What is it? An aggregator for non-commercial personal blogs! How does it work? Log in with your Mastodon account and you can upvote (no downvotes) blog entries. There are multiple view types akin to Reddit but unlike reddit, there are no user submissions here. Entries are all automated, after the blog has been manually approved by the moderator. Why? It’s a good way for your blog to get discovered AND a good way for you to discover new blogs! And you can even get daily or weekly “newsletters”…
A couple of weeks ago, Fabrizio of Passo.uno dropped me a message on LinkedIn and told me that my article was No.2 on Hacker News. I thought he was pulling my leg. My article, “Substack writers, you need a website!” was something I wrote out of frustration from what I’ve been seeing. I checked Hacker News and indeed it was true: I was on the front page. By the time I checked, I had dropped to No.6, but I visited hnrankings.info to check the historical movement of the essay and saw that I was…
Portrait of a Budding Marxist Post Nutrition Label Content Type: text Read Time: 7 min Topics: ai, capitalism This is almost certainly hot and mostly incoherent, poorly organized thoughtvomit. The phrase "democratization of art" is a smokescreen. Not a like lie exactly. A redirect. It points anger at the wrong door while the actual thing walks out the back: AI companies, and Capitalism wearing its Sunday best, commoditizing art as one more assault on the value of effort. Devalue time. Devalue…
1 : something devised or contrived: such as a(1) : a piece of equipment or a mechanism designed to serve a special purpose or perform a special function Merriam-Webster Dictionary I'm not, it must be said, the worlds most practical man. I can do a few things however, and have enough practical background to recognise when something is a truly beautiful example of a tool. Something made to be used, but also made itself of metal and wood and human ingenuity and a thing of beauty in its own right.…
Finding a better way to waste time.
One subject, three lenses, let's fucking goooo Back in the Cohost days ["COHOST MENTIONED" ALARM SOUNDS] I used to regularly post these "one subject, three lenses" projects where I'd slap three different lenses on my camera and try to capture the same thing to get as much variance as possible, but for sunsets in particular I'd include a color palette made out of that sunset's colors. They were a lot of fun to too and I just kinda stopped when Cohost died. I still do them every once and a while…
We had a visa appointment at the US Embassy in the capital city, Ankara, on Friday. We were supposed to go there by the sleeper train on Thursday night but unfortunately my wife, in a way very out of character for her, made a mistake and bought tickets for Friday night instead. We needed to find a bus ticket in a rush to make the appointment (very early in the morning) on time. The journey was one of the most uncomfortable of my life. I slept less than 2 hours. Once it was past 3am, I started…
Sony took away digital movies that people paid for. Streaming services keep raising rates. Amazon bricked old Kindles. Sounds like the LA Clippers broke salary cap rules. Sports teams use tax payer money to build stadiums. Billionaires and VC just bought the Lakers, I guess. See also, The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshit. People will start turning their backs on all this. Back to buying books, borrowing movies from the library, going to local sporting events. I can see movie rental places…
As a race, humans are really bad at doing cost benefit analysis. We might try and weigh up the pros and cons but we all have a tendency to exaggerate the pros if they are beneficial to us and downplay the cons that we can't directly see. This is also the case if the downsides are not immediate but will affect us at some point in the future. We see this pattern throughout history. We find something useful or pleasurable and later discover that it is harmful or unethical, and then continue doing…
When I was young, you told me the scientists couldn’t agree. I argued when you blustered, that one volcano meant our emissions didn’t matter. I plead when you complained, it was hotter when you were younger. I whined when you joked, that China produces more than us so don’t bother. I despaired when you claimed, that global warming was fake because it was cold today. I cried when you asserted, that you had had enough of experts. I shrugged when you postured, we need to acclimatize when no rain…
Robert Kingett tooted that indieweb folk are saying RSS readers are flawed, I'm here to say that feeds are ESSENTIAL to the web, all of it, and if any web gardener/creator/writer folk are indeed saying this, they need to re-evaluate.
A week ago, when I was working on my project for HTML Day 2026 I stumbled upon this passage from an essay on blink and marquee tags: At the time, there was a new breed of web professionals proudly labeled “webmasters.” Part designer, part developer and part evangelist, webmasters held enough esoteric knowledge about the web to manage, edit and create websites, both large and small. — Jay Hoffman (August 28th, 2017) And that's when everything clicked for me. Over the past year, I've written…
✨ In This Edition ✨ 📟 Short-Form Content: On many, many leaks - of credentials, unpublished games, and entire passports; being ""opted in"" to chatbot activities; and on having the robot create a "podcast" instead of talking to your children in the car. 🌞 Good News!: Top court in France blocks the under-15's social media ban; A judge in the US has ruled that Google needs to make it easier to use rival app stores; and there's now a font to fool AI scrapers. 📯 The Post-Script: Reading How to Talk…
On Monday, I came back to my day job from a weeklong vacation wherein we did birthdaversary stuff and packing / moving related activities. I rarely if ever talk about work here but one of the first things out the gate when I logged in was that I apparently missed a companywide meeting on how Claude use is now mandatory for all departments, and I was going to have to watch the missed session on how to implement it into my workflow. On top of that, the company has repositioned itself as an…
Anthropic: Future Claude models will generate text that contains a watermark. This is a way of determining the likelihood that Claude was involved in writing the text, and we, along with several other major AI providers, are implementing this change to comply with the EU AI Act. In this article, we share answers to some of the questions we’ve received about how our chosen watermarking method works, whether it affects Claude’s outputs, and why we’re making this change. To summarize: We use a…
It finally happened - I lost access to my stupid Microsoft account and have now lost access to all my One Drive files too. It was my fault. Well, mine and the chaotic digital mess of usernames and passwords and emails we have to keep track of in the 21st century. I won't even bother to go into the stupid details. After going through the recovery process many times and even raising a ticket, they've just said nope, and have locked the account entirely - going against their terms of service,…
Today, Instagram updated its logo wordmark. CNET had a nice image of the before and after, presented below as after and before: Instagzam vs. Instagram Although I don’t think AI was used in the creation of the new logo, it still smells of it in the way AI messes up things, like: Goofy kerning Goofy mix of cursive and non-cursive letters (apparently trying to call back to the previous logo the same way someone riding a bike off a picnic table and crashing calls back to Evel Knievel) Goofy…
At the back of my mind this week was the sense that nothing had gone badly wrong, chronic fatigue-wise. I appeared to be living a reasonable normal life doing the things I wanted to do at a pace and capacity that didn’t feel constrained, so maybe I’d cracked it? (For the unaware I’ve been working on pacing to reduce the severity of post-exertion crashes, basically relearning how to be in the world as a disabled person). It was getting a bit spooky as I got through another day, and then another.…
It’s a great topic. AI. Easy to dismiss. Easy to praise. But it isn’t everything. Not everything needs to be in comparison with it. Not every thought shared needs to take a stand for, or against, it. Not every article has to include a reflection on it. Sometimes you can just forget AI exists. Post the photo. Publish those thoughts. But don’t say that AI couldn’t have done this. Or AI wouldn’t do that. Or that it would be better with AI. Just let it go. Stop moaning about AI. Find a different…
Some highlights from the last month (ish) About the city I biked along the seawall, which I hadn’t done in a while Watched A couple of World Cup games — Norway vs England, and Spain vs Argentina I finally watched X-Men '97 (season 1), which was good! I need to watch season 2 soon The Odyssey was good I should probably see it once more in theatres before it leaves Chungking Express makes the ordinary so romantic… Hadestown: The Musical — saw this multiple times (lol) and it was wonderful I had…
It looks like AI scrapers have been using a surreptitious method of making their marauding presence appear legitimate, this time by appending a bogus query parameter, or tracking tag, to the URL of the webpage they are targeting. In the last month or so, I have seen a stack of page visit items looking something like this: https://disassociated.com/?ref=yourwebsitepage/213page/page/page/14page/16page/page/2page… I’ve replaced the actual website name with the generic yourwebsite marker in the…
A weekly recap of the articles and posts I’ve read that I think are worth your time. Tech sucks: You have to vote with your wallet, or nothing will change – 82MHz — I enjoy Apple products. But I am aware of the “trap” I am in. Does that make me complacent? Controlled? Less so or more so than those in the Android “trap”? The Clash of the Egosystems — “egosystem leaders are not motivated by thinking about us, shared ideals, or even technological progress. They’re inspired by market capture,…
This is my 8th blog post for the Blaugust 2026 community blogging project. Join me all this month for more blogging. Today I am celebrating the one-year anniversary of the next chapter of my life: retirement. I am having a great retirement. In the years approaching, I gave it a lot of thought and was prepared for it. The way I see it, I am no longer employed, but I have a job: be retired. I had an experience back around 2009 that showed me what a bad retirement could look like. It scared me,…
This week we explore creative provenance and trust in the age of AI generated content. Also don't miss 3 amazing illustrators you must follow, the design of the new European banknotes and an ongoing reference library for Black hairstyles.
Fascism’s unifying idea carries also its death.
Don’t let the absence of a flying car in your garage distract you: we are definitely now living in a version of the future out of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson. Every day I notice a news story that startles or alarms me, that feels like pure cyberpunk, nestled between reports about council bin collections and cabinet reshuffles. “The first ever IV Drip clinic to appear in the centre of a shopping mall, our Westfield clinic is a must-stop shop when doing a bit of retail therapy. From Vitamin…
Welp. My Forgejo instance got popped with an RCE two days ago by CVE-2026-60004. Luckily, I noticed the following morning and had the day free to figure out what happened. Let's dive in! The IncidentI woke up on Saturday morning to several Pushover notifications from Komodo warning me that my server's CPU usage was quickly spiking to 95%, then dropping back to 80%. That machine has an i5-10600K that normally idles at ~4% usage. I checked Komodo and found that it'd been at a sustained 50% CPU…
Introduction Gordon, Gordon, Gordon… I think you should look back at what you have written in Tech sucks? Really? and reassess your thoughts. Your conclusion shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between technology, companies, and customers in my opinion. Technology doesn’t suck. I think the problem is that we’ve allowed a handful of enormous companies become the gatekeepers to the extraordinary technology that many of us can’t imagine living without. You can’t separate the…
The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted that I've add an upvote button above the comments section. Don't worry it's an IndieWeb thing not CorpoWeb thing. If you haven't heard of bubbles.town then where have you been this past few months? 😉 It's a place for discovering IndieWeb content a bit like a HackerNews for nontechnical blogs and articles. The problem I have is, I read in FreshRSS. I Think "I should boost this on Bubbles", So I have to go check it is on Bubbles with their "Is a blog on…
I’ve been thinking lately about what happens to my online writing and photographs after I die. To be clear, at my current age I expect to last at least another 20 years. But I’ve entered the time of life where my death isn’t an abstract someday — I can see it from here. I’m not kidding myself that my work is so important that it must go into the National Archives or the Library of Congress. But my children and grandchildren might enjoy a connection to me through my work. And I have done some…
