markets and reports on what he found. Spoiler: it’s dark!

Lean In girlbosses out, burned out babes in.

Interesting read: NYT is using a custom LLM tool to track trends within the “manosphere,” as reported by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

A friend of the blog told me a story about a Substacker who uses AI to summarize books and then publishes AI-generated content about those summaries, never reading the books herself, and yet has a ton of followers. I’d guess at least some of those are purchased, betting that a high follower count …

Anecdotally hearing about LLMs being weaponized in divorce and custody, including inundating the other party with slop to drive up the opponent’s legal fees. Worse, the sycophancy is tuned to and confirms the aggrieved party’s grievances, regardless of their real-world relevance in court.

Brooke Warner grapples with the implications around authorship and ownership in relation to AI writing, and how it’s showing up in the small publishing business.

NYT on the trend of “Luddite teens.” I have a growing suspicion that various neo-Luddist trends will largely map to class identity. In some areas of the world, in some areas of the US, Facebook is the internet, yellow pages and water cooler, and the internet experience is entirely …

From 2021, notes on supply chains and chip shortages in a global economy.

Twitter on a vape, the great e-waste crisis.

A good essay on writing and communication in this time. Ultimately the pickle of AI writing is that meaning is something best made through collaboration.

Forgive me, but I’d like to propose we call this a “sloppelganger.”

Excited about Inkwell, a contemporary treatment of the classic RSS reader.

Doing numbers on Twitter/X this week: this paper tested 70+ LLMs on open-ended prompts and found they all produce strikingly similar outputs. Worse, the systems used to improve models actively penalize diversity, reinforcing the convergence.

I need someone to talk me into/out of the new Macbook Neo. Is this just a Chromebook for design people?

Through a new quiz, NYT asks readers to rate passages of writing against AI. Despite thinking I could spot the AI writing, my results were 50/50.

Telling the gods: I would love a micro.blog plugin that provides an easy way to bulk-manage post categories. If there is one, lmk.

AI in practice: Chatbot tool comparison: The exploration of LLMs as writing tools reveals their varying strengths and weaknesses in generating content, ultimately highlighting patterns rather than determining superiority among them.

Winer on Doctorow on RSS.

A note on Ezra Klein: I’ve been looking across the NYT’s breathless reporting on the AI industry and seeing very few women represented across the commentary. Klein’s tech coverage tends to center a fairly narrow circuit of sources: founders, researchers, and policy thinkers who are …

One of the tricky things about consumer AI tools like Claude and Gemini is that the experience varies widely depending on the person using it, and it’s not always clear why. I have spent a lot of time learning the tools so I can advise on them in my work, and this variance of experience has become a …

Finished reading: Life in Code by Ellen Ullman 📚

Thinking more about arXiv and public-facing publishing: Back in the day, my mentor was among the first on campus to successfully argue that public-facing publishing should count toward tenure, as service and outreach at minimum. She was on the edge of digital studies, and by the time her work was …

Do you have what it takes to be the next McDonald’s CEO? A quiz about this week’s funniest business story.

Some notes on arXiv: arXiv is a preprint server hosted and maintained by Cornell University, where researchers post their work to establish priority and get it in front of other researchers quickly. This kind of server is common in emerging fields, to help build a body of shared knowledge among …

Good and bad uses of AI on a website, from Sumy Designs.

A smart take on nonconsensual deepfakes, considering them not just as a social issue but as a cybersecurity issue, as they’re often connected to broader financial and social harassment campaigns.

Reaching back to 2025 to put this article on the pile of AI commentary: Cottom’s argument here is that AI, for all the breathless hype around it, is a “mid” technology, one that makes modest augmentations to existing processes while its loudest boosters use it to justify employing …

Platformer on the emerging politics of military AI, and the backlash resulting from this week’s activities.

Applying a Claude writing skill: LLMs have a default house writing style with identifiable patterns: sentence fragments for emphasis, “not X, but Y” constructions, lots of hard contrast, atmospheric openings, heavy use of em dashes, and heavy use of marketing language. This reflects the semantic construction of an LLM. …

WaPo on the many issues of LLM house writing styles. I have much to add. Here are some notes on applying a writing skill to override house style on Claude.

Some content notes: while I haven’t quite figured out how much I want to broadcast this space, I have put a couple of feedback mechanisms into place, including an email loop as well as turning on comments for those logged into micro.blog, Bluesky and Mastodon. If you’re reading along, say hello.

This new report from Anthropic is depressing at best, as it tries to measure which employment sectors carry the most exposure around AI expansion into the economy. In short, the tech is likely to impact two groups the hardest: educated professional women, and young workers for whom the career ladder …

A thorough look at the loss of institutional hip-hop media archives and what it means for culture writing today.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

NPR’s Code Switch on the gentrification of the Internet.

I have pretty strong feelings against the use of AI around military operations, based on my hands-on experience with the tools. When the tech’s creators say the tech isn’t ripe for warfare, that’s strong feedback. And I agree, with the risks and implications around trust, marketing …

You might call this a taste test: Obsessed with the story about the McDonald’s CEO and how his LinkedIn-style videos selling the McD’s franchise have escaped containment, leading to one of the funnier CEO/product marketing dynamics in recent history. Burger King’s CEO swooped in, …

New blog alert on gender, feminism and gaming: Mothership.

Following the news on Meta glasses this week and how real people are moderating that content loop, watching and moderating all of our intimate video footage, including our most private moments. Last year, my book club read a speculative fiction novel about this very dynamic called …

Ryan Broderick is currently my fav reporter on the Internet culture beat, and on this podcast he’s talking about Epstein and why he was interested in putting his resources to developing the early internet (spoiler: for crimes).

Ruling: AI art is not copyrightable.

Apparently one thing LLMs excel at is deanonymization at scale. The original promise of pseudonymity online was social and normative, over and above any question of technical depth: decent people don’t try to unmask you, because why. What strikes me today is how what used to be unacceptably …

Developing a new pet theory that you could theoretically crank AI outputs toward your vision by having an organized link blog revolution.

The Guardian has a long-running series where readers answer one another’s questions, which gives a pretty good point-in-time survey of how people of a certain demographic are feeling on a given subject. This week’s question is on AI futures: “what would happen to the world if computer said yes?”

Reading about a new “slow” RSS app called Current.

Some analysis on Anthropic and the Pentagon. Per @manton, it feels a little bit like the company isn’t fully on board with the product they produce. I find it interesting that the feds appear to be toying with the idea of nationalizing AI companies alongside other nationalization efforts.

A pal sent along this exceedingly cool article on an art space on the south side of Madison, WI, that marries quilting and memory care.

Like Rickrolling on steroids: I didn’t even know P2P music file downloads were still a thing, but of course, and the scene had a big week recently when somebody trolled SoulSeek by generating a bunch of popular songs sung in Homer Simpson’s voice, then quietly polluted the platform by offering the …

A new report shows that “just 100 users were responsible for almost 70 per cent of online conspiracy posts from influential accounts they examined in Canada.” Relatedly, a White House staffer is reportedly behind a massive Trump account on Twitter. This practice is a common information strategy by …

A guy put his life savings up against DOGE and won big on the new, anarchic betting markets online. This line hooked me: “Crucially, he’s been around long enough to see promises collide into reality and to know basic federal-budget math.”

Second wavers in tech and engineering talked a lot about the “god trick” of presenting knowledge and information, particularly around math and science, in a way that suggests its objectivity is eternal, immortal, unknowable. Work by Safiya Umoja Noble and others extended this lens to Internet search …

An open letter from employees of Google and OpenAI in support of Anthropic, against the DoD: notdivided.org

Looking at this new book by Michael Berube (mensch and legend) on what science fiction can tell us about our contemporary crises. Berube and I used to play Words With Friends together and I assure you he’s a killer.

McKenzie Wark for Verso Books on Donna Haraway, in 2015: “Creating any kind of knowledge and power in and against something as pervasive and effective as the world built by postwar techno-science is a difficult task. It may seem easier simply to vacate the field, to try to turn back the clock, …

Where are the women? A brief history of women in the computer sciences.

New research shows that social media advertising suppresses voting in targeted communities, and is the first to quantify the effect of this kind of microtargeting on voter turnout.

Sharing Digital Animal, a new, curated playlist of songs about all the angst and joys of living with modern technology.

I’ve been spending more time in tech spaces online and getting good information from folks like @manton, creator of Micro.blog. Like this reflection on how to think about AI now that vibe coding works. Something I’m thinking about: there’s an emerging tension between those who see …

Making the rounds on Twitter today, an AI programmer pulled together a dashboard comparing how LLMs respond when given a series of nonsense prompts. There is a notable difference in quality even between Claude’s Opus and Sonnet, in my experience. The lesser GPTs will take a wobbly claim as …

Some additional discussion of LLM models, including open weight and “staggered openness,” where orgs “release previous versions of proprietary models once a successor is launched, providing limited insight into the architecture while restricting access to the most current …

“Open source,” “open weight,” and “proprietary” describe different relationships between LLM model producers and users, governing what you see, modify and control. Comparing them isn’t necessarily about “best,” but whether you’re optimizing …

A new report from Pew on how teens view and use AI says that more than half of teens turn to chatbots for help with school, and some are turning to AI for emotional support and companionship.

“A brief history on writing, a forgotten technology: how the challenges we face in today’s digital age can be traced back to one of the most significant yet underrated innovations of all time.”

“Digital silence” is a new ethic emerging on the visual web, where travelers are no longer posting about their travels. Reading along, thinking of how I rarely post about family out of respect for their privacy, and recently took several road trips without a single post.

“History was unmade last year, as engineers began the massive project of ripping the first-ever transoceanic fiber-optic cable from the ocean floor.”

My life is work right now, so I’ve been training my reading and writing habits in that direction in the hope it will be additive. So when a friend who works in tech suggested I pick up some Ellen Ullman, I snapped it up. Ullman was a programmer who wrote about her experience as a woman in tech in …

My friend Dave Bangert has been a Midwestern reporter for thirty years, and began his own newsletter project after layoffs and mergers emptied his local newsroom. Now his 8000 subscriber project is a major influence in a Big Ten town that otherwise has a weak media market. In this podcast he talks …

As a true blue Hoosier, here’s my hot take on the Chicago Bears moving to Hammond: no dunking on NWI. I’m seeing a lot of disgust for Indiana in related Bears commentary that troubles me, especially the comments about NWI as a place of blight, beyond consideration or repair, obscuring the …

The last time I went truly viral was in April of 2020 in the height of the COVID shutdown. I posted a tweet and walked away from my phone. By the time I checked back, my notifications were out of control. The next morning, I got a message from an old friend familiar with my handle. “I think I …

In an Internet of things (IOT), what happens when the companies behind the service model cease to be?

What to do when the biggest platforms for readers are kind of evil?

Making the rounds on social today: New study suggests that while 70% of financial firms use AI today, 80% report no impact on employment or productivity.

“Because RSS is an open protocol, and because there are so many different possible ways to follow and read the news, RSS readers ought to be a UI playground in the way Twitter clients once were, where innovation and experimentation are normal and celebrated.”

There are many hyperbolic essays on AI going viral this week. This essay gets into some of the emerging politics around AI in the United States and how they map onto electoral politics, and is irritated with the American left’s approach to AI. I agree on one angle, that as a cohort, abstaining …

Who decides what’s real in the age of AI? Instagram.

Widespread AI adoption reopens some basic questions in business: who your audience is, what work can reasonably be automated, what absolutely requires human oversight, and how the service and information environment actually holds together when we shuffle these circumstances around. All this, with …

I’ve been writing about how writing and code are the same thing in digital environments, and about how that equivalence shaped the early web. AI changes that relationship. The dominant conversation is about whether LLMs can write well, but I suspect that’s the wrong frame. Human …

When I started building websites in the late ’90s, the line between writing and coding didn’t really exist. A person probably learned HTML because she had something to say and needed a place to put it. The internet was free and anonymous and it felt audacious to put your stuff online, …

I’ve been running a series of informal experiments with my team to understand how we should advise people on using AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini around our work. In our last session, I gave everyone the same task: ask your AI tool to summarize a single article in plain language. …

Writing is code, code is writing.

I asked Claude.ai for a plain language summary of this buzzy new research paper. Claude offers the following: Researchers from Caltech and Stanford conducted the first comprehensive survey of how and why large language models (LLMs) — AI systems like ChatGPT or Claude — fail at reasoning tasks. …

A survey of 1200 authors on how they are thinking about and using AI

My undergrad experience in college really shaped my approach to the internet. I was an English Education major at the time, in the early 00s, when the internet was around but mostly the wheelhouse of scholars and nerds. I was a nerd, learning code as a vehicle for writing, primarily to amuse myself …

Something else I noticed in my experimentation with AI and creative writing: Claude prefers a mid-length, declarative sentence, while I prefer a lot of variety in my prose. Sentence variety is a primary consideration in any text-based communication approach. Write accordingly.

I have a confession. While experimenting with AI over the last year, I wondered what would happen if I crammed an unfinished novel draft, one I actually care about, into Claude. Claude is pitched as the LLM for writers, with Claude 3.7 Sonnet and 3 Opus widely regarded as the premier LLMs for …

About fifteen years ago, when I began to take my work and career more seriously, I turned toward other women in my orbit who were in the same phase of life. For many years now we have supported each other through our various iterations, talking interviews and talent and resumes and obstacles and …

Tagging this plain language definition for later: “platforms… are any space or any institution that brings together buyers and sellers, speakers and listeners.”

The article argues that Silicon Valley’s shift from long-term employment to talent migration has created a model where workers maximize their individual compensation through frequent job changes, fundamentally altering tech industry culture and economics for the worse.

The reporter who tried to replace herself with a bot

🍿Watched: Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am This PBS doc recently came to Netflix, and I tucked in expecting a nice but predictably boring documentary about one of my favorite authors. To the contrary, it really plumbs Morrison’s writing craft, not only as an author but as an editor who brought a …

The universe is telling me to read Neuromancer already.

Closer to the machine: There is something about the AI moment that reminds me a lot of when the internet was new. A lot of what was imagined and promised about the internet was never realized. But much was. I’ve been reading Ellen Ullman’s memoirs - “Life in Code” and “Close to the …

“Evidence from a study about workplace writers who use AI suggests that writers are outsourcing some of their research, editing, or drafting to AI, but that they retain responsibility for their writing.”

Crunching for clarity: In 1999, academic and theorist Judith Butler famously won an award for the worst academic sentence, raising good questions about how we read difficult texts, who gets to access academic ideas, and the role of academic and plain language in and around the academy: The move from a structuralist …

A lot of readers are fascinated with the “black box” of AI writing, and trying to reverse engineer what it does and why. John Gallagher goes down the rabbit hole and articulates some credible theories about why LLMs use lists and listing to create meaning, and why it matters.

French overlooks how smartphones and social media raised the stakes on debate and discussion, transforming campus discourse. Today’s students worry that one viral misstep (in countless directions) may define them forever.

Connected Places uses ICE as a case study to explore trust, safety, and community dynamics on decentralized social networks, examining how federation changes community moderation expectations we’ve developed from centralized platforms.

A new paper in Science Magazine explains how AI now allows propaganda campaigns to reach previously unprecedented scale and precision. This gets into the implications for organizations, institutions and nations.

The real problem is that it's not our quagmire: Tiktok is not much better or worse than other major social platforms, I say. The primary arguments against TikTok, including data collection, algorithmic manipulation, potential foreign government access, addiction and influence on public opinion, apply with equal or greater force to American …

The TikTok deal means American users will see a US-only algorithm. Brands and creators will likely see smaller audiences and higher costs for domestic reach. ByteDance faces split algorithms, divided workforces and parallel governance, complicating product delivery across global markets.

The promise of AI is that it makes work more productive, but the reality is proving more complex and less rosy.

I’m generally skeptical of anyone selling a solution to a social problem that relies on individual abstinence, so I tend to be annoyed with many arguments about the attention economy. I more or less land here on the question of AI, which I know many of my contemporaries will find similarly …

Searching for Suzy Thunder: In the ’80s, Susan Headley ran with the best of them—phone phreakers, social engineers, and the most notorious computer hackers of the era. Then she disappeared.

While conspiring with a friend about life and work in these trying times, both of us confessed that we believe, at the root, that reading and writing are ultimately the cure for everything that ails us: collectively, individually, epistemically, existentially. Maybe that’s naive, but I’ll take it.

Make Canadian TV weird again (sponsored by The Red Green Show, probably).

Rules without lessons: If you spend time around cycling and pedestrian advocates, the debate between bans and regulations is familiar territory. When I got deep into road biking, where I learned to ride long distance through a red state with almost no bike infrastructure outside tight urban and exurban areas, one of the …

UW-Madison is among universities seeing federal terminations of international student visas. Public research universities have come to rely on these students to offset funding cuts. The losses are both financial and cultural.

404 Media on Wikipedia, reciprocity and collaboration online, and how to protect the public commons in the age of AI.

Wondering whether I want to switch to something more robust like Wordpress if I keep doing this thing, but at the same time I have enjoyed not working within and around the world of WP, which has dominated my CMS experience since the aughts.

This observation at the end of Manton’s post on AI and Wikipedia made me chuckle: AI using Wikipedia reminds me of the FAQ on setting up a Little Free Library: _I think someone is stealing books from my library and selling them, what do I do?_ Remember that the purpose of a Little Free Library …

Woof: ads are coming to ChatGPT.

Affinity as an organizing principle: Reading this blog post by a political scientist explaining the problem with our fractured information landscape, and how calls for more information and media literacy are not likely solutions: “In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are …

I too have been challenged by defining “federation” to non-technical audiences, so it was fun and instructive to see others give it a go.

The CEO of Instagram says that social media platforms will be under mounting pressure to help users tell the difference between human-made and AI content, and that going forward, it will be more practical to label real content over AI.

“It’s really a software maturity story,” Sag says. “But that’s not very sexy.”

The trust gap : I suspect these three trends are connected: Women reportedly use AI at significantly lower rates than men—25 percent lower on average—in part because they’re more concerned about ethics, including privacy, consent and intellectual property. At the same time, countries with more positive social …

Folks are beginning to wonder why Twitter and Grok are still in the app stores, given the latest trend in using the LLM to generate non-consensual imagery of people (namely women and children) at alarming rates.

Blogging from the Ruins is an essay getting a ton of attention in the fediverse this week, making a strong case for intentionally building non-algorithmic intellectual communities on the open web.

A new study suggests that countries who report more positive experiences with social media also feel more positive about AI. It seems to come down to tech regulation and trust.

On the Media spends an hour exploring the media strategy behind the calls for debate. Tl;dr: controversy extends unpopular ideas much further than they would reach organically on their own.