I'm a software developer in Camarillo, California. I write about software development, technology and music.
'Alt-text' is short for alternative text, and is used to convey the substance of visual content as text. It is important for people with visual disabilities, though is beneficial for a wide range of people. It is useful for low-speed connections where an image might not load, for searching for an image, for SEO/AIO/GEO, for cases where a link to an image is broken, for understanding context, and…
A lot of people seem to be realizing that knowledge work is mostly pointless. AI might give us the pleasure of finding out what happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers.
After a multi-year detour wading through the quagmire of bloatware that is modern software I’m back to coding in Sublime Text.
Most native apps collect far more data than their website equivalents ever could. They request permissions to hardware, sensors, and background processes that browsers deliberately restrict. The third-party software embedded in these apps frequently transmits your location, device identifiers, and behavioral data to third parties before you even see a consent prompt. This data is in tandem bought,…
I’ve had the pleasure in my career of sitting in tons of different board rooms talking with executives and getting a rundown on different charts and graphs they care most deeply about. As expected, “number chart go up” is always the desired outcome. Number chart go up is good because it makes other number charts go up, specifically stock ticker number.
The reality of how much damage AI mania is doing to our ability to run institutions effectively.
If you’re not familiar with the IndieWeb movement, it’s a practical approach to maintaining your presence on the web that emphasizes fully owning your identity and your content. This is especially relevant now, at a time when a growing number of corporations want to own and control those things for you. The IndieWeb ethos seeks to eliminate external influence and control over both you and your…
Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.
LLMs have broken legibility of effort - our ability to tell, at a glance, whether something took a human real work. What happens next?
It's kind of incredible that these days, barely a day goes by that I don't think about AOL Instant Messenger (or AIM, as I'll call it throughout) at some point.
Standard.site provides a set of lexicons for publishing long-form content on the internet using the same protocol used under the hood by Bluesky.
At the moment I am writing this, bad internet bills are being proposed across the US, Canada, Europe, and the UK. They're using the usual tactics: they claim they're fighting for kids or fighting security risks, but in general, that's what surveillance and censorship bills have always claimed.
If anyone can build it in a world of generative AI, what, then, are people paying for when they buy software? Why would people buy software?
Let’s review. Token costs are rising. In response, Meta and Amazon have shut down their internal “artificial intelligence” leaderboards; Microsoft has pushed its employees toward Copilot, and away from Claude Code’s rising costs. Uber has already capped its usage of LLMs internally, setting a monthly cap for every employee’s token spending. All of this is happening against the backdrop of the…
AI is inherently political technology. If AI works as intended, it will gradually corrode our liberal democracy, risking an irreversible shift into another political and economic configuration. Among AI risks, this one deserves more consideration, because it requires no additional conditions like malign actors or AI malfunction. AI only needs to amplify existing trends,…
Last week, the Safari team formally expressed their opposition to the WebMCP API. In Safari’s explanation of why they oppose WebMCP, they captured something I’ve been trying to articulate.
I’m often asked to edit friends’ or coworkers’ writing, anything from emails to short stories to documentation. Recently, someone asked me how I edit. What am I looking for? How do I know what changes to make? That made me stop and think about what I’ve been doing semi-instinctually.
The current gold rush in civic tech is around HR1 work requirements implementation. Vendors are pitching states on systems to help them comply with the new federal mandates. The pitch sounds like operational efficiency, reducing burden on caseworkers, helping eligible people stay on benefits through the new verification gauntlet. What’s being built is administrative burden as a service.
There are about a thousand and one debates about the ecology of AI, the ethics of AI, the governance of AI. As the technology advances, the debate with the slipperiest footing is on the actual efficacy of AI: does this work for this application? Or for this one? Ultimately, whether LLMs “work” as a technology or not doesn’t matter. The function of a system is its output, and no matter what utility…
The determination to move away from the addictive doom-scrolling of social media has given me pause, given me space to look around at how I use the internet and figure out where I get most value and where I WANT to get it from.