Joshua McKenty

848 Followers
1.2K Following
629 Posts
Technology and Change.
CEO of Delving, builder of software and companies. Co-founder of #openstack, Piston Cloud. Ex #NASA, #Pivotal, #netscape & circus. Father.
He/Him.
This is your friendly reminder that I make and sell delightful miniature retrocomputers like TRS-80s, Osborne Ones, and the occasional big friends like Connection Machines and Crays.
I'm a retired nerd who's living the dream. Well, if your dream is working in your garage on tiny art machines. 😺 ⚙️
#retrocomputing #miniatures #trs80 #cray #shamelessSelfPromotion
https://store.transmutable.com/
Subscribe to Trevor Flowers

On Gumroad

Gumroad

This may be excessively Icelandic* of me, but I strongly prefer the term “platform decay” over “enshittification” because it’s much more descriptive.

* Our words for “breakfast”, “lunch”, and “dinner” are “morning meal”, “noon meal”, and “evening meal” respectively.

modern society is so divorced from our food sources that most people who eat pop tarts have never actually killed one themselves
Free idea: a website that asks you random meaningless questions like “do you prefer blue-green or green-blue?” or “are cones better than spheres?” and then plots you on a random political-compass chart with nonsensical axes like “Peanut–Cashew” and “Lichen–Moss”.

While I was happy for the Figma team to get a payout, it's great news to hear that Adobe's acquisition of Figma has been called off. It would not have served our Design community well.

It'll be interesting to see how the #design community reacts today.
https://www.figma.com/blog/figma-adobe-abandon-proposed-merger/

Figma and Adobe are abandoning our proposed merger | Figma Blog

Figma and Adobe no longer see a path toward regulatory approval

Figma

Bruce Schneier shares the depressing conclusion that while the internet enabled mass surveillance, AI enables mass spying.

Surveillance is the collection of data. Our phones track our location. Our credit cards track our purchases. Etc.

Spying is understanding what you are doing and saying. This used to be expensive and now is cheap.

Yesterday I shared that Mountain Dew watches every Twitch stream and will message every streamer who drinks their soda on stream.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2023/12/ai-and-mass-spying.html

AI and Mass Spying - Schneier on Security

Is there a corner of the fediverse filled with friendly radio #astronomers? Having a hard time finding any.

The Beeck Center's Digital Service Network just published a collection of 134 US state executive orders relating to digital transformation, and a high-level synthesis of trends and themes:

https://www.digitalservicenetwork.org/policyscan

(Next up: legislation and administrative rules, and guidance to understand how these policy tools, along with EOs, contribute to state and territorial-level government digital transformation.)

State-level Digital Transformation Policy Scan

Digital Service Network (DSN) launched a new research agenda to support deeper understanding of three policy tools that influence digital transformation at the state and territorial level — executive orders (EOs), legislation, and administrative rules and guidance.

"Given the ineffectiveness of deepfake detection models, and the increasing availability of generative AI, it is likely that influence campaigns using generative AI that target voters will increasingly go undetected by the general public." https://news.google.com/articles/CBMiT2h0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmNiYy5jYS9uZXdzL3BvbGl0aWNzL2FydGlmaWNpYWwtaW50ZWxsaWdlbmNlLWNzZS1lbGVjdGlvbi0xLjcwNTA1NjPSASBodHRwczovL3d3dy5jYmMuY2EvYW1wLzEuNzA1MDU2Mw?hl=en-CA&gl=CA&ceid=CA%3Aen

"So, I'm going to do something which may not be well-recieved: I'm going to push-back (slightly) on the Linked Data movement, because, frankly, I think it is a bit draconian with respect to the way it oversells the HTTP URI scheme"

https://archive.is/gtBty#selection-181.0-185.106