Link tags: pow

Curate your own newspaper with RSS

I’m almost certainly preaching to the choir here because I bet you’re reading these very words in a feed reader, but what Molly White has written here is too good not to share:

RSS offers readers and writers a path away from unreliable, manipulative, and hostile platforms and intermediaries. In a media landscape dominated by algorithmic feeds that aim to manipulate and extract, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is choose to read what you want, when you want, without anyone watching over your shoulder.

Designing a Grid-Aware Branch

Hannah runs through the details of making a grid-aware website:

The design adjusts between “low”, “moderate”, and “high” based on the quantity of fossil fuels on your local energy grid.

I like this idea, but I really think it needs to be on by default, rather than being opt-in.

And I’m really intrigued by the idea of a grid-aware browser!

Scrappy: make little apps for you and your friends

I really like the thinking behind this project:

We believe computers should work for people, and dream of a future where computing, like cooking or word processing, is available to everyone. Where you can solve your own small, unique problems with small, unique apps. Where you don’t just rely on mass-market apps made by expert programmers. Where you share home-made little apps with family and friends.

Scrappy is our contribution to this dream.

“AI-first” is the new Return To Office - Anil Dash

AI is really good for helping you if you’re bad at something, or at least below average. But it’s probably not the right tool if you’re great at something. So why would these CEOs be saying, almost all using the exact same phrasing, that everyone at their companies should be using these tools? Do the think their employees are all bad at their jobs?

Pluralistic: The enshittification of tech jobs (27 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

The point of AI isn’t to make workers more productive, it’s to make them weaker when they bargain with their bosses.

What we talk about when we talk about AI — Careful Industries

Technically, AI is a field of computer science that uses advanced methods of computing.

Socially, AI is a set of extractive tools used to concentrate power and wealth.

The web was always about redistribution of power. Let’s bring that back.

Many of us got excited about technology because of the web, and are discovering, latterly, that it was always the web itself — rather than technology as a whole — that we were excited about. The web is a movement: more than a set of protocols, languages, and software, it was always about bringing about a social and cultural shift that removed traditional gatekeepers to publishing and being heard.

Pluralistic: With Great Power Came No Responsibility (26 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Like I was saying:

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it’s a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me | WIRED

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a desktop browser or an e-reader screen to a mobile app or a screen reader for the blind (so long as that device is built to present hypertext).

Hell, yeah!

Ultimately, even as HTML has become the province of professionals, it cannot be gatekept. This is what makes so many programmers so anxious about the web, and sometimes pathetically desperate to maintain the all-too-real walls they’ve erected between software engineers and web developers.

Hell, yeeeeaaaaahhh!!!

What other programmers might say dismissively is something HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we’re using complex frameworks or very simple tools, HTML’s promise is that we can build, make, code, and do anything we want.

HTML for People

This is excellent! A free web book (it’s a book! it’s a website!) that teaches you how to make a website from scratch:

I feel strongly that anyone should be able to make a website with HTML if they want. This book will teach you how to do just that. It doesn’t require any previous experience making websites or coding. I will cover everything you need to know to get started in an approachable and friendly way.

👏

The next decade of the web | James’ Coffee Blog

After the last decade, where platforms have emerged as a core constituent of the web on which many rely, it may feel like things cannot change. That the giants are so big that there is no other way. Yet, to give into this feeling – that things can’t change – is not necessary. It is the way it is is not true on the web. We can make change. It’s your web.

Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content - Vincent Schmalbach

Google search is no friend to the indie web:

Well-known brands often see most of their content indexed, while small or unknown bloggers face much stricter selectivity.

There was life before Google search. There will be life after Google search.

Information that you might search for may never appear in Google’s results. Not because it doesn’t exist, but because Google has chosen not to include it.

The next decade of the web | James’ Coffee Blog

Things can be different:

The core value of the IndieWeb, individual empowerment, helped me realise a fundamental change in perspective: that the web was beautiful and at times difficult, but that we, the people, were in control.

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity – Baldur Bjarnason

An insightful and incisive appraisal of technology adoption. This truth hits hard:

React and the component model standardises the software developer and reduces their individual bargaining power excluding them from a proportional share in the gains. Its popularity among executives and management is entirely down to the fact that it helps them erase the various specialities – CSS, accessibility, standard JavaScript in the browser, to name a few – from the job market. Those specialities might still exist in practice – as ad hoc and informal requirements during teamwork – but, as far as employment is concerned, they’re such a small part of the overall developer job market that they might as well be extinct.

Motorcycles, Cars, Websites, and Seams - Jim Nielsen’s Blog

Seams.

Pluralistic: Tech workers and gig workers need each other (13 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Ever wondered why you’re always being encouraged to download the app?

But zero percent of app users have installed an ad-blocker, because they don’t exist, because you’d go to prison if you made one. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it.

Electric mountain: the power station that shows the beauty of infrastructure | Wales | The Guardian

This extract from Deb Chachra’s new book confirms that it’s a must-read. The writing fairly sings with infectious enthusiasm!

Automate the CEOs - by Hamilton Nolan - How Things Work

Let’s be rational here. If I were to imagine a job that was a perfect candidate for replacement by AI, it would be one that consists of measurable tasks that can be learned—allocation of capital, creation and execution of market strategy, selection of candidates for top roles—and one that costs the company a shitload of money. In other words: executives.

The logic is sound. However…

The CEOs will be spared from automation not because they should be, but because they are making the decisions about who is spared from automation.

Artificial intelligence: who owns the future? - ethical.net

Whether consciously or not, AI manufacturers have decided to prioritise plausibility over accuracy. It means AI systems are impressive, but in a world plagued by conspiracy and disinformation this decision only deepens the problem.

The stupidity of AI | The Guardian

A great piece by James, adapted from the new edition of his book New Dark Age.

The lesson of the current wave of “artificial” “intelligence”, I feel, is that intelligence is a poor thing when it is imagined by corporations. If your view of the world is one in which profit maximisation is the king of virtues, and all things shall be held to the standard of shareholder value, then of course your artistic, imaginative, aesthetic and emotional expressions will be woefully impoverished. We deserve better from the tools we use, the media we consume and the communities we live within, and we will only get what we deserve when we are capable of participating in them fully. And don’t be intimidated by them either – they’re really not that complicated. As the science-fiction legend Ursula K Le Guin wrote: “Technology is what we can learn to do.”