anildash

anildash , 3 days ago to random

"In 1999, I interviewed Prince for TIME and he told me to leave my tape recorder off because he didn’t trust what future technology might do with unauthorized recordings of his voice.

At the time, I thought Prince was being paranoid ... I realize now that Prince wasn’t paranoid, he was prescient."

https://time.com/7338205/rage-against-ai-generated-music/

anildash , 5 days ago to random

Many folks are reflecting on Prince’s extraordinary halftime performance, the greatest of all time. What you may not know is that it was a profound, nuanced statement and a powerful reclaiming of a proud Black music tradition. Some background: https://anildash.com/2021/02/05/how-prince-won-the-super-bowl/ 

anildash , 1 month ago to random

RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/115884631610047441

If you reserve this, they’ve got… some land on the moon they’d like to sell you?

anildash , 1 month ago to random

I've been working on this one for a while. The multi-trillion-dollar AI industry? Their most advanced platforms are controlled by a plain text format that John Gruber made up for his blog, and then bounced off of a 17-year-old Aaron Swartz, before sharing it with the world for free. That is the internet. Here's the amazing (true!) story of how Markdown took over the world. https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/09/how-markdown-took-over-the-world/

anildash , 1 month ago to random

I wanted to just share one story about a kid who spent a lot of time in the neighborhood where Renee Nicole Good died today. Prince got married at Park United Methodist just down the street from 34th & Portland; he went to high school at Central High a few blocks in the other direction over on 35th. Prince spoke several times about a particularly formative memory of growing up: During a march against police violence in 1967, the cops responded brutally, leading to uprisings all over the city…

anildash , 1 month ago to random

Since ChatGPT came out in late 2022, over half a million tech workers have been laid off. That fact, and their voices, aren't really shaping the conversation about AI, and what "AI" really means in culture. So I started to get into it: https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/06/500k-tech-workers-laid-off/

anildash , 1 month ago to random

The number one thing I've been hearing from people in tech lately is, basically, "How the hell am I supposed to work in this industry anymore?" Though most folks are kind of afraid to say it out loud. So I wrote about how to think about it: https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/05/a-tech-career-in-2026/

anildash , 2 months ago to random

One amazing thing about 2025 is that, if you start up an Apple product, it forces you to choose between three different window mangers, but if you start up a clean install of a current version of Linux, it just chooses good defaults for you.

ALT

anildash , 2 months ago to random

Bleh. Just saw a friend who found out they couldn’t be followed by one of their friends because (unbeknownst to both parties) the moderators of their friend’s instance had defederated from their own instance. All of this, for people who barely know what any of these terms mean. What they experience is, “Two people you’ve never met have a beef you’ve never heard about over an issue you don’t know about, so your friend can’t see you. And there’s no fix.” It’s just terrible all around.

anildash , 2 months ago to random

I sat for a long while with my complicated feelings about "vibe coding". It is genuinely empowering for many — opening a door to creating with code that otherwise would never exist. Also? It enables a dangerous dependency that could be a path to serfdom for coders. https://www.anildash.com/2025/12/02/vibe-coding-empowering-and-imprisoning/

anildash , 2 months ago to random

One of the top stories on Hacker News today was a post arguing that Mozilla shouldn't accommodate any usage of AI in Firefox because (understandably) people were mad at Big AI companies for all the horrible things they've done to users and the internet and society. But I think people are ignoring the reality that hundreds of millions of users are using LLMs today, and they need to have tools from platforms that will look out for their interests. https://www.anildash.com/2025/11/14/wanting-not-to-want-ai/

grumpygamer , 3 months ago to random

I wish there was some kind of global internet-wide setting that says "I don't want to you use fucking passkeys, stop asking me".

anildash , 3 months ago to random

LOL I stepped away from Mastodon for a couple hours and everybody is VERY MAD that I made jokes about CLIs. I use them every day, guys, it's gonna be okay. I promise I did not hurt Zork's feelings. It is, however, a factual statement that CLIs are not discoverable user interfaces and they are a poor choice for mainstream audiences; this debate was settled long ago.

anildash , 3 months ago to random

So much of what's wrong with tech started from one simple phenomenon: focusing on the money-movers instead of people who actually make shit. Real technology matters. Inventors over investors, every time. Founders over funders. Writing code > writing checks. https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/24/founders-over-funders/

anildash , 3 months ago to random

Imagine a browser where you type in “Taylor Swift” and it doesn’t even admit that her website exists. I write about Atlas, ChatGPT’s new anti-web browser that should come with a warning label. https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/22/atlas-anti-web-browser/

anildash , 3 months ago to random

By popular request: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful take on LLMs that (in my experience) the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. https://www.anildash.com//2025/10/17/the-majority-ai-view/ Please share!

anildash , 4 months ago to random

One first step people should do to respond to this is start using the “report a speed trap” function in Apple Maps to report where ICE is operating. Make Apple party to the attempt to protect people. https://www.theverge.com/news/791533/google-apple-ice-tracking-app-store-red-dot-iceblock

anildash , 4 months ago to random

I've been trying to find a name or descriptor for people who I think are looking at "AI" broadly and soberly, with a genuinely objective perspective and information that's not captured by the big tech companies but also fluent in the technology behind it. ( @simon would be the exemplar here.) What would you call this cohort? Because I think it's sort of a community without a name, which limits its impact.

anildash , 5 months ago to random

I guess I actually was pretty mad about that stupid golden paperweight https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/09/how-tim-cook-sold-out-steve-jobs/

anildash , 5 months ago to random

Today's my birthday! I've got five simple requests, based on what I've learned over the last... 50 years. I hope you'll take a moment to give them a look. And thanks to everybody who's taken a moment read my writing over the years. https://www.anildash.com/2025/09/05/five-for-fifty/

anildash , 5 months ago to random

One of the biggest cultural issues we have is that no major media or journalistic institutions have been reinforcing norms of what things should look like. That corruption isn’t normal, that cronyism isn’t normal, that lies and scandals should be punished, that incompetence is disqualifying.

They’ve simply stopped pointing out that there are any standards at are, or that there used to be a bar of any sort. And now an entire generation doesn’t know this concept at all.

anildash , 6 months ago to random

There could not be a more opportune time to make a competitor to GitHub, especially one grounded in community and accountability. Git was not meant to be centralized; “pull requests” are not actually an open standard and throwing code over the wall at others is not actually social coding.

anildash , 7 months ago to random

This Zohran Mamdani video is absolutely INCREDIBLE. The numbers he cites, the strategy and results they produced — it’s the future. When have you heard any campaign talk about this, ever? It is the blueprint.

Zohran Mamdani summarizes the primary victory one week after the election

anildash , 8 months ago to random

The entire modern internet has been built on platforms that don’t believe in asking for consent. What if we started demanding a culture of consent online? https://www.anildash.com//2025/05/27/2025-05-27-internet-of-consent/

anildash , 8 months ago to random

I have a lot of thoughts about this. https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-dead/

anildash , 8 months ago to random

It’s been fun watching the unlikely rise of MCP as a standard, which is open and messy in a way that mimics the dynamics of the good parts of Web 2.0. Maybe something interesting will happen! https://www.anildash.com//2025/05/20/mcp-web20-20/

anildash , 8 months ago to random

Squinting at MCP as an old person, seeing which parts are like CGI, which parts are like Gopher, and which parts are like SOAP.

anildash , 8 months ago to random

I would only add that this is a valid assertion about all of the major platforms funded by big tech. (Whether they are framed as non-profits or B corps or not.) It need not be intrinsic to the technology, but we do not yet have any meaningful large-scale counterexamples. https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/114530048579737393

anildash , 9 months ago to random

This is wonderful news for the future of Mastodon, for everything from governance to continued evolution and innovation. Love to see it! https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/05/evolving-the-team/

anildash , 9 months ago to random

A bunch of tech CEOs are talking about being “AI-first”, the latest in a series of CEO fads like “return to office”, “founder mode” and “pivot to full fascism”. This one’s weird, though, because it only makes sense if… none of their workers are great at their jobs. https://www.anildash.com//2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office/

anildash , 9 months ago to random

Truly my greatest professional joy is that, not only did we get to build a tool to help people stop AI bots from scraping up their work without consent, I was able to have our in-house artist create a SLOP sign to mark the spot where the bots expire.

If you are a non-profit or open source project that does good internet stuff, we’ll protect you for free. If not, then you can pay us money and we will hook you up. Either way, good tools to put you in control over the bots. https://www.fastly.com/blog/take-back-control-make-ai-bots-play-by-your-rules

ALT

anildash , 9 months ago to random

I took a look at the top “tech” podcasts and holy SHIT all but, like… 2? of them are just straight up fascist propaganda by VC firms promoting their defense investments or lifestyle scams from right-wing bros? Obviously we don’t need any more podcasts, but it made me think I should bring mine back.

anildash , 11 months ago to random

Okay, after years of over-hype about AI, does the DeepSeek moment and the deflation of the AI bubble mean we can finally be normal about AI and treat it like any other tech, evaluating it on its pros and cons, and its actual utility? I wrote about how we might actually do that in our day jobs: https://www.fastly.com/blog/can-we-be-normal-about-ai-now-that-deepseek-happened

anildash , 1 year ago to random

Hey! If you care deeply about the open web, I hope you’ll consider joining our team at Fastly. We get to support open source and good internet projects ranging from Scratch to Kubernetes, Watch Duty to Mastodon, Python to Perl, Ruby to Rust, and many, many more. We’ve committed nearly $100M in resources to making the Internet better, and helping to build healthy, sustainable communities. And we haven’t wavered one bit in our inclusive hiring policies. https://www.fastly.com/about/jobs/apply?gh_jid=6523073

anildash , 1 year ago to random

This is a monumental day for the future of the social web, though it might not be obvious for a while. Mastodon matures its governance model with a great, solid non-profit https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/01/the-people-should-own-the-town-square/ and a coalition of independents push to open up Bluesky's AT Protocol: https://freeourfeeds.com/ These two moves together put the most credible players on solid ground for years to come — and set up the open platforms to enable lots of innovation just when it's needed most.

anildash , 1 year ago to random

I think everyone who has an opinion, positive or negative, about LLMs, should read how @simon summed up what’s happened in the space this year. He’s the most credible, most independent, most honest, and most technically fluent person watching the space. https://simonwillison.net/2024/Dec/31/llms-in-2024/

anildash , 1 year ago to random

I wanna say something to people who work in tech-related jobs in America: this is still a field where most people hate the rise of fascism and want to stop it. I know the media & amplification of the tycoons makes it seem like that’s the whole industry. But it’s not. And we still have power.

anildash , 1 year ago to random

lol I wonder if the person who profits from persuading people to risk money on sports gambling is a reliable source on whether to invest in the memecoin that has her name on it, and which she has been unabashedly shilling. https://awfulannouncing.com/gambling/taylor-mathis-cryptocurrency-draftkings.html (cc @molly0xfff )

molly0xfff , 1 year ago to random

@fediversereport @stefan the corollary here is they probably could have raised from different investors too, if they so chose

anildash , 1 year ago to random

The success of a startup called “posthog” has inspired me to call my next company “showfeet”.

anildash , 1 year ago to random

Congrats to @molly0xfff who is now impossible to find on Meta Threads.

ALT

anildash , 1 year ago to random

Has anybody switched from a standalone 2FA app like Google Authenticator or Authy to Apple’s Passwords app? Looking for folks who have actual experience with it and how it works.

anildash , 1 year ago to random

Here’s my dream plan, which would take 5 years and probably less than $5B:

• We replace Social Secutity Numbers (which are like having a username with no password!) with disposable, single-use IDs of similar format, perhaps by adding letters so we have enough identifiers
• People could get a new number anytime from the Social Security Admin website or app, by calling a number, or by going to a post office
• Credit scores and credit info brokers are required to only have info you choose to share

anildash , 1 year ago to random

One key question to ask yourself: why does media talk about tech’s support for political policy or candidates, and focus entirely on investors like VCs, instead of those who actually make the tech? Do they do this in any other industry? When a major labor union endorses Biden, do they ignore this and talk about the bankers who lend money to that industry?

anildash , 1 year ago to random

Get ready: in just about 2 hours, it’s Fastly ‘s first ever special event for developers. We’ll be talking about the exciting future of @glitchdotcom , the most-requested features you’ve wanted from @devs , and even some big surprises. Watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgNjS1_kOW8