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.
Microposts
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 is to share books—you can’t really steal from it._
Woof: ads are coming to ChatGPT.
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.”
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.
New numbers from Pew Research on how teens used social media and AI chatbots in 2025.
One of my favorite low-cost cooking hacks is baking nice charcuterie on a frozen pizza. Today, I found out that Alimentari carries Smoking Goose products from my home state, so we’re having frozen pizza from Sal’s with capicola for dinner. Rawr, yum.
The deepfake goes mainstream, and it sounds like virtually everyone is unprepared for the negative social implications.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025 →
Our friend, the RSS feed.
Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2026
Anthropic on how AI is changing how people work. This is a marketing piece, of course, but useful nonetheless.
Just speaking this into the universe, but it would be exceedingly cool if someone pulled together a micro.blog plugin for Feedland blogrolls and page feeds.
An interesting update by Dave Winer on how blog comments might work in and around federation.
I love this: Sam at Yale Climate Connections suggests some slow fashion gift ideas for the holidays.
Wednesday, November 26, 2025 →
Determined to finish at least one more novel this year, and this one fits the bill. Currently reading: Moderation by Elaine Castillo 📚
I am pro-games and gaming (and partake in gaming myself), and both of my kids had a generally positive experience on various gaming platforms over the years, but stuff like this still gives me pause.
Interesting to see web and print magazines talk about their strategy and value proposition since Google adopted an A.I.-powered search feature. x.com/pastemaga…
Solarpunk is happening in sub-Saharan Africa, a movement to bring electricity to places that are impacted by “last mile” challenges in grid engineering and politics.
Human in the loop (HITL): HITL means that humans are involved at some point in the AI workflow to ensure accuracy, safety, accountability or ethical decision-making. HITL inserts human insight into the “loop,” the continuous cycle of interaction and feedback between AI systems and humans.
At the nail salon where a woman is telling her very intrigued mother about podcasts. “You can listen to them anywhere! In the car, while you’re gardening.”
This book isn’t in Epilogue so I can’t log it properly, but it’s an okay primer on change communication. For higher ed, the emphasis on engaging leadership and governance is handy. 📚