Since my last piece about Bluesky, I’ve been using the service a lot more. Just about everyone I followed on other services is there now, and it’s way more fun than late-stage Twitter ever was. Halifax is particularly into Bluesky, which reminds me of our local scene during the late-2000s/early-2010s Twitter era.
Tom Scott is playing to win.
I was late to the party, but I played Luck Be a Landlord last year and really enjoyed it. It’s a deckbuilder where you build combos by manipulating the icons in your custom slot machine. I linked above to the Steam page, but it’s on just about every platform — I played through it on iOS.
I was recently on-site with a client and noticed that one person was using the new “Macintosh” screen saver that was added in macOS Sequoia. If you haven’t seen it, here’s a video of it in action.
Today, Alec Watson posted a video titled “Algorithms are breaking how we think” on his YouTube channel, Technology Connections. The whole thing is excellent and very well argued. The main thrust is: people seem increasingly less mindful about the stuff they engage with. Fewer people are reaching out for stuff to read/watch/listen to, and are letting systems control that for them. Watson argues that this is bad, and I agree.
Yesterday, the Mastodon team announced it would be handing over control of its project to a new non-profit organization. The timing of this announcement is perfect given everything that’s happening with WordPress, Meta, and… well, everything else. To date, I think Eugen Rochko has done an excellent job stewarding Mastodon, but I also might have said the same thing about Matt Mullenweg a few years back. Why gamble when you can set up safeguards?
Since I last wrote about WordPress, things have gone off the rails. This after a brief period when things were blissfully quiet. Matt Mullenweg stopped commenting for a while, though his company had launched WP Engine Tracker — a site for tracking WordPress-driven websites that moved away from WP Engine. I think this is a bit gauche, but it seems like fair marketing given everything that’s going on. It should be noted that many sites are leaving for Pressable — owned by Mullenweg’s company, Automattic — because of a sweetheart deal.
This morning I read a 404 Media article about Instagram showing people ads with AI-generated images of themselves. I thought this take from Sam Biddle was very good: