The 'vibe shift' was a leveraged buyout
At some point in the 2010s, it became clear that Elon was obsessed with an incongruity in digital space. The man was getting richer and richer, and everyone around him was telling him he was cool and successful. But on Twitter, a site that mattered a lot to his social cohort,…
We have killed the technical debt
Big day for docs 🙂🙂
No-One Makes You Shop at Amazon
Responding to Noah Smith
The shapeshifter’s little brother
Thoughts on the Meta CEO’s recent essay on AI, “The Future Is for Everyone”—less a manifesto, and more like nine blog posts in a trenchcoat.
I wrote an AI textbook — how long until AI can do it better?
Reflections on AI's writing ability and how AI models get more capable.
The Three AI Pills
Sincere disagreements about AI are usually disagreements about future AI capabilities.
Technorealists, the silent majority?
you might find yourself standing in the unremarkable center
Odysseus at the End of Civilization
If the film’s pre-release critics, enraged over Nolan’s decision to adopt a diverse cast, had waited for the release, they could have instead been angry over its themes, which position the film as speaking for the norms and civility of the Western civilization those critics cl…
Mu personal home-feed
of atmospheric threads
Introducing Radial: Agent orchestration on the Atmosphere
I've been iterating on a coding-agent orchestator for atproto for a while now and it's finally in a place I'm happy with. Still early, bugs, rough onboarding, etc. but finally coming together.
Sensors, not just bookmarks [Patterns of Sensemaking #1]
First of a new series on sensemaking patterns we're observing on Semble
More On An Internal OpenAI Model Hacking Into HuggingFace
We now have more details of what happened. Every time we learn more details, it somehow makes things seem worse.
Rob Miles: Some people become staggeringly credulous as long as the story sounds cynical and jaded enough. “Our product sometimes goes out of control and commits…
More On An Internal OpenAI Model Hacking Into HuggingFace
We now have more details of what happened. Every time we learn more details, it somehow makes things seem worse.
108 PRs in eight days: Accidentally discovering loop engineering | Brittany Ellich
How I shipped 108 PRs in eight days with an agent working my task board: the loop engineering setup, constraints, and lessons that made it work.
OpenAI Shares Some Alignment Problems
Kudos to OpenAI for sharing their recent experiences with a misaligned internal model, where they encountered problems sufficiently severe they were forced to take the model offline to work on new mitigations and defense-to-depth.
Open models are decelerationist
people and planet need open models to win
“ Researchers let AI models run a simulated society...
Noah Smith's Review of Power and Progress is Very, Very Bad
It should have been disowned, not republished
Chatto is Robots
Chatto is built with agentic engineering. Here's my workflow.
Linus Torvalds: ‘AI Is a Tool, Just Like Other Tools We Use. And It’s Clearly a Useful One.’
Blogging: It's more social than ever !
We want blogging to feel less like posting to the void, and more like sharing with a community. From pckt notes to better discovery, everything we've built over the last few weeks is designed to help bloggers connect.
I'm gonna make a billion dollars
by helping a thousand people make a million
Skyreader update - Home, Magazines, and Paged view
A calmer front door and more tools to work through your reading backlog
Permissioned Data Shapes: Self-Only Bookmarks
A self-only space is the smallest shape permissioned data can take: one authority, one member, one repo, and private bookmarks that share a record shape and a write path with public ones.
What will be left for us to work on?
My keynote at ICML 2026
Introducing Plan A
...
The Tower Keeps Rising
Roomy Devlog 2
"Save for Later" Has No Later
Publication pages and nav, for Leaflet as…website builder?!
Lab Notes 032: custom pages and nav for all your publications — with a whole bunch of great examples showing sites made with Leaflet
Moats & Drawbridges
In a world obsessed with moats, the open social web drops drawbridges
Cosmik Updates: June 2026
Semble API launched, and the community didn't waste a minute. Plus share-outs from ATScience, the MIRA (modular research) workshop and a Frontiers of Open Science panel.
An equitable company
decentralized networking is best realized with decentralized ownership
Dead Forest Theory
Internet darkness is turning into deadness and time is running out
A bridge beyond Discord
Roomy Devlog 1
Better Models: Worse Tools
The uncomfortable lesson is that tool schemas are not neutral, at least not on
Anthropic models. We like to pretend that a schema is an abstract contract and
the model is a general reasoner that will follow it, but that might no longer be
the case for some of the tools.The AI Superforecasters Are Here
I generally disagree with Sayash and Arvind, but this is the prediction of theirs that I’ve thought about the longest, without being able to find any decisive refutation. It’s a great test case! If AI hits top-human level forecasting and then flattens off, maybe there’s someth…
Open Social Web ID
Approaching a shared method of single sign-on for the entire open social web.
Roomy is generally available
the door's open
What does it mean for AI to be democratic?
Lurking under this idea that AI models themselves should be “more democratic” is sometimes the idea that all products in society should reflect the correct opinions of the good majority, and never reflect the opinions of the bad minority. I think a better solution here would b…
Skyreader update - Bookmark syncing to Semble/Margin and Standard Reader Collections support
Sync your reading list across the Atmosphere. Read magazine-like collections.
» How Jordan Mechner Made a Different Sort of Interactive Movie (or, The Virtues of Restraint) The Digital Antiquarian
The Dumb Matrix
Idiocracy’s major mistake wasn’t the future it predicted, which would arrive a lot quicker than 500 years as it turned out, but who the movie blamed for it. President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho, a Black former pornographic actor and wrestler, doesn’t look lik…
Comments are a basic web feature. So why aren’t they solved on ATProto yet?
Comments are about as old and basic as the social web gets, so I assumed ATProto would have them figured out. It doesn’t, not yet.
Yeah comments are gnarly. Want to support something like them for linkblog shares in @skyreader.app but holding off for now due to exactly these…
Two questions from the Jagged Frontier
At last, we have invented the abundance machine from the cautionary tale "the abundance machine is really cool actually, someone should make one of those". The threat to intelligence on demand is not resource scarcity, it is unexpected externalities -- like, say, holding a mo…
Maybe it's time for lots of little indie AIs to take over
Skyreader update - Highlights, Margin, and Performance
Skyreader can now highlight and integrates with Margin. Everything is faster now too.
Formal methods and the future of programming
But the emergence of agentic coding has changed our perspective, and we’ve gone from being skeptical to being excited about the possibilities.
The Boring Internet
The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is.
Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill.
Beneath The Enshittification, Something Amazing Is Growing
But, it takes time. And that can be frustrating for those of us who want to live in that better future.
easy to get cynical when the future we can imagine isn't here yet. but we can just build things!
Dangerous Technology For Americans Only
Leaflet Together: cursors, comments, group publications!
Lab Notes 028: a new suite of features to make Leaflet great for collaborative writing and collaborative publishing!
What would Muskism be without Musk?
The mode of production behind the man
Friday Facts #442 - Flip, Flow, and Fresh Paint
My AI Opinions
Not endorsing the predictions here but worth thinking through the reasoning.
Arguments against simulation: Too weird.
Yeah, I kinda think that the lesswrong and adjacent crowds would be taken more seriously if they just stopped talking about the simulation argument. Too weir…
Why AI hasn’t replaced software engineers, and won’t
Coding agents as normal technology
Claude Fable is relentlessly proactive
After two days of experience with Claude Fable 5 I think the best way to describe it is relentlessly proactive . It knows a whole lot of tricks and it will deploy pretty much any of them to get to its goal. I'll illustrate this with an example. I was hacking on Datasette Agent…
It's not enough to have better ideals.
Lab Notes #009: Semble (alpha) API
Very excited for this!
Making it even easier to build with Semble.
Standardizing Bookmarks in the Atmosphere
Saves in @skyreader.app are off protocol currently so this is a great starting point for thinking through what a save/bookmark integration would require.
a mini proposal for a shared bookmark lexicon
Cosmik Updates: May 2026
We migrated the blog to Leaflet; The Semble community is cookin'!
Sill's new view
Some major improvements come to Sill today
Hark, a link blog!
Boris makes the point that Skyreader linkblogs should actually point to the link so now it does! The other suggestions are good too and on the roadmap.
Edit: mentions should work too: @bmann.ca
Excitedly trying out Skyreader's new link blog and opinions on link blogging
Skyreader update - Linkblogs, standard.site, and discussions
Sharing the sharing post. How meta.
Making Skyreader more social. Everyone gets a linkblog! Find your people.
Modeling communities on permissioned data
So excited for permissioned data!
Arguing against "universal spaces" and raising a couple questions that come up as a result.
Permissioned Data Diary 6: Boring Auth
In which we resist the temptation to invent a clever authorization model & pick the boring one instead.
Skyreader: A RSS Reader on the AT Protocol
Introducing a RSS reader for the AT Protocol where you feeds and article sharing are portable
SembleIt: Semble Without the Distractions
Semble is two apps in a trench coat. SembleIt is just the quiet one.
An Atmospheric Website
Notes from the fifth and final migration.
RFCs on the Atmosphere
What Did Scientists Find?
They should probably stop looking!