This one starts off a little slow but makes some really good points about the pressure to not work on the “middle part” (and how “infrastructure gravity” often means people do unnecessary innovation too low in the stack).
Aleksey Skorobogaty
Excellent article on positioning domain engineering between product engineering and infrastructure engineering. I fully agree with the financial model section. However, I prefer to call it ‘platform engineering: the hard parts,’ simply because in the middle, we face more volatile semantics.
May 17, 2025 at 12:34 PM
Climate, Energy, & the Future–How Infrastructure Works–Deb Chachra–The Future is Literally Bright
How Infrastructure Works: Transforming our shared systems for a changing world
'Pulsing with wisdom and humanity... a masterpiece' ED YONG'A hopeful, lyrical - even beautiful - hymn to the systems of mutual aid we embed in our material world' CORY DOCTOROW'An extraordinary book' MARK MIODOWNIK'You won't see the world the same after reading this book!' AUSTIN KLEONEvery day, we are granted the power to travel at high speeds, fly, see in the dark, summon water from distant mountains and electricity from the sun. The systems that run our world are invisible to us until they fail.Infrastructure enables lives of astounding ease and freedom that would have been unimaginable just a century ago. These technological systems - the most complex and vast ever created by humans - have allowed us to work collectively for the public good. But these systems are now beginning to fail us.Engineering professor Deb Chachra takes readers on a fascinating tour of these essential utilities, revealing how they work, what it takes to keep them running, and just how much they shape our lives - but also the price they extract, who pays it and in what ways, as well as the threats to our infrastructure in a changing world.From Snowdonia's Electric Mountain to a solar plant in southern India, Chachra shows how we can rebuild our shared infrastructure to be not just functional but also equitable, resilient, and sustainable. We need to learn how to see these systems and to transform them, together, because the cost of not being able to rely on them is unthinkably high.
Three questions any founders should be able to answer
Stress test your product-market fit with these three simple questions
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System
By Donella Meadows~ Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything. This idea is not unique to systems analysis — […]
Wisdom in a World in Crisis: The Counterintuitive Need to Slow Down and Find Spaciousness with Iain McGilchrist
A.I. Should Elevate Your Thinking, Not Replace It - Blog - Koshy John
Read about the hidden divide between self-inflicted irrelevance and real engineering leverage.
interfluidity » Quick thoughts about airline economics
If you’ve not already read this piece by Matt Stoller challenging the conventional wisdom that airline deregulation in the 1970s has been a great success, you should. See also this 2012 piece by Phillip Longman and Lina Khan, and this 2015 piece by Longman. Thanks to Matt Ygesias and Marshall Steinbaum for pointers.
Matt Rickard | Substack
Thoughts on engineering, startups, and AI. Click to read Matt Rickard, a Substack publication with thousands of subscribers.
Day two of ;#QConLondon! Starting liveskeet a bit late so not covering the beginning of @martin.kleppmann.com's keynote about geopolitical tech resilience (because USA is shitshow rn). Three topics: - Multicloud - Atproto - Localfirst For multicloud, key thing is making it easy to switch
Hillel is on Social Media Break
Hello from #QConLondon! I am going to liveskeet as much as I can while very, very jetlagged. Right now we are going through conference intro and "how to attend a conference". Gotta be a couple of thousand people here
ooh nice my talk got posted! this is a 30 min whirlwind introduction to atproto through a technical lens, basically building up the stack from DIDs -> repos -> PDSes -> relays -> lexicons -> OAuth -> applications
FediForum
Have you ever wondered how #ATProto actually works? This presentation by Daniel Holmgren from #FediForum should answer your questions in 30 minutes. spectra.video/w/mDnE8FbYh1PXiaCPxsniGQ /cc @dholms.at
finally posted thoughts about the atmosphere conf (along with an illustration and a bunch of tweaks to the blog) macwright.com/2026/04/05/in-the-atmosphere
In the Atmosphere
macwright.com1/ Lots of thoughts about the new White House science and tech policy report, meanwhile just a few quick notes (I only skimmed it so far but plan to read through it)
Science: A New Golden Age
www.whitehouse.govExcellent @tgspodcast.bsky.social episode, finding myself pausing every minute to take notes. "What sorts of systems are going to make it through the bottlenecks of the 21st c?“ TLDR collective robustness beats individual optimization Once (if?) funders get this, atproto will see investments
The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile with Olivier Hamant
open.spotify.comTechnological
Posts about the future of the internet, AI, and anything technological. Hence the name.
Landslide/Holdfast
Citations and background for my talk at Atmosphere Conf 2026
Take back the web. Make it weird again - soulcruzer
Social Media and Anti-Social Pluralism - Aaron Ross Powell
Technorealists, the silent majority? - open self
Skyreader Vision - Skyreader Dev Log
Road to a book lexicon (Part 2) - Nick The Sick
The Turing Collapse | Jason G. Butterfield | Offprint
Sources on social media: Information context collapse and volume of content as predictors of source blindness - George Pearson, 2021
Pacific kelp forests are far older than we thought - Berkeley News
Illusion of knowledge through Facebook news? Effects of snack news in a news feed on perceived knowledge, attitude strength, and willingness for discussions
No Sense of Place by Joshua Meyrowitz | Open Library
A perspective on friction interventions to curb the spread of misinformation
The social media context interferes with truth discernment
