Many years ago when I was a tiny baby making InFlux (of which there is now a Redux), I had no idea what I wanted to do with it narratively, if anything. Because, from a young age, he had humoured me, I emailed Gabe Newell about it, knowing he was in the habit of either replying or forwarding to someone he thought might reply. I got some good thoughts back from David Speyrer, who’s been at Valve since ’99, which I shall publish here now because at a party last night someone was interested.
'Who’s Deciding The Fate Of This Game?' The Secretive Process Of Getting A Game With Sexual Content On Steam
'You work six years on a game, you line up press and events for the launch, and then some guy at Valve clicks on a checkbox and blocks everything.'
Integrating Narrative into Game Design: A Portal Post-Mortem
Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes
In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.
How Google and AI Nearly Made a Seasoned Reporter Spiral — ProPublica
I thought I had missed something major in my reporting. Turns out I had stumbled into an AI-fueled feedback loop that involved a real LLC’s fictional website and a search engine that’s thrusting unreliable answers on users.
Welcome to LWN.net [LWN.net]
Emmanuele Bassi kicked off a project to improve GNOME's technical governance with a presentation about his ideas (video) at GUADEC 2025. His nudging has led the project to, slowly, work on creating more formal structures for technical governance. It is adopting a teams structure and looking toward creating a steering committee, as well as bootstrapping a Request for Comments (RFC) process. If adopted, GNOME would require RFCs for design, user experience, architectural, and other changes that carry a major impact on the project.
Confer is bringing foundational AI privacy to Meta
I started building Confer because I saw how amazing LLMs are, and as a result, how much of our data is flowing through them. Already, AI chat apps have become some of the largest centralized data lakes in history, containing more sensitive data than anything ever before. We are using LLMs for the kind of unfiltered thinking that we might do in a private journal – except this journal is an API endpoint to a data pipeline specifically designed for extracting meaning and context.
AT Protocol for Building Unique Social Apps — Boris Mann — FediCon 2025
Boris Mann gave a talk at FediCon 2025: "Beyond Microblogging: AT Protocol for Building Unique Social Apps". Boris Mann posted some notes about his talk here: https://bmannconsulting.com/notes/beyo...
Cory Doctorow on Enshittification, with danah boyd and Lee Vinsel
Rebuilding Social Media From Scratch!
Rebuilding Social Media From Scratch!
Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine on AI Slop, Quality Content & Social Media Fragmentation
one of the most radical actions the @npmx.dev community took was talking with every single human being who joined our chat server. more than 500 people were welcomed, encouraged to join our open conversations, ask for guidance, share their own ideas, and jump into action when they see opportunities
Substack's CEO now trying to scare people into *only* distributing their content through their proprietary app, not email. (The link he posted warns users away from email.) It's not enough that Substack's locking in publishers & readers with "notes" and comments, now they're escalating tactics.
1. Recently I’ve received lots of emails from people I don’t know personally, asking for my feedback on their books or papers. They explain the connection between my work and theirs and ask me to take a look. The catch, of course, is that the emails are transparently, obviously, written by AI.
LOVE this vision, and how @semble.so's upcoming connections feature helps to build towards this. Open, accretive collective sensemaking FTW!! Seize the means of sensemaking!! leaflet.pub/p/did:plc:y3dbemzlq5lzfl7osur…
rish
republishing with the right leaflet! i'm doing an exploration of how writing / long form content could live on the feed specifically to help documents acquire more context over time and did a write up here
Twitter/X - Cautionary Tales
Lessons to learn from X's failures
Facebook and Twitter shutter pro-Trump network reaching 55 million accounts
Quit X (by あ) — Semble
Twitter users #BlockTheBlue as ‘verified’ accounts take on new meaning
Criticism of X (social network)
The political effects of X’s feed algorithm
