Welcome to compend. On here, you can review anything that has a Wikipedia article.
Truly genius website idea.
In the last few months, Yen set up an email address for employees to contact if they come across anything blocking adoption of AI at Proton, so leadership can “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity;” Proton installed software on workers’ computers that track how much AI code the company is generating; and Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.
By all appearances, Proton's CEO and CTO are both in the throes of a deep and disturbing bout of AI psychosis and it's putting a lot of people who rely on their products in danger. Diversify soon, methinks.
What we are learning at an alarmingly fast pace is that not only are some of the locks easy to pick, in some cases the door is wide open or there’s a giant hole in the wall.
You may or may not have noticed (though I did make a blogpost about it) but I took down this site for a couple hours last night -- the reason being a massive PHP exploit that this site (& a few others I selfhost) were vulnerable to.
I'm not really sure what to do with this, other than what I can do -- be wary, pull things offline if need be. I am a bit of a pessimist in general and I know that, but I do think it is a very rough time to be "getting into" hosting websites, and yet that is what I'm doing.
This stuff has seeped into the soil like a crude oil spill. There is so much viral hyperbole about what these things are capable of that is often followed by a sobering and less sexy reality. What I mourn is the loss of trust, the alienation of people with institutional knowledge and the chaotic disruption of real communities by strangers walking in like a toddler with a Glock.
I do not trust that all these big tech companies will remain solvent. They are currently making a multi-trillion-dollar infrastructural investment so that software devs don't have to write regex anymore, and so that regular people don't have to learn how to use excel formulae.
Laura is right
The answer to this is simple: say what you mean. This will take, to some degree, courage. It may even take, I hesitate to say, some sacrifice. When I suggest this course of action to people, they inevitably say, “But it will cost me audience!” or “But what if I lose followers!” or “What if they demonetize me!” Okay, what if they do? What if they do.
Anil Dash is on the money with this one. God, I cannot stand "unalive" and "grape" and all these fucking childish neologisms and I will call you out on using them if I see you using them! Talk like a fucking adult!
And a reminder: Substack is not an email newsletter, and a Spotify show is not a podcast — they’ll be unaliving your distribution any day now.
And he's also right about this!!
If you haven't looked at the Napster website lately, get ready for some major AI-related indigestion. The former music-sharing rebel is now peddling AI digital twins of teachers and serving the Saudi market.
Very... odd? Very odd. I mean, anything Saudi related these days is sort of strange but this is a particularly weird product fit.
A free QR code generator that works entirely in your browser. No ads, no trackers, no data sent to any server.
Hey, this is neat.
“AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying online.
In the past week I have received 10 different sign-up requests for my mastodon instance from really obvious bots, and I wonder how many of those were "AI Agents".
HTML isn't only for people working in the tech field. It's for everyone. Learn how to make a website from scratch in this beginner friendly web book.
Lovely little website -- I've read it in the past and am noting it here so that I have a record of it for later to recommend for people.
Most of the critiques I've seen of "algospeak" miss the mark, for me. If you see someone getting in a fight about it online, they're probably going to accuse the algospeaking poster of being a child. That's the wrong tack to take, I think. You should instead be accusing these people of not understanding the website where they're posting, and not caring enough to read any of the other posts!
lurk moar!!
Good UX is highly desired and once you get it right, it feels almost natural, intuitive. The current state of news UI assumes that the reader is an adversary to be trapped and monetized.
Free film archive of solidarity and struggle!
This is my claim: we, as a civilization, forgot how to center things.
Lovely blogpost/rant about centering in the modern UI landscape.
So, you may notice things look a bit different around here.
Bruno moved his blog to a proper selfhosted option instead of Bear, which is something I am also considering, so this was a great read of what I should expect.
A well laid out, interactive map of the current Trump administration's connections with crypto. Really cool artifact.
Everything is so evidently handcrafted, giving it the energy of a high school production (complimentary). A small orchestra, manned by people dressed in Pride regalia, sits off to one side. Behind them, a table holds 10 different zines covering everything from how to get off Spotify to the role of surveillance technology in schools to “Why GenAI Sucks.”
The kids are alright?
Instead of a one-size-fits-all block, all customers can now easily distinguish and manage Search, Agent, and Training bots, alongside the new ability to protect ad-monetized pages.
Not a bad move from Cloudflare, honestly.
Each laptop tells a story through its stickers.
Fun little internet curiosity. I love the different ways that people customize their laptops. I should post an update to my own on the big blog sometime soon...
A parallel web updated through physical media.
This looks very cool! Interesting idea. Sort of like a federated... internet? I think? seems cool.