Well, it’s dark and rainy all the time now. But the mushrooms are thriving.

I cannot

@colinmegill.com made the grand reveal of Pol.is 2.0 - the new generation of the software that allows for people with different opinions to reach consensus, at #TICTeC 2025 - another great one to rewatch! youtu.be/Q8kMOg4EPQA

#NoKings event in Fairhope, Al. A woman was arrested for "lewd conduct" because she was dressed in penis suit with a sign that said "No dick-tator" 3 cops on a 53 yo woman.

Of all the clerics they could have popped, those ICE idiots had to hit Hot Priest.

New reddit alternative built on AT

‘Brexit is a tragedy and it will be reversed.’ 💥 #Heseltine is the best political communicator by a long way. His emphatic call for rejoining the EU cuts through the noise, grounded in truth, while the counterarguments cling to a dwindling minority of Brexit believers. 1/2

Stanford Engineering (@StanfordEng) launched an open-rank faculty search in design. It can place candidates in any department in our School of Engineering: facultypositions.stanford.edu/en-us/job/49... I'm thrilled to bring in more colleagues at the intersection of engineering+design!

I wrote something new! It’s a UI design history essay about Mac’s Control Panel, and it uses emulation in some… maybe new and maybe interesting ways? aresluna.org/frame-of-pre...

4.5 was the one they should have open sourced.

Bluesky's near-consensus that AI doesn't work and won't be a technology that has major knock-on effects on society is…not grounded in reality. No mater how loudly and repetitively people say it.

And now we have a panel 'Growing the Open Society: Tech and democratic innovation' with @fecampagnucci.com, @colinmegill.com from Polis (a real time system for gathering and analysing what real people think), and Lula Chen from MIT Governance Lab. #TICTeC

Fantastic panel at #TICTeC Day 2 ✨ @fecampagnucci.com ✨Lula Chen from MIT GOV/LAB ✨ @colinmegill.com from Pol.is

I might go as far as to say that the attempt to “get past” process is actually a part of that problem because it further undermines the attempt to have the conversation we need about process.

Agree with @glenweyl.bsky.social: "We cannot "get past" process. We must improve on it."

or thinking that what they believe is the answer will appear unattractive to the "hoi poloi" and therefore needs to be hidden. Making the case for why I think this is bad practice is hard to do briefly, but I think it is a strategic mistake.We cannot "get past" process. We must improve on it.

TICTeC day 2's plenary sees @fecampagnucci.com of @internetlab.bsky.social; @colinmegill.com‬ of Polis & the Computational Democracy Project; ‪@martintisne.bsky.social‬ of the AI Collaborative and our own @itscrowbot.bsky.social‬. Join the conversation: tictec.mysociety.org/event/tictec... ‬ ‬

not the wedge issue platform, the union issue platform at some point there's a tip-over

Older parents are constantly telling those in the early days to cherish it. But that can be very hard advice to follow when you’re in the thick of it. In the Wonder Reader, Isabel Fattal rounds up stories on the gems and the challenges of parenting:

I hardly ever draw on paper anymore and I miss it. I miss the results.

The 100 Men Vs 1 Gorilla debate

Lost a dear friend to cancer today, absolute force of nature. As a doctor, Dana was hope for many patients. Joyous, generous, humble. Impossible that she's gone, leaving behind a young daughter. We loved you Dana Lott — you'll be in our hearts forever. today.duke.edu/2019/09/blue...

Oh hell yes.

Bowling Green, Kentucky, is home to 75,000 residents who recently wrapped up an experiment in using AI for democracy: Can an online polling platform, powered by machine learning, capture what residents want to see happen in their city?

A fascinating democracy experiment in Kentucky saw good participation. There's still a debate though: can a self-selecting group of residents ever really represent a city's ideas? Great to speak with @politicsprof.bsky.social @bethnoveck.bsky.social www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/15/1...

Really interesting story about essentially using AI for participatory (non-AI) governance; a lot of stuff about participatory methods in AI is about using crowds or voting or things like that to design the AI itself, this is sort of the reverse. www.technologyreview.com/2025/04/15/1...

Also curious!

Team's been working hard on a new "Explore" page (what you see before you search). Apparently the dodgers are hot rn. Shout out to Darrin ( @mrnuma.bsky.social ) for showing us all the upside of hiring a designer

Debbie Harry, wearing a dress that was purportedly once Marilyn Monroe's, in the fire damaged apartment she shared with Chris Stein at 17th Street and 6th Avenue, New York City, 1970. Photo by Chris Stein.

CNBC's Steve Liesman doesn't mince words about the way the White House calculated its tariff rates: "Nobody ever heard of this formula. Nobody has ever used this formula. So I’m sorry, but the conclusion seems to be the president kind of made this up as he went along... these are off the charts."

Got my Northern Technologies Vision 1000 VT-100 workalike terminal sort of working. It comes up all weird and when it warms up, it's fine. This one is quite stylish and was designed by Bertoni (the Ferrari Bertoni). It has a built-in tilt screen and a keyboard garage underneath. #vintagecomputer

Here’s my account on Flashes, a photo sharing app. All my followers can automatically find me as soon as they log in! This is what we mean when we say Bluesky is open: your identity and followers belong to you. It took 30s to sign up for this new, independent app, and everything is there.

This is horrifying. She co-wrote an OpEd at her school, then was grabbed by masked people, put into an unmarked black van, is now detained in an ICE facility over 1000 miles away. youtu.be/PuFIs7OkzYY Trying to limit the topics I post about, but this is my country and this one shook me. =(

You can read the oped Rumeysa Ozturk co-authored that got her added to Canary Mission’s website: www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024...

ICE kidnapped another student. This time a grad student at Tufts, Rumeysa Ozturk. Turkish national, in the United States on a student visa. Her lawyer does not know where she is being held. Rumeysa wrote op-eds criticizing the university's response to student demands on Gaza.

Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk, she's a student from Turkey, and even her lawyer doesn't know where she is right now.

The Trump admin. has detained and revoked the visa of Tufts graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk. Last year, she coauthored a piece arguing for “the equal dignity and humanity of all people,” including Palestinians. www.tuftsdaily.com/article/2024...

Rumeysa Ozturk's abduction was kicked off by a pro Israel NGO targeting her. That's not due process and externalizing intelligence gathering for a racially motivated terror campaign is chaos, authoritarian, arbitrary and fully un-American. www.salon.com/2025/03/26/d...

Unidentified men grabbing someone off the street and putting her in a car because she wrote an op-Ed. This as flatly authoritarian as anything we’ve seen in this country in a very long time.

sometimes the best thing you can do is sit near some really nice trees and talk about how to maybe make human communication better

Grateful to all pol.is users. Thank you for trusting us and growing with us over the years. Incredible things coming

Where is the Signal social media team right now this is an incredible opportunity

A rainbow appears at sunset following a late afternoon storm in Chicago on Wednesday.

In 2004, @judalicious.bsky.social and I were living in Los Angeles when Gavin Newsom, then-mayor of San Fran, decided the city could do gay marraiges. We BOLTED up there to tie the knot and were one of the first couples to get married in city hall. My marriage: still going strong. Gavin Newsom: not.

we out 🦋 #sxsw

Was great to meet so many folks from the ActivityPub world! Rooting for everyone. Thank you Mike

1. New Working Paper: Optimizing Economic Complexity For more than a decade scholars have been using relatedness-complexity diagrams to identify industrial diversification opportunities. But these diagrams suffer from some important limitations ... 🧵

Speaking at #SXSW in conversation with @mmasnick.bsky.social soon — 1pm in Ballroom D!