"That’s the gap! Not between C and Rust (or any other language). Not between old and new. But between systems that were built by people who measured, and systems that were built by tools that pattern-match. LLMs produce plausible architecture. They do not produce all the critical details."

I think there is something funny about engineers who might deride management where they’re now doing engineering management/ tech lead stuff but for “engineers” who are a mix of Amelia Bedelia and the guy from Memento

Democrats should demand a clawback of ICE's remaining OBBB money before agreeing to supplemental Pentagon funding.

On Harriet Tubman Day, one of my all-time favorite images by Jacob Lawrence: the joyful & ebullient screenprint "Play," based on panel #4 from the 1940 "Life of Harriet Tubman" series. The series, thirty-one paintings in all, was one of Lawrence's first major bodies of work

Olympic curling: elaborate sweeping operation to tweak the path of the thrown rock, constant screaming, plus an earth-shaking controversy about tapping the rocks post-release to influence direction Paralympic curling: just huckin it down there, don't see what the big deal is, works just fine

In 2024, of 161.4 million registered voters, which constituency was responsible for: - 0.0008% of the votes, + - 19% of the campaign spending? A tiny, wildly over-represented group of *300* billionaires Why should any of the rest of us vote for candidates unwilling to repeal #CitizensUnited?

The proper way to translate this, if you want to assimilate the value of America's higher education sector into brute economic terms, is: "Exports of one of America's world-leading industries dropped by more than a third this year." Where's that headline in the business press?

He knows he can't say the truth, but it's slipping out anyway and that's the whole thing; "DEI"—like wokeness, like critical race theory before it, and political correctness before that—has always and only ever meant "establishing equality by leveling traditional ascriptive hierarchies"

Always interesting listening to the guilty tip-toe around depositions. It's everything we suspected. They grabbed a bunch of tech-bros referred by Elon and silicon valley investors, set them free in the government, no thought about organizational methods and let them run wild.

I wrote up a piece on how standards are made, because of some folks being very negative about the grant on other social networks: writings.thisismissem.social/how-standard...

Don't forget that CEOs report to their boards. Bluesky's board is Jay Graber, Jeremie Miller, Kinjal Shah, and Mike Masnick.

I always hate to see startup founders handing over the reins to a "more experienced" CEO -- doubly so when that founder has more to offer than most cis white males, including a proven ability to negotiate the right governance model for their organization But this is a *very* good sign

I think @jay.bsky.team's biggest accomplishment: she allowed the Bluesky engineering team to follow their hearts on what they saw as pursuing the best design. Not easy to do given all the other pressures in the role. Best of luck with what's next, and I hope future leadership does the same.

I've spent the past couple months hand crafting a new B-tree map implementation for Go. It's fast. Faster than Rust's BTreeMap. Faster than the fastest C++ (frozenca/btree). And about 2x faster than my current Go btree (tidwall/btree).

Some very cool work last week by @baileytownsend.dev on characterizing non-bsky PDSes inspired me to take a longitudinal peek at mushroom PDS usage If you like geeking out about stuff like this, be sure to scroll upthread to Bailey's take for a more provocative analysis than my modest contribution

Emelia has already done so much great standards and auth work behind the scenes, which benefits not just atproto/atmosphere, but also ActivityPub, Solid, and other social web ecosystems. really excited about the potential for FedCM to make login flows slick and competitive with Google/Apple/Meta

« The question is not "where did people go wrong?" but "why did this assessment or action make sense to them at the time?" Such real insight is derived not from judging people from the position of retrospective outsider, but from seeing the world through the eyes of the protagonists at the time. »

Side note on all those explanations Once you've successfully figured out the 1 vs 2 issue on *any* of these UXes, you can safely ignore that verbosity on every other parallel UX You already know what to do, but because the clutter is worded differently, you still have to scan it to be sure

A long time ago, in a galaxy... well... very very close to you. Earth had a ring (probably). For about 40 million years in the Ordovician (466 MYA), any trilobites that looked skyward would have seen the faint shimmer of the Earth's ring. Let's look at the evidence for this conclusion.

Understanding how your tools work so they serve you better

Are you responsible for designing the way users connect to atmosphere services? Here's a rapid-fire tour of 16 UXes in 45 seconds

A coherent protocol punishes partial adoption. Hypothesis: Anyone who tries to merely piggyback onto ATProto for bandwagoning (eg. by using identity to hoover the social graph while trying to control data) will be outcompeted by those who fully embrace the protocol’s potential.

SCOOP — Body camera footage obtained as a result of my lawsuit against the DC Metropolitan PD confirms DOGE and the Trump administration openly admitted they were entering private property when they raided the building on March 17, 2025. That didn't stop MPD from breaking down the doors. My report:

👀

Want to identify large warehouses that are vulnerable to becoming ICE detention sites? Here's a quick, proactive guide anyone can use. No special skills or access needed. 👇🧵

When AI makes generation of all kinds of content free... ... the review burden on folks with domain expertise increases immeasurably.

You're absolutely right—that was not a command post, that was an elementary school. Those were not military leaders—they were schoolchildren. I said the opposite, and that's on me.

ah, anthropic is not beating the Iranian Murder Bot allegations

Excellent 🧵 explaining the pragmatic reasons why the leverage of a great leader rests on three pillars: - choosing the right objectives, - communicating them clearly, + - trusting good folks to execute That trio is an unmistakable cultural marker of how effective an organization will be

I said what I said. Are war and tariffs the best ways to accomplish any goals in 2026? That's the approach the waning superpowers are taking. How's that working out for Russia and the USA? How's that war fighting and tough talk working out for us? Are we winning yet? China is *removing* tariffs 🙂🙃

Oh they must *hate* Mamdani! The man started a fire. This is how you win elections in New York now.👍🏿 Related: Lindsay Boylan took her power back, but is not content just to get back to even. No. She wants more, so that she can make sure that what happened to her doesn't happen to others. Respect

👨🏻‍💼Sir, we recommend a daytime strike. 9:40 am to be precise. 👴🏻I thought we strike at night? Aren't all the high priority targets in the bunker? 👨🏻‍💼High priority ones, yes sir. But this target moves around. We know where he will be at 9:40 am. 👴🏻How do we know? 👨🏻‍💼He... drops his daughter off at school

Online communities are always reduced to the same structure: Stewards as Landlords Part 3 of Composable Trust wields ATProto to architect a solution: decomposing communities into 3 sovereigns—Members, Rosters, and Venues—each with full jurisdiction over their own domain, and none over each other’s.

This is a radically different idea than the advocacy I’ve seen for “data portability” and ”data sovereignty”. It’s a *restructuring* of power rather than small adjustments to existing structures. atproto and local-first, both in their own ways, demonstrate what such a restructuring can look like.

Check out my new blog post, 'ATProtocol Patterns: Record Elicitation'. In ATProtocol, only the user's client can write to their repo. But what if the AppView has information the client doesn't?

Software Design is weird. It is undoubtedly the most impactful medium shaping the world today, yet even those of us working in it know very little of its history. We have no broadly-read books, no docu-series, no video essays. Most see the works of the past as obsolete rather than a rich heritage.

Moderating @furryli.st always made me feel that something was missing from atproto. If we disappeared, so too would the community we built This feeling’s finally crystallized into this proposal: Composable Trust We created identities that survive platform failure. Lets do the same for communities!

Forest bathing, winter edition

Stop asking for permission. Build the thing you want to build.

Started to flesh out the amount of services which you can cryptographically verify you have access to using @keytrace.dev GitHub, DNS, Masto, Bsky, npm, Tangled, PGP, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit & Hacker News

Instantly transported back over four decades to the night we rushed to see one of Buddy Guy's last performances at the Checkerboard Lounge on 43rd Street in Chicago Awestruck that we still have the privilege of living in his world today

TIL about a pair of centralization metrics: - Herfindahl–Hirschman Index - Shannon Index The former comes from economic analyses of market share + competition, while the latter is an ecological analysis of entropy + diversity ( See ALT text for an overview. More details linked from the OG page )

This is a heckuva compliment: "And once we started, it was actually easier to build something that works for any atproto record than to build a bespoke scheduling system just for ourselves."

“protocol is fun for dev“ seems like one of those things that has been undervalued

ok as a word nerd this is very cool: The Bluesky Dictionary by @avibagla.com www.avibagla.com/blueskydictionary/ (via @j4ck.xyz)

reading "users shouldn’t feel they’re dealing with weird behavior just because they’re on a decentralized protocol" and i feel like we don't really appreciate how radical that is as a concept in the grand scheme of things

Goldilocks unit of social context: "Buckets give us a few things we’ve been missing. They provide a natural unit of access control that is neither too granular (per-record) nor too coarse (per-app). They handle dynamic membership. And they give applications something concrete to sync and index."

More apps that have the stated benefit of making you lifelong friends

Every day they are choosing harm. Every day we are choosing care.

On the need for effective participatory governance: "Past research on platforms such as Reddit, Stack Exchange, Tumblr, and DeviantArt reveals a recurring pattern: when platform policies conflict with community values, communities tend to push back."