Vox dot com, explained in one image

The canceling of ICEBlock is more evidence, were any needed, that the Web is the platform of the future, the only platform without a controlling vendor. Anything controversial should be available through a pure browser interface. #uspolitics

It's pretty clear from the #bluesky CEO's shitposting that she really would rather not have all those uppity trans folks and their friends on the platform. Instead she'd prefer to proudly talk to investors about how even J.D. Vance has an account. It's the digital town square! Everyone is […]

Mario Guevara is being punished for speech by deportation to a country he fled decades ago: El Salvador, a dictatorship that operates horrific gulags the US has previously made use of. You can read Guevara's letter from detention in English here […] [Original post on social.coop]

Apple: And you'll see why 2025 will finally be like 1984. Think ... identically. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/us/politics/apple-iceblock-app-store-trump.html

“No Kings has already surpassed the June event total and we are still more than two weeks out. That means that with over 2,100 events, nearly no matter where you are, no matter where your family lives, there is a No Kings event close by -- now we need your help to make No Kings Day the biggest […]

Any reporter covering the US Supreme Court should take notes from this Slate summary. (Most will instead cover it with legitimizing, normalizing "analysis".) "The challenge will be to seek out that which the court is obscuring in this performance of business as usual this term, and to […]

Jane Fonda, with a large coalition of celebrities, revives the Committee for the First Amendment - a key group from the McCarthy era. Fonda: "I wish there were a secret playbook with all the answers – but there never has been. The only thing that has ever worked – time and time again – is […]

Apple has built this mythology of a user-friendly OS. But as I'm setting up a test Mac for development builds, I'm struck by the many tiny UX papercuts. Case in point: 1) Erase Mac -> connect to WiFi and enter password. 2) Install: select WiFi again, enter password you just typed again (!); no […]

@eloquence I think this is a really good framing. Any path forward needs to acknowledge that the systems we had, which have been or are being dismantled, were not producing democracy. We need to be asking and envisioning what actually will.

I don't really think it makes sense to talk about "protecting democracy" in a two-party system where one party has fully given up on the idea of democracy and is steadily building out authoritarian rule. Nor does success at pushing that party out of power while it remains fundamentally […]

Wrote up my initial impressions of the brand new Claude Sonnet 4.5 - I think it may live up to Anthropic's claims of being the "best coding model in the world", for the next few weeks at least! https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/29/claude-sonnet-4-5/

In a democracy, this would be enough to launch investigations and topple a president or a prime minister. In Trump-land, it's just Saturday night. (The grift is a separate website where the marks can buy "Med Bed Cards" that look exactly like the ones shown in the AI-generated "news" video.) […]

@Nonilex I just woke up to see the announcement that troops are being sent to Portland. We are in Portland now. Yesterday we walked around the Pearl District, visited Pioneer Place, and enjoyed the peace and beauty of a NW autumn day. Below are a few photos I took. As […] [Original post on mas.to]

Populist authoritarianism is a cruelty exchange program. You cannot understand it unless you reckon with the fact that their cruelty is what keeps these people in power. Friends, family, neighbors who support authoritarian governments harbor this cruelty, seek this cruelty, desire this cruelty […]

#ennis Friary, #ireland

The goal, as always, is not just to silence her, but to send a clear message to future whistleblowers that Meta's army of lawyers will make their life hell. Politicians that keep posturing about reining in "Big Tech" could start by strengthening whistleblower protections. Instead they pursue […]

the head of ICE getting filmed accepting $50,000 in what appeared to be cash bribes from undercover agents is the least surprising news ever > "On Sept. 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in […] [Original post on universeodon.com]

Why #freesoftware for public services? ✅ Ensures transparency 📖 ✅ Avoids dependency on single vendors 🔄 ✅ Allows collaboration & improvement 🤝 ✅ Saves money in the long run 💰 Taxpayer-funded software should be for the public Public Money? Public Code! […]

The investigative newsroom I work for, @ProPublica, is raising money right now. This is the last few days of our pledge drive. We report on abuses of power in the public interest. We reported on who works for DOGE and revealed Clarence Thomas’s conflicts of interest. It was the first outlet to […]

The Jimmy Kimmel firing, Colbert's show, what's happening at WaPo, CBS... legacy journalism is slowly but surely coming under state control. It is more important now than ever before that we support the independent journalists out there doing the work not beholden to a fascist's bidding.

#uspol Theeere it is: The ABC affiliate chain that started this whole Kimmel thing is up for FCC approval for a huge merger, so the FCC chairman ranting about revoking licenses over this meant they knew where their money had to stand. via [ […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

Now, in retrospect, we can see that what Murdoch did with Fox News was just the playbook. Soon, every major corporate US TV outlet will operate like Fox News: right-wing propaganda for the authoritarian government, 24/7. The oligarchy - Bezos, Ellison, Musk and friends - will make sure of it […]

I’ll keep posting this until I find a great person to come be my manager: the Monterey bay aquarium is looking for its next VP of Technology! […]

As I finish my time with @freedomofpress this month, I'm proud to still see the launch of a collaboration with @fight - we now have our own "Contact Congress" features, powered by FFTF's API. You can see it in action on this FOIA campaign: https://freedom.press/the-classifieds/foia/ Try it […]

Even more than Trump himself, nobody symbolizes the decline of the United States more profoundly than RFK Jr. The damage he is doing will impact millions -- hurt them, and in many cases kill them. Even if he resigned tomorrow (he won't), he already has blood on […] [Original post on social.coop]

Of course it's a signature style he's used. Of course they will lie about it. Receipts, if you need 'em: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/03/us/politics/trump-note-giuliani.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/03/us/politics/trump-note-erickson.html

#mozilla, I'm very predisposed to actually want to like stuff like the link preview feature you're trying, but it really doesn't seem ready for prime time. Clunky overlay, lots of error cases, limited value. :/

Nobody is too smart to get phished. If you think you are, you _will_ get phished sooner or later. To not get phished, you have to know what phishing attacks can look like. I feel for this dev who fell for a 2FA phishing email with a plausible domain name. Remember, this can happen to anyone - […]

If you haven't listened to one of the interviews with Andry Hernandez Romero yet, you owe it to yourself to do so. Andry is one of the men sent by the Trump gang to the #cecot gulag in El Salvador, where they experienced constant physical and psychological abuse. Most of them did not have a […]

I'm up to 124 little mostly-vibe-coded apps on my tools.simonwillison.net site and most of them are trivial but some of them aren't, so I wrote up this guide to the ones I think are most worth checking out https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/4/highlighted-tools/

Whenever you're feeling lost, like you don't have a clue Remember, somewhere out there, is a guy Typing into a small box @grok Is this true? He'll always be more lost than you

I find dealing with MIME parts (e.g., when troubleshooting email rendering) incredibly annoying. There's solid CLI tooling (e.g., `ripmime`) but it still involves a fair bit of poking to get the stuff you want. Ended up vibe-coding (*gasp*) a quick solution for […] [Original post on social.coop]

After having poked frequently at docs written in it over more than 7 years, I can confidently say that reStructuredText can go away forever as far as I'm concerned. Just give me markdown for simple things, and HTML for more complicated things.

I have yet to interact with a #figma project I find easy to navigate. I blame the tool itself - the "pages" organizational structure just gets messy very quickly.

Internet censorship is a racket - coming soon to an authoritarian government near you: https://blog.torproject.org/Corruption-Control-Turkmenistan-internet-censorship-business/

Democracy dies in "data science". https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/dem-strategists-urged-party-trump-military-takeover-1235415635/ ← https://archive.is/Lga3G

- Briefly checks out #omarchy by DHH - OK, so I don't think I ever need to read anything about that again.

No, I don't have a problem with keeping too many browser tabs open. Why do you ask? *quits 29 terminal windows*

The thing that may finally get me off GitHub is not that they're doing AI training (I'm fine with that, train away) but that the whole damn thing is just a black box built around git, which is antithetical to open source development. Want to understand how branch protection rules are enforced? […]

Permacommons #devlog 2025-08-14 Today was a bit of a side-quest into "how to print a version string". The behavior I ended up with is: - For dev builds, print detailed git version info - For "cargo install" builds, print only basic build info - Ensure we […] [Original post on social.coop]

I'm still new to the #rust ecosystem but I can see why it's become so popular so quickly. Aside from the language itself, the tooling just makes sense - so far I've rarely gone "why would you do it that way?" Contrast that with Python, where that question was basically constantly on my mind […]

Pretty neat feature in the #Cline VSCode agent -- you can create custom workflows fairly easily as project-local or global markdown file. Here I'm running a custom workflow by just typing `/msg.md` to generate a commit message in the […] [Original post on social.coop]

The volume of spam calls (even with spam call filter) has gotten so high that my standard response is now "yes? / goodbye". Probably the "goodbye" will drop next. Eventually it just won't be feasible to pick up anymore at all if it's not a known number.

Some days it's hard to keep up with everything happening in #ai. Today is one of those days - gpt-oss, Genie 3, Opus 4.1, Gemini Storybook... I know what I'll be doing this evening.

Keir Starmer is keeping Britain safe from encyclopedias. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62j2gr8866o