Short dated entries, links, and microblog-style notes.
The Gap Through Which We Praise the Machine
In this post I’ll expose my current theory of agentic programming: people are amazing at adapting the tools they’re given and totally underestimate the extent to which they do it, and the amount of skill we build doing that is an incidental consequence of how badly the tools are designed.
Slow Software for a Burning World as Bonfire heads to a v1.0 release:
“In a world of ‘move fast and break things,’ we’ve chosen a different tempo — one rooted in care, deep listening, and collective stewardship. Slow software means building for long-term resilience and meaningful participation, rather than chasing novelty, speed, or scale.”
The Shape of What You Meant is a blog post about Index Network, a kind of ambient discovery that describes its contrast with performative social media and how things must be public in order to aid in discovery.
Devine wrote notes on malleable computing as a reflection on the Ink & Switch Malleable Software essay.
“…because the avocado slicer is narrowly focused on one task, it’s useless at anything else. If you used a specialized gadget for every single task, you’d end up with a mountain of plastic.”
Why Centralized AI Is Not Our Inevitable Future is a response to Sam Altman’s “gentle singularity”, written by Alex Komoroske, founder of Common Tools
“between hyper-centralized systems that inevitably tend toward extraction and manipulation, versus distributed systems that enhance human agency and preserve choice.”
I’ve been uneasy about Matrix for a long time.
This post goes on to recommend where to look for a replacement: Polyproto, Delta Chat, Revolt
Radicle, an open source p2p collaboration stack around git repos, has a new desktop app.
Tonk released an explainer about their new release - “a CLI that helps you vibe code your second brain”, “designed to simplify the process of building custom dashboards, tools, and AI agents using your own data.”
Explicitly mentions remixing your Obsidian content.
As part of walking the startup showcase at Web Summit Vancouver, I saw Forestwalk Labs demo’ing Timberline, their agentic Mac app - building task management in an agent-first way.
Justin Searls explains why to be excited about what Apple announced about LLMs at WWDC. One is that developers can do “free, unlimited invocation of Apple’s on-device language models”, so zero cost LLM features by using a user’s own device. The rest is about native support in Swift for working with LLMs.
Resilio Sync was introduced to me by Jonny at Z-Space for user friendly file sync across many platforms. It used to be called BitTorrent Sync (and now I’m down a wikipedia rabbit hole - oh god,comparison of file sync software)
RSS Dashboard is an Obsidian plugin that pulls in posts from RSS feeds, YouTube, podcasts, and other feed based media, created by Aditya Amatya.
Steve Klabnik is disappointed in the AI discourse “all of the discussion online around AI is so incredibly polarized…both the pro-AI and anti-AI sides are loudly proclaiming things that are pretty trivially verifiable as not true”
He recommends two good reads: The Software Engineering Identity Crisis and Algorithmic Underground
It was about a year ago that I posted about Puter. It’s a web desktop and got me thinking about these types of interfaces so I put together a page about them.
I used Cyd to migrate tweets to Bluesky on my @bmannconsulting.com account, self hosted on BringYourOwn.Computer.
Feature request: support replies using bsky’s facets to link to the Twitter original.
Chris Joel aka cdata just posted an announce thread that he’s building Familiar, a “magical notebook”, bootstrapping a healthier web from today’s ailing one.
Great Q&A with Robin Berjon about open social protocols wearing his Free Our Feeds hat in Columbia Journalism Review.
Explains open social protocols as roads shared by all, and gently pushes journalists to inform themselves & get better at explaining it.