I don't write too often, so when I published this, I expected a few friends to read it and share their feelings. I've been blown away by how many people have commented, DMed, and emailed. Knowing how many people feel in their bones that *something needs to change* gives me hope.

Idk man, I think the journalists who have been traumatized the most were not sitting in that room tonight. The feds gassed the shit out of us, knocked us over, sent in the local PD to harass, detain, and hurt us, shot a teenaged photographer in the face and he lost an eye, and that's just in LA

the current tech business model means, tech in it's existing paradigm is incompatible with the type of future described below. but that doesn't mean we shouldn't demand it

Googly eyes might stop seagulls from stealing your lunch. UK researchers stuck googly eyes onto takeout food containers in seagull-infested places and found that they were far less likely to be approached or pecked compared to un-googly-eyed control containers. buff.ly/G5i7JE5 #ShareGoodNewsToo

the google spokesperson tried their best

Revoking kids' visas because their parents criticized Elon Musk.

Here's some of my favorite @xoxofest.com over the years. They just launched a rad video archive: @molly.wiki 2024 xoxofest.com/2024/videos/... Nicky Case 2015 xoxofest.com/2015/videos/... @contrapoints.bsky.social 2018 xoxofest.com/2018/videos/... Dooce (RIP) 2015: xoxofest.com/2015/videos/...

Recent hiring trends suggest that employers may be favouring senior developers with significant pre-AI experience. As I’ve been only half-joking for over a year, the devs who’ll be in highest demand in this age of AI will be the ones who don't need it. codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/04/24/t...

This wild document is the basis for the State Department's decision to cancel the visas and green cards of tech researchers who study the social media platforms and of tech regulators who enforce privacy and transparency laws. Disclosed to us last night in @thecoalition.bsky.social v. Rubio.

It just defies comprehension that the world's richest man is literally a hitlerian figure, got to illegally commandeer the US govt for months and condemn millions to excruciating death, and then just fucked off to make jokes about "show orphans" on podcasts with zero consequences. The mind recoils

A Roman emperor called Commodus was so enamored of himself that he renamed every month of the year and even the city of Rome after himself and had himself declared a god. Today his name is associated only with toilets. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes historyfacts.com/famous-figur...

A handful of law students are rowdy when a federal official visits: THIS IS AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO ACADEMIC DISCOURSE REPORT THEM TO THE BAR Entire state universities ban fields of study and classroom learning as unlawful and prohibited: 🦗

Every day brings a new AI product, use case or outcome. But one method endures for knowing what these systems actually do and to whom: auditing. Thrilled to share my new coauthored book, Auditing AI-a roadmap for accountability across this dynamic terrain #openaccess mitpress.mit.edu/978026205172...

Neat idea, a panel of law professors on how they were forced to changed their minds as to important aspects of their worldview. (Although as I hear the panel, only one of them, Yochai Benkler, actually admits to changing their mind in that way.) www.youtube.com/watch?v=tf88...

Hey #TCMParty friends, this is interesting…

The new federal comprehensive privacy bill would be an enormous step backwards. It reuses tired lame approaches that don't work. It lacks rigor. It's just a gift to companies that want to gather and use data without accountability. And it preempts better state laws. Yuck! iapp.org/news/a/us-re...

🚨 ICE Glasses are coming - specialized smart glasses designed by and for the Department of Homeland Security, documents reveal: www.kenklippenstein.com/p/exclusive-...

Every layer of the software toolchain is changing at the same time. New spec formats, new generation strategies, new evaluation frameworks, new feedback mechanisms Most teams are responding by trying to pick winners. This could lead to regrets....

In honor of Tim Cook's stepping down, here is the story of how I emailed him, not once but twice, with open email tracking enabled, only to discover that, not once but twice, my emails to the CEO of Apple were opened on a computer running Windows.

This is a real problem and I hope the solution is neither “cloudflare++” nor “stop APIs from being useful”.

If the hyperscalars and AI labs want to do some good for the world they’ll turn cutting edge models and tons of donated compute at finding and rapidly fixing vulnerabilities in the many pieces of open infrastructure that already exist…

I expected it to be bad from the description but it's so much worse. I really do wonder what they put in the water for professors at Harvard Law

what—and I cannot stress this enough—the fuck are you talking about

There’s so much to say about the remarkable reporting from Jodi Kantor & Adam Liptak—and I’ll say a lot of it in Monday’s newsletter. But the most striking thing about all of it is the role & behavior of Chief Justice Roberts. “Calling balls and strikes” this ain’t: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/u...

A federal judge in Illinois today ruled that the Trump administration improperly coerced Facebook and Apple to remove ICE-tracking apps in violation of the First Amendment. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Microsoft and other US tech companies successfully lobbied the EU to hide the environmental toll of their data centers, @investigate-europe.eu reports in collaboration with Tech Policy Press and other media partners.

It’s all well and good for tech leaders to endorse UBI. But it feels convenient to only focus on a distant political prospect. The GOP, right now, is doing reverse-UBI (work requirements on SNAP). It’d be nice to hear more objections to that.

NPR announced $113 million from two charitable donors, including billionaire philanthropist Connie Ballmer, months after Congress voted to strip federal dollars for public media. Ballmer gave $80 million, the largest gift by a living donor in the organization’s history. https://wapo.st/4cvzfOa

Kauna Malgwi, a former worker at Sama, said: “This issue is not confined to one company or contract. It shows how the global AI industry is shaped. Power sits with large technology companies. Risk flows downward, affecting outsourced workers, often in the global south, who have the least protection”

It's not longing for inconvenience, it's wanting to restore agency: newsletter.danhon.com/archive/s21e...

The New York Times is now blocking The Wayback Machine from accessing its articles. That means you'll no longer be able to view archived versions of NYT stories published in 2026 and beyond on archive.org. (All those posts you see tracking changes to NYT headlines and ledes? They relied on WBM).

there's only 2 kinds of optimization in AI land: - spend more tokens for better results - spend less/cheaper tokens for the same result most people chase 1, but 2 is the real value

EPIC is proud to join 70+ organizations in calling on Meta to halt and publicly disavow its plans to add facial recognition to its Ray-Ban smart glasses. We don't consent to this profound invasion of privacy, and you shouldn't either.

Once again, I am holding a FREE event to help publishers leave Substack this Thursday. luma.com/qho2psws

Media people think I'm funny and/or crazy when I start every conversation about Murthy, the CenSorShIp InduStrial ComPlex, CISA, etc with "So some election deniers did a thing..." But it has been the whole game the whole time and this article explains it: www.propublica.org/article/trum...

Permissioned data is what we’re all waiting for. There is no [uptake of X social networking behavior] without control over audience And yes, creators need privacy too!

This is so astonishing. I keep trying to explain to people who aren't following protocol conversations what it was like, going to #atmosphereconf. I'm just going to show them this—both as a record of the conference and as an example of people JUST BUILDING THINGS that are extremely cool.

I’m seeing some of the arguments in the comments but I feel many of them miss the point here; substack is run by people who openly admit to allowing and enabling harm. If moral objections are a factor in your platform use, substack should be a nonstarter for damn near everyone. 🤷🏾‍♂️

US now turning to grand juries as a potential way — circumventing immediate first amendment arguments — to force intermediaries like Reddit to de-anonymise users who are criticising government policy theintercept.com/2026/04/10/r...

A reminder that we put out a report that explains the shady ways technology companies are marketing and selling their devices to police, including how they come up with the claims of effectiveness. Everyone, especially journalists and law makers, should read this. www.eff.org/document/sel...

DJI is banned in the US, but no company has rushed to serve the videographers and farmers that use DJI gear. Instead, US dronemakers are largely focused on a more lucrative opportunity: a billion dollars the Pentagon has earmarked for drones that kill. Read more: buff.ly/QapZmtI

I have a father and mother in law in Iran. I have a sister in law. A niece. She's 14. She likes silly pink headbands and purses and dresses, just like kids her age all over the world. There are 93 million people like her in Iran. People who do all the normal mundane life things as the rest of us.

One thing that Tara touches upon but that I want to spend more time on is that the master's tools that are problematic are the *epistemic* ones. Tech has unexamined epistemic assumptions inside of which there is no liberation.

Are they gonna cut the butts out of their pants? because they’re already showing their whole ass

Rudy wasn’t playing yall.

🧵 🔥

This is how open source won—innovation without mandatory permission created space to *build* something better, which changed minds. People envisioning a better future around AI are going to have to Do That Future.

The US AID destruction is one of the sickest things anyone has ever done in human history. No one got anything out of it besides the gleeful thrill of mass black death. It’s truly bone chilling to even contemplate what this really was.

Ok!! I am happy to be opening registry.blue for beta use! It's a wishlist/registry app built on atproto. It stores all the data in your PDS. It's also a great way to compile mutual aid lists, lists of causes to donate to, or list of community needs. To join the beta, you'll need to follow me.