Anatomy of an internet argument
Everyone always asks me, how do you have so much patience to engage with “these trolls/haters”. I don’t do this for them. I do this for me. I share the earth with these people we call vile. Their opinions & actions affect me greatly. Closing my eyes & ears only hurts me.
[Gold medal: convince them. Silver: get them to understand you. Bronze: understand them. Always go for bronze first.]
Anthropic negotiated moral agency constraints into Claude's training. The Department of Defense contracted for targeting capability through a third-party integrator. The model's behavior in that pipeline is not fully visible to either party, as each operates on a different layer of the same system. Anthropic sees the weights. The Pentagon sees the outputs. The integrator sees the interface. No single institutional actor has complete legibility over the full chain.
States can deter foreign armies. They have developed no equivalent doctrine for emergent algorithmic behavior operating inside their own command infrastructure.
The Repricing of the Digital Gulf
Microsoft’s refusal to issue a standard outage report for the Gulf availability zones is consistent with DoD Impact Level 5 and 6 protocols. Under these classifications, disclosing operational status during a kinetic event is considered a breach of national security, as it provides the adversary with vital BDA (Battle Damage Assessment) data.
Beijing has been waiting for this moment. Huawei’s "Cloud Stack" and China’s digital infrastructure offerings come with a different geopolitical package. If China can leverage its relationship with Tehran to guarantee that "Chinese-built" data centers will not be targeted, the Gulf states face a staggering choice: stick with a Western system that is under fire, or pivot to a Chinese system that offers a "neutrality guarantee." This would represent a total collapse of the U.S. technological blockade against China.
These facilities consume extraordinary amounts of electricity, measured not in megawatts but in gigawatts. GPT-3, when it launched, required roughly 1.3 megawatts to train. Next-generation frontier models are projected to require facilities drawing 150 megawatts or more on a continuous basis — the equivalent of powering a mid-sized city. At that scale, the constraint is no longer silicon. It is power.
Almost every watt consumed by a processor ultimately becomes heat. A large AI cluster therefore generates enormous thermal loads that must be dissipated continuously — not occasionally, but every second of every hour of operation. A gigawatt-scale facility must remove roughly a gigawatt of heat.
Instead of building data centers first and connecting them to the grid later, developers are increasingly looking for the opposite arrangement: locating compute directly adjacent to major sources of generation. The logic is straightforward. If the grid cannot deliver power fast enough, go to where the power already is.
[Frames can displace the core issue without being true, just by being repeated.]
[Hegseth's version of legality is up to the Pentagon as end user. Anthropic should provide capability, whereas the state determines its usage limits.]
[The new criteria for AI systems in military to process intelligence data, and inform decisions about targets and operations is not capability, safety, or reliability, but 'patriotism'.]
[The entire defense industry's relation with one of the most capable AI systems was structurally rewired, without legislation, review, or voting.]
a failed marketing campaign doubles as a successful research experiment we can publish, if it surfaces why people did not like thing/what the origin of the resistance was
[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.]
Tagged: video.
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.”
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
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.]
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.
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".
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."
[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.
How n8n Handles Vulnerability Disclosure - and Why We Do It This Way
[Closed-source security updates are hidden from attackers, which means the time they need to reverse-engineer a patch is a window for users to safely apply the update. Open-sources security patches are immediately visible and become a roadmap for attackers to target those who haven't updated yet.]
[We currently publish patches and advisories on the same day to minimize the exploitable window. We also develop fixes in private and merge into public only when it's announced.]
