https://werd.io
120 posts · 69 Votes
Tech 35% · Culture 33% · Politics 23% · Writing 5% · Life 2% · Art 1%
Subscribe via RSS
Winnie Lim:“When I think about what I wish to accomplish if I knew I was going to die, apart from spending time with my loved ones I think only writing is left. It is a way of emptying myself I guess, a way of sublimating my sad existence. I wouldn’t pretend that my writing is useful, but at least it will be a window into an interior world that doesn’t exist anywhere else.”Co-signed.Eliot Peper:“Writing about whatever you’re uniquely obsessed is hardly a new approach, it’s the basis of all good…
Link: OpenAI will delay GPT-5.6 after Trump administration request, by Hayden Field in The VergeI’ve got (at least) two worries about the story that the Trump Administration halted the release of models from both Anthropic and OpenAI.Anthropic recently pulled its Fable model release in response to the government. Now it turns out that OpenAI has done something similar:“The Information reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees Wednesday in a company Q&A that it would release GPT-5.6 in…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know. Did someone forward this to you? Subscribe for free.Before we begin this week's roundup, I want to express my condolences to the friends and family of Om Malik, who we sadly lost this week. Om was one of the most important voices in blogging, tech journalism, and then the wider industry. So many people in tech have a…
Link: It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests, by Jason Koebler at 404 MediaAll good fun:“A tiny snippet of user-generated text as short as 13 words long is often enough to manipulate the AI agents that power tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI search, new research shows. The study suggests that it is trivially easy for brands to inject promotional content on sites like Reddit, Quora, and Wikipedia with the end goal of poisoning or manipulating the output of…
Link: Empower Others, by Corey Ford at Point CAnother superb post from Corey Ford:“There's a simple diagnostic for any organization: Are your leaders focused on accumulating control, or on empowering the people around them?Too many people in positions of power are overly focused on themselves. They hoard decisions. They micromanage. They grab power. And the people around them suffer for it. Those employees wait for direction instead of taking initiative. They bring problems instead of…
Link: Journalism's Logical Fallacy, by Shirish KulkarniJournalism is in crisis, and it’s really easy (and lazy) to say that making a technology or process tweak will fix it: we just need to use AI to fill capacity gaps, or build stronger comments into our site, or we need a better business or distribution model.None of those things address the underlying question of why we need journalism, why it’s important, and what it should be. By addressing innovation at the edges, newsrooms are avoiding…
Link: Texas anti-ICE protesters convicted of terrorism charges sentenced to at least 50 years in prison, by Sam Levine in The GuardianThis is an outrageous litmus test for the freedom to protest in America:“A group of Texas protesters convicted of terrorism charges received unusually harsh sentences of at least 50 years in prison on Tuesday in a closely watched case that was widely seen as a test case of the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on dissent.”Let’s be clear: a few of the…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.Change AgentGina Chua is one of the people in news who is doing the most to push the conversation forward and prepare the industry for the future. This piece of hers outlines what I think is a necessary skill for survival.We’re in the fastest period of technology change — and, consequently, the fastest period of…
Link: W Social, Public Institutions and the Theater of European Digital Sovereignty, by Elena RossiniElena Rossini (rightly) calls shenanigans on what’s been happening in the European social world. I think what happened should be instructive for any pro-social technology movement.Here’s what happened:Earlier this month, the European Commission announced a technology sovereignty plan that included a reliance on open source software as a path to autonomy.Eurosky, a non-profit fork of Bluesky that…
Link: Overview and key findings of the 2026 Digital News Report, by Jim Egan at the Reuters Institute for the Study of JournalismThis year’s Reuters Digital News Report has a key finding that’s worth paying attention to:“Though it has been the case in some individual countries for several years, at the global level (averaging across 48 markets) social media and video networks are for the first time the single most widely used way of accessing online news (used by 54% of all respondents), ahead…
Link: A Scottish Post: The New Election Threat: Disinformation Inside the Answer, by Tim Chambers in Will Robinson's NewsletterThe dangers of AI-generated answers in search results are enumerated here in the context of the recent Scottish election. 75 questions about the ballot were posed on AI systems, and the findings were sobering. On average, 44.4% of responses were at least partially wrong; ChatGPT was specifically wrong 46.2% of the time. Improbably, Grok actually performed the best in…
Link: CEOs Who Think AI Replaces Their Employees Are Just Bad CEOs, by Mike Masnick in TechDirtI second this sentiment:“It seems pretty clear to me that companies that think they’ll be able to layoff huge swaths of workers because of LLM tools are going to find out they’re mistaken pretty quickly. The power of LLMs is that when used well and used willingly it can help employees to get more done, but that doesn’t mean you need fewer humans. You need more humans who know how to work…
Link: Change Agent, by Gina Chua in (Re)Structured NewsGina Chua is one of the people in news who is doing the most to push the conversation forward and prepare the industry for the future. This piece of hers outlines what I think is a necessary skill for survival.We’re in the fastest period of technology change — and, consequently, the fastest period of journalistic change — in decades. Building takes time; if we aim to build for today, we’ll always be behind. So we need to consider what the…
Last week I was privileged to contribute to the PublicSpaces conference in Amsterdam, which discussed the impact of technology on democracy. I was there all-too-briefly, but I was reminded how wonderful Amsterdam really is as a city: both culturally rich and a reminder of how a city’s infrastructure can work if it receives the investment and thoughtful attention it deserves.PublicSpaces itself is a marvel: a conference that dives into the underlying power dynamics behind tech and aims to create…
I’m at the PublicSpaces Conference in Amsterdam this week. This year’s theme is “why a digital public space is essential for a healthy democratic society”. This is an idea space I care about deeply and I feel very privileged to have been invited to contribute.I’ll be giving a talk to kick off the unconference today, and then tomorrow will be on a panel about Social media, Journalism & Democracy:Can journalism use open social networks to combat disinformation, hate speech, and news fatigue, and…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.Know your Point CThere’s so much packed into this idea:“You started at Point A. Now you're at Point B. To reach your big goal, you don't just need to paint a picture of the long-term vision. You need to sell Point C: the concrete, vivid destination you will take yourself, your team, and your company to over the next…
Link: The Pope on Defederation, by Laurens Hof in Connected PlacesLaurens Hof provides some of the best and most important analysis of the open social web. This piece about the Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical is a standout.“The dominant thinking that decentralisation is built upon has lots to say about the threats of concentrated power, but has little to say about social obligations. Cyber-libertarian tradition can tell you why no one should rule the network, but it cannot really tell you…
Link: Know Your Point C, by Corey FordThere’s so much packed into this idea:“You started at Point A. Now you're at Point B. To reach your big goal, you don't just need to paint a picture of the long-term vision. You need to sell Point C: the concrete, vivid destination you will take yourself, your team, and your company to over the next twelve to twenty-four months.”I’ve worked with so many teams where the Point C is essentially defined as: “continue existing”. And on one level, sure, it may be…
Link: The 'normal' response to the Social Web, by Saskia WelchA smart, accessible, nuanced piece from Saskia Welch about marketing the open social web, which translates easily to being a piece about marketing any transformative technology.“Fediverse this, Social Web that, no one cares!Genuinely, no one cares. And, even if you get them to start caring, they do so in the complete opposite direction we've been heading with our messy, undoubtedly decentralised, marketing.”When we’re building as…
Link: Data Centers Now Consume 6% of US Electricity—and the Backlash Has Begun, by Edd Gent at SingularityHubWhen the dotcom boom came to a crashing end, the companies behind it imploded in sometimes spectacular ways, but the infrastructure they built continued to exist. That in turn laid the groundwork for Web 2.0, the cloud revolution, and everything that came afterwards.When we think about the AI boom, we should consider what will be left behind: the infrastructure precedents being set that…
Link: In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV says AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few, by Claire Giangravè for Religion News ServiceIt’s perhaps a sign of how integrated technology is into society that this is a quote from the actual Pope:“AI tends to amplify the power of those who already possess economic resources, expertise and access to data. Small but highly influential groups can shape information and consumption patterns, influence democratic processes and steer economic dynamics…
Link: The Web Is Being Made Accessible for AI, Not People, by Jonathan Zong and Frank Elavsky in Tech Policy PressThis is worth sitting with:“The modern web, originally built for sighted humans using browsers, is now being redesigned for a new kind of user.What these developers are offering their AI visitors is essentially an accessibility accommodation. […] But when the audience is a disabled person, it has historically been treated as an afterthought. Structured, concise text-based…
Link: AI scandal engulfs prestigious short story prize after multiple entrants accused, by Shahana Yasmin for the Associated PressSo I want to be a bit careful about this, because a false positive would be harmful, but it certainly looks like the short story that won the Commonwealth Fund Short Story Prize was generated with AI.A lot has been said of the writing, which includes sentences like:“She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.”And:“The girl smiled like sunrise over a…
In an interview with Nicholas Thompson last month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman backed a micropayments strategy for news:“What really makes sense in a world of agents is we try a sort of micropayment-based approach. […] My agent can read it, pay $0.17, and give me a summary of that. If I want to go read the whole article, pay $1, or however that works. If my agent wants to calculate something for me that’s really difficult to do, it can go rent some cloud compute somewhere and pay for that, but I…
Link: 25 Years of OLDaily, by Stephen DownesIf you’re not in educational technology, it’s possible you might not know who Stephen Downes is. If you are, there’s no way you don’t. For a quarter century now, his daily updates at OLDaily have been one of the main ways people learn about the space; part reporter, part advocate, he’s pushed for an open web approach to education that’s been genuinely influential. And all on one of the very first ling blogs.My own work on Elgg, which kickstarted my…
Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.After the FeedI think this research-based presentation about the future of the information ecosystem in the age of AI is important for publishers, product leaders, and social platform builders to read and understand. If you assume that AI will dominate how people receive their information, its conclusions are sensible,…
Link: The First Year, by Corey Ford at Point CI could include Corey’s posts in my link roundups every single week. Each one is genuinely gold — and I’ve had the pleasure of knowing and working with Corey in various ways for over a decade, so I also know they work. I use many of them in my own day-to-day practice, and I’ll have them front of mind as I move on to my next chapter later this year.I also want to say: posting every week on the same day, at the same time, for a whole year is an…
Link: After the Feed, by New_ PublicI think this research-based presentation about the future of the information ecosystem in the age of AI is important for publishers, product leaders, and social platform builders to read and understand. If you assume that AI will dominate how people receive their information, its conclusions are sensible, well thought-through, and even optimistic in some ways. I think all signs — AI adoption curves, data about social media use, qualitative evidence about how…
Link: Bridging on a budget, by Ryan Barrett at A New SocialI’ve been in awe of Ryan Barrett since I first met him over a decade ago. He cofounded Google App Engine and led engineering at Color Health. His Bridgy tool, which allows people on different protocols and networks to follow and converse with each other, is now the basis of A New Social, the open social web non-profit that he runs with Anuj Ahooja. (Disclosure: I’m on the board.)This post about how he reduced Bridgy costs is brilliantly…
Link: Writers are fleeing the Substack Tax, by Emma Roth in The VergeIf you weren’t all that bothered about Substack platforming and compensating Nazis, The Verge reports that there’s a new reason to be worried: it costs more and its much-touted network doesn’t count for much if you’re not one of its featured writers.Sean Highkin of The Rose Garden Report is quoted in the piece:““When I first joined up, [Substack] gave me a big push and featured me and funneled a lot of traffic to me, which led…
