iOS 26 is a disaster. Stunningly fugly; unreadable blurs under your text; the widget screen (leftmost swipe) is a disaster - they even broke the one usable widget (recent/search apps); controls keep hiding and morphing so you can't find or hit them... I used to blame Jony Ive... who do I blame now?

Trump’s Immigration Enforcement: Free The Criminals, Jail The Innocent The Trump administration's immigration enforcement has revealed itself to be not just cruel, but fundamentally backwards: They're literally freeing dangerous criminals while manufacturing cases against innocent people. And…

Do you use LLMs for search/answers? Do you have friends who do? It's time to sit down and have an intervention! Across all vendors LLMS confidently misidentify information (e.g. fabricating sources) more than half the time -- even when "plain" google does not. arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/a...

And while I'm at it, another hot take: the Apple Watch SUCKS. I will spare y'all my 15 bullet points on why. TL;DR: after 4 days of constant use (and twiddling, and googling) I still have almost no idea what it's doing most of the time, and it apparently feels the same way about me.

Apple's FindMy is both the best AND the worst feature ever. I misplace EVERYTHING so I love this idea SO MUCH but I just spent 15 minutes using it to find my AirPods, which were within arm's reach when I started searching, hidden under a faraday cage -- oops, I mean a cardboard box lid from See's.

Pretty much every one of these studies comes up with similar results.

@matthewcbell.bsky.social o hai!

Honored to be quoted in @washingtonpost.com last week on how people naturally will disengage after bad experiences on social media -- which is not so great for those businesses. Safer social media is better social media. Platforms should invest in trust and safety, it is core to their success!

From Casey Newton's latest piece: "Reddit has made lasting, positive contributions to the web. Its decentralized approach to content moderation now serves as one of the foundational principles of federated social networks like Bluesky and Mastodon. "

Jeff Allen, co-founder of the Integrity Institute, just dropped the most accessible, comprehensive, balanced-yet-pulling-no-punches look at how and why social media search (and ranking) is so truly awful: fundamental errors in goal-setting, strategy, and execution. READ THIS ARTICLE!

Moderation is an exercise of power - always, inherently. Excellent discussion of this from the abstract to the nuts-and-bolts of what this means and what we can and should be doing in a Bluesky world, from someone doing the real work.

CHAI have announced the Prosocial Ranking Challenge — propose a sufficiently promising algorithm for bridging-based ranking and they'll spend $50k to test it with 1500 people on Facebook, X, and Reddit over a 4 month period. https://bit.ly/prosocial-ranking-challenge

Big Tech chose to disproportionately lay-off experts in combating harmful content on their platforms in order to save a buck. In this piece, @geewiz.bsky.social and I document how extraordinarily expensive this decision was and continues to be in the long-run www.techpolicy.press/the-unbearab...

Here @mattmotyl.bsky.social and I lay out the business case for trust and safety (also known as integrity) work. T&S is not just about dodging monumental government fines, it's also essential to ad-based business models, and for long-term customer satisfaction and growth, without which.....

Seems kinda fascist to have the voting public pass an amendment and then have the legislature say "we're sure people didn't mean to do this so we're going to stop the judiciary from enforcing it."

Delighted to be able to sign and share the Neely Center's Design Code for Social Media. @iyerland.bsky.social. This is a deep, thoughtful document that all practitioners should read - and that everyone can demand our social products embody. uscneelycenter.substack.com/p/introducin...

This is one of the most critical issues with all forms of fact checking -- whether by the community or journalists. While it's a good thing for people to engage and challenge misinfo, careful, thoughtful responses to all the junk being spewed cannot and will not be enough.

This continues to be a hard time for workers in trust and safety and tech. I wanted to write a pep talk as we go into what will be a really tough year. Plus the Integrity Institute has launched part two of our election integrity best practices guide. anchorchange.substack.com/p/keep-doing...

KEEPING PEOPLE HOUSED & FED during rough periods of their lives is *cheaper* than incarcerating & hospitalizing them repeatedly when they’re shoved onto the streets. Always has been. Just give them the money. It saves money, even if “it’s just the right thing to do” never convinced you.

Proud to share the Integrity Institute's second election integrity guide for online platforms (adding to our first guide earlier this year)! @katieharbath.bsky.social and I, and the fantastic group of integrity professionals at the Institute, hope people find this helpful heading into 2024 elections

So... you called him a pedophile for no reason, leading to a flood of death threats, forced him out of his home permanently, and he goes on stage a year later to say "that kinda sucked," and your response is to say that he is "evil in as pure a form"? WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!?

Iceberg Efficiency xkcd.com/2829

I just preordered an iPhone 15 Pro Max and paid through PayPal. My iTunes charges also through PayPal; no logins required for either experience. While it sucks to have old eyes that need a giant phone, it's kinda neat to buy that phone using products you helped build before the iPhone even existed.

OK, so I've done some quantitative empirical research on bsky. Ready for the big reveal? I have received 4 follows, of which 1 was a spammer (followed 61k accounts and posted spammy junk) so...

So... Many.... Social... Media... Plays.... How shall I document myself here? Let's start with who it's really all about, the cat I serve, although apparently not quite as well as I should: