87 entries for 2026

The Purpose of Protocols

[Email letting any server send to another with no authentication enabled universal messaging, spam, and becoming the defacto internet identity, for which its spec wasn't designed nor does it anticipate. HTTP model with servers authoritative for their resources enabled the web's openness and also consolidation into a few platforms. RSS gave publishers independant distribution but with no way to collectively curate, so algorithmic platforms filled the void. Google defeated XMPP simply by not federating when its own network had enough users so that protocol no longer served its interests.]

[Protocols can design the rules but not how the actors operate within them. Silence about purpose is a politics of non-interference that predictably benefits actors with resources to build wherever the protocols did not govern.]

if we define ATProto’s purpose by what it currently does, the answer is not “a decentralized social protocol with separated powers” but “a social protocol with architectural provisions for decentralization, currently operated as a near-centralized system.” Whether those architectural provisions will translate into actual distribution of power depends on economic and institutional developments that no amount of protocol design can guarantee.

The open protocol community has inherited two intellectual traditions, both inadequate to this problem: an engineering functionalism that treats protocols as neutral infrastructure whose political consequences are someone else’s concern, and a governance minimalism that treats any collective decision-making structure as a potential vector for the very centralization the protocols were designed to prevent. The result is a community that has developed exceptional sophistication about technical architecture and individual rights while remaining largely inarticulate about collective governance. Addressing this will require the protocol design community to draw on intellectual traditions it has not yet seriously engaged with, including Ostrom’s institutional analysis, Beer’s organizational cybernetics, and the broader literature on commons governance and cooperative design.

the same incentive structures that determine who can afford to operate at scale also determine what content those operators are rewarded for surfacing.

"Purpose not being defined gets captured by well-resourced actors" reminds me of Kyla Scan's "friction doesn't get removed, just shifted" and Rudy Fraser's "you can't design decentralized software without thinking about moderation". Purpose and consideration of the dynamics created by interfaces and systems perhaps should be part of the design process.

Cory LaChance shares his Claude story building TakeOffTrak

[With no coding experince (just Excel macros), I learned to use Claude Code and the terminal by asking Claude. When I don't know what to click, I take a screenshot and ask Claude.]

Is the story of your relationship true?

[We can still over weigh past hurt in our relationships even after repair.]

[At any given moment, relationships contain eight combined narratives, from

• you: about yourself, your partner, and the relationship
• your partner: about themselves, you, and the relationship
• the relationship itself: about you, and your partner]

Don’t Mix Up Artifacts With Processes

predict how a person will react to all this stuff by figuring out how much of their life is spent inside of a bureaucracy. Work on your own? The bots are coming to ruin your life. Manage employee and constituent safety at a large group of harm-reduction-focused, state-funded addiction recovery clinics? “I use it for everything.”

communication and collaboration as tuning: all parties responsible for the interaction and supporting it to bring the best out of each other without overloading anyone

A sufficiently detailed spec is code

Typically the reason we write specification documents before doing the work is to encourage viewing the project through a contemplative and critical lens, because once coding begins we switch gears and become driven with a bias to action.

There is no world where you input a document lacking clarity and detail and get a coding agent to reliably fill in that missing clarity and detail. Coding agents are not mind readers and even if they were there isn't much they can do if your own thoughts are confused

Vandana Shiva | On Cultivating Fearlessness

[Just as yield doesn't measure agricultural productivity, mechanistic thinking is a poor fit for the living world.]

[When you try to make things better, what seems a small contribution can have multiple ramifications because our world is interconnected. Being overwhelmed by your actions seeming insignifican is a result of conditioning from mechanical thinking that reduces us to isolated entities. We don't carry the world on are backs, we are just one of a trillion species that each creating microscopic impacts.]

[Mechanical thinking conditions us into believing that things are separated so that it can sell us natural things as products we can buy repeatedly forever.]

[We're trained to consume, and consider living without unsustainable products to be a "sacrifice". But if living within natural restaint can be a source of satisfacion and peace, and freedom from the insatiable desire for more, it's really consumption that requires us to "sacrifice".]

replace "doing it wrong" with "doing as learned"

Ageless Linux — Software for Humans of Indeterminate Age

A law that the largest companies in the world already comply with, and that hundreds of small projects cannot comply with, is not a child safety law. It is a compliance moat. It raises the regulatory cost of providing an operating system just enough that only well-resourced corporations can afford to do it.

Why Slight Failed: A Slight Post-Mortem

When someone asked “how do we get started?”, we had a technical answer (“connect your database, write some queries, data for all!”) but no story about which team should champion it first, or which problem to solve first. Data teams? Product teams? Analysts? We had some answers, but not the answer. We had pitches for individual teams that worked well, but we never nailed down the way companies should adopt Slight.

I made the stupid mistake of just working harder and harder to on-board companies. Instead, we should have sat down and mapped out ways to properly experiment with our approach. Maybe simplifying to a single clear use-case, or finding a completely different initial wedge, or focusing on specific verticals.

My 'Rules' for Running My Membership Program

[Have clear and specific goals – all membership activities must support them.]

[Frame the program as for those goals, not its members (who will benefit because the goals should benefit them).]

[Building a community is part of this, but managing community can easily distract from the goals.]

[An EU-hosted cloud governed by a non-EU parent company is just "data residency" not "data sovereignty".]

Salve América

trippy guitar harmonies, beautiful amalgamation of references to indigenous words and culture

Boy I was wrong about the Fediverse

Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality. In a nightmare world full of constant change it’s good to have a few constants to hold on to.

Billions of dollars at their disposal and Meta made a hot new social media network with the appeal of junk mail.

I'm sorry

[I asked strangers in Egypt who they would apologize to if they could.]

Mike Song + David Elsewhere - Kollaboration 2, 2001

inspiring to see so much mechanical detail in this pre-YouTube dance

Intuitive Understanding of Sine Waves

Sine is a natural sway, the epitome of smoothness: it makes circles "circular" in the same way lines make squares "square".

Spoonbill (2016—2023)

I woke up every single day for the next two months after signing those deals, convinced that I had somehow broken the law and I would find in my inbox an email saying "no, sorry, this has all been a misunderstanding, you must return to us all of that money." The process of sending an invoice of that size was surreal in a way that few things since have quite been, and more than the actual financial gain it was a deeply useful lesson in understanding that the numbers which look big to a twenty-four-year-old look like rounding errors to a sophisticated company.

It's painfully rare for a piece of software to have a true sense of narrative closure: either it succeeds, and is immortal, or it is killed: killed by shifting priorities and shrunken budgets and changing macroeconomic headwinds and more exciting ideas.

The case for gatekeeping, or: why medieval guilds had it figured out

We need a verified not-shit-person badge. Some mechanism, ideally decentralized, ideally reputation-based, that lets maintainers distinguish between "human who has demonstrated basic competence and good faith" and "entity or bot submitting or causing to be submitted auto-generated changes to mass repositories for credential farming."

Practical Decentralization

[The more people contribute to a shared network, the less appropriate "personal computing" metaphors becomes. It becomes inevitable to index aggregate data on their behalf, and these are shared resources that require governance. Pure p2p fails here because it has no solutions for shared governance.]

[Servers simplify operational challenges that come with p2p, like reliable uptime, device sync, and key management.]

A shared data space enables modularity, separating powers away from the popular hosts.