406 entries under "article"

Nobody pays for open source. We can force them to.

Free wins the code game, but the supply game is won by whoever is the default, and defaults can charge.

the people who run the meter pay the people who make the thing worth metering.

I Am a Flat-Rate Monthly Responsibility Service

There’s no prestige in being an active contributor to an open-source community anymore because you are just a meat proxy for the Borg. Make sure your docs are formatted for them!

Nothing was mastered. Their passion for solving the problem didn't push them through the hard part. They had an errant thought, manifested it into reality, and are now showing it to me. It's exactly like a coworker cornering you in the breakroom to tell you about a dream they had. You have to nod, but you are dead inside.

I am a flat-rate monthly responsibility service that agrees to assume full liability for the output of the robot. I am the human face with a pulse who can be lectured about why something did or didn't work. I will apologize. I will attempt to fix it. I will take the blame.

Designing AI Native Teams

A small team with a strong agent workflow can produce an enormous amount of convincing work very quickly. That does not mean the work is correct, maintainable, secure, or worth shipping. Without strong ownership and production discipline, the feature team becomes a prototype generator that leaves the rest of the company to clean up the mess.

[AI makes judgement, domain expertise, and production ownership more important rather than unnecessary.]

Accidental anonymity

The perfected, generated, prompted resume is generic and impersonal. It tells me nothing about this person, other than that they use particular tools. I can't see the inputs to their outputs, see what they typed, or the process of building.

The email about why I'm the right person to try your side project says nothing about you. I don't know why you made it, who you are. I don't know your writing style. I don't have any way to connect to you as a person, and no reason to care.

ive been "promoting" things on the internet for 15 years now! here's my top tips

• show yourself having fun
• many consistent repeated small launches is better than one big launch
• someone needs to see something like nine times before it sticks
• reward people for following along with everything. you can never go too far with in-jokes
• let people feel part of something.
• never show off. never try to be cool
• be like a monster in a horror film - never show the whole thing. make it seem like there's more to discover by clicking through
• create drama and arguments by being fearless and stupid
• make it clear you dont need anyone - you're having fun on your own. its more infectious that way
• show how you feel. feelings are more powerful than information
• its a lot like rolling the dice. to go viral once, roll a thousand dice

Who pays the price?

Universal basic income is not a reward for idleness; it is recognition that productivity gains belong to society, not just to capital.

A society that automates its way to prosperity while abandoning its workers has not progressed at all.

Technology advocacy without social advocacy is just greed with better tooling.

There is Always Another Lunch

most daily choices are reversible, and because life presents an endless stream of future opportunities, spending excessive time and energy on minor decisions is inefficient and puts you at the end of the lunchtime rush of orders put into the kitchen.

Things lost in translation

In Western contexts, "martyr" carries a heavy political or theological weight—the idea that someone made a conscious choice to die for a cause. But that isn't how shaheed functions for Palestinians.

Calling a child playing in a yard, a sleeping family, or an elderly patient in a hospital bed a shaheed isn't claiming agency or choice. None of them chose to be targeted. Instead, shaheed is an act of love, sanctity, and honor. It is a communal refusal to let a life stolen by Israeli military violence be reduced to a cold, clinical statistic.

This creates a constant struggle in translation: In English, saying someone was "killed" feels completely inadequate—it strips away the honor owed to the victim and flattens the active, systematic violence taking their life.

A Quirky Introduction To Number Systems

[Math is software for your brain: each concept is an app or approach with uses and limitations. Getting stuck on a problem often has more to do with our method than reality itself.]

Don't Make Assumptions

This is how learning works. Be interested. Don't assume you know anything. That's how you stay dumb. Be a beginner. Ask questions.

The Craft of Capitalism

'Sterile' is a word that accompanies the spread of modern corporate capitalism, precisely because of that process in which the rough edges of older, more informal markets are sanded away. In the midst of an accelerating capitalist economy, people operating according to its logic feel compelled to remove friction or 'inefficiency', but in doing so begin to scour away all the texture that gives a neighbourhood its soul. Inefficient snags are the very thing around which community collects, which is why efficiency can create malls but not community.

Gentrification appropriates the aesthetics of punk, anarchism, village life or immigrant culture, and uses it as a marketing tool while stripping away the substance of that culture.

The end result of a gentrification is an area that feels like a museum of itself. Your eyes catch glimpses of things that still look edgy, exotic or alternative, and yet your body does not feel it, because all those little cues that would be present in an authentic and alive space are missing. The honesty box by the beer fridge is gone. In its place is a Square terminal for cashless payments, plugging into the banking sector via Visa and Mastercard.

Jacob Bessen on How Sicilians are Neighbouring with Migrants

what do you want to keep purely for yourself, and what would actually be more fun if it were shared or done alongside other people?

Modern houses, built for self-contained nuclear families, are sealed against the world, the smells and sounds and life kept in, and that seal is precisely what has to be broken. In Sutera, people actively mourn the older ways of living around piazzas and street corners, because they wish they could easily see and feel the presence of others nearby and invite them in and go to others without invitation.

In this context, small towns aren't boring because people are brilliant at talking, storytelling, and joking. That art atrophies without practice. In contrast, much sociality in much of modern life is organised around consumption rather than presence.

Just Pay the Subscription

Take your favorite indie developer out to coffee, look them in the eye, and tell them the $5.99 you just spent on them should be good to cover their work until they die.

On the Regular

Another nice thing about being a regular at a place that values regulars is that you meet the other regulars. This summer I was often left to my own devices for dinner and a couple times a week, I ended up at my local. And almost without exception, I ended up having dinner with someone I'd previously met at the bar. Routinely turning a solo dining experience into dinner with a friend is an amazing accomplishment for a restaurant.

Please Use AI

be sure to use AI when your next child
gets married, so that you can write them
the perfect toast or poem or speech or song
because no one wants to hear your
words, the actual poorly written words
of a parent (you) who changed
hundreds of diapers for said child or fed
them in the middle of the
night from your actual body. Or cried
when they were late home because
you were positive they were dead. We don't
want those words—we'd prefer the sterile
words of a machine that never lived, never
had an original thought, never felt
the pain of miscarriage or broken
relationships or the joy of a friendship restored

I'll be over here in my 50th
year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,
my arm falling asleep because I dare not move
lest I scare away this moment,
lying here melancholy about my older
children moving out and my middle
children no longer needing me, at least
not like they used to, weary about this body
that fails me now in ever increasing ways
that will never be restored. Sighing
over stories I tried to write but never hit
the page the way they felt in my mind.

X: Claude Fable 5 will be available globally tomorrow!

X: But what about safety?

Me: First you must decide who you are focused on protecting? Users, citizens or existing power structures and specifically, which ones? The paths are not the same. Market benefit rarely coincides with social benefit.

kottke.org memberships

In an ideal world: I write for you, you pay me, I write some more. No middlemen.

If we knew as much about Haiti as we do about France, the world wouldn't be the way it is!

[Napoleon's bankruptcy from the Haitian revolution forced the sale of Louisiana territory to what we now call the United States; without this, it would be a third of the size today.]

Open Source Psyop

It's a psyop if you understand the other mind's decision calculus, and have the ability to override their decision purely via careful selection of input information.

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism

The thing your industry would prefer not to deal with is reframed as an obsolete burden. Your refusal to do it is rebranded as innovation. Your inability to imagine a world where you don't get exactly what you want becomes a manifesto.

Once the platforms got large enough to be unstoppable, once they captured enough of the regulatory apparatus to write their own rules, the libertarian rhetoric got quietly shelved like a college poster you took down before your in-laws came over. Meta no longer pretends it stands for free speech and seemingly takes delight in putting its thumb on the scale. TikTok users have invented an entire euphemistic shadow language to evade automated censorship like "unalive," "le dollar bean," "graped" that would have made 1996 Barlow weep into his bolo tie.

Copyright and patents matter when they're Apple's copyright and patents. Or Googles. Or OpenAIs. Go try to make a Facebook+ website and see how quickly Meta is capable of responding to content it finds objectionable.

People did not get better because they went online. Giving everyone access to a raw, unfiltered pipeline of every fact and lie ever produced did not turn them into better-educated people. It broke them. It allowed them to choose the reality they now inhabit, like ordering off a menu. If I want to believe the world is flat, TikTok will gladly serve me that content all day. Meta will recommend supportive groups. There will be hashtags. There will be Discords. There will be a guy named Trent who runs a podcast. I will never have to face the deeply uncomfortable possibility that I might be wrong about anything, ever, until the day I die, surrounded by people who agree with me about everything, including which of the other mourners are secretly lizards.