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roma★
occasionally subtle
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
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we're not kids anymore.
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@danyork
AVFTCN 040 - Returning From A Hiatus, and Plans for 2026
I’m back. After a self-imposed hiatus for most of 2025, I’m returning to something I’ve been deeply missing… writing and speaking. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know that not writing or speaking is, for me, a kind of pressure that builds and builds until I am ready to explode. 🤯 ✓ Subscribed So what happened? The short version: my role at the Internet Society changed…
AVFTCN 039 - The 2 Simple Steps To Running DeepSeek (or another AI) Locally
I did not realize how incredibly EASY it is to now run LLMs locally on your computer! Two simple steps: 1 – Go to Ollama.com and download/install the app for Mac, Windows, or Linux. 2 – Open a terminal / command shell window and run whatever LLM you want (from Ollama’s list). So to run DeepSeek, you can type this: ollama run deepseek-r1:7b That’s it! After however long it takes to download…
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AVFTCN 038 - 5 Emerging Trends I’m Paying Attention to in 2025
As 2025 begins, I thought I’d climb up into the crow’s nest and share what I am paying attention to as this new year starts. Some of these are technologies, while others are policy areas or overall trends that have been emerging over the past few years. Resilience As I wrote about in my last newsletter, and also in my first post of 2025, and has been a theme in my recent writing and speaking…
AVFTCN 037 - Resilience, Connecting Carolina, and ITDRC Response
Climbing back up into the crow’s nest and turning the spyglass toward the southeastern United States, it’s hard to escape the utter devastation caused by the cascading effects of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. The photos are unbelievable. The stories are heartbreaking. The recovery costs will be enormous. And the people responding are amazing! (And the disinformation is despicable!🤬) All…
AVFTCN 036 - A Hard Drive Failure, a Puppy, Climatebase, a New Role... and an Unplanned Hiatus
Hi! Remember this newsletter you subscribed to? The one you haven’t seen since back on April 22, 2024? Welllllll… it’s been a wild ride… and an unplanned hiatus. But… my goal now is to get back into this a bit more, and so I want to fire off this short note to just give a personal update. Next time, I’ll be climbing up into that proverbial crow’s nest and looking out at the horizon ahead of…
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AVFTCN 035 - 3 Articles To Read On Earth Day
Today is Earth Day… and when I climb up into that crow’s nest, hold up my spyglass, and look out at the horizon… it can look pretty bleak. It seems like the whole world is on fire in different ways. But amidst the chaos… what gives me hope is seeing people taking action. And they are! Today I offer you three articles to hopefully provoke some thoughts on this day: one by me and two by…
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AVFTCN 034 - The Cautionary Tale of the Death of Ello
Do you remember… Ello? For a brief time in 2014 to 2016-ish, it flared up as “the next emerging social network” and even as a “Facebook-killer”. And then it flamed out… and… in the summer of 2023, it disappeared completely as the site was taken offline. I was all in with Ello for a time! Kind of as Mastodon is today for me, Ello was where I was focused on posting and engaging. And then it…
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AVFTCN 033 - Kiwix, Meshtastic and content and connectivity during an outage
Tonight here in northwestern Vermont we’re supposed to get the double trouble of heavy, wet snow and a windstorm with winds up to 49 mph (79 kph). The combination will undoubtedly cause trees to fall, taking down power and Internet cables. Forecasters are expecting power outages all across the state. In these moments, I often think about what we would do in an extended power or Internet outage.…
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AVFTCN 032 - Finding Hope Amidst the Chaos
Happy New Year! Climbing up into the proverbial crow’s nest as 2024 begins, it looks a bit bleak up ahead. LOTS of icebergs! Of course here in the USA we have the US presidential election, that is sure to bring out an added level of nastiness. We are not alone in this… a colleague of mine points out that in 2024 there will be 106 elections in 67 countries! Given the current state of generative…
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AVFTCN 030 - Book: “Making A Metaverse That Matters”
I have always been intrigued by “what comes after the web browser” for how we interact with information online. After all, the web browser has been our primary way of interacting with information since the early 1990s. Even when we are using “apps” on our phones today, in many cases they are effectively web browsers wrapped in a customized layer. Could there be something more? Could we get to a…
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AVFTCN 030 - Want to run an AI on your laptop? Just download one file...
5:42 am Mind = 🤯 Would you like to run a large language model (LLM) on your own local computer? So that all your data and requests stay local? Would you like your own private “ChatGPT”-like thing that you could ask questions of? I happened to be looking at my personal email the other afternoon when Simon Willison’s email newsletter appeared. As I scanned his text (now available as a blog post)…
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AVFTCN 029 - Sunday Smorgasbord: Humane AI Pin, LEOs, Livestreaming Wikipedia editing
5:03 am Greetings from basement isolation. The dog has been let out and I’m back here in the dark. Instead of a specific topic, I want to catch up on some updates to past newsletters. So today’s note is a collection of smaller updates of different flavors. I’ll call it a smorgasboard, which of course Wikipedia has more info about than you probably ever cared to know! 😀 Now on to some updates…
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AVFTCN 028 - Let’s Not Forget the Magic of the Internet
6:23 am It is so easy to get so used to how the Internet works*, that sometimes we forget to pause and just think about how amazing this technology can be. We just expect that it will work – and for the most part it does. I’m had some experiences this week… and plenty of time to think… that reminded me about how magical the Internet can be at times. * – for those of us privileged enough to…
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AVFTCN 027 - The Paywalling of the Web
5:03 am Is the future of the Web really one where so much of the content is behind a paywall or a registration screen? (some call it a “regwall”) Are we returning to the pre-Internet days where so much information was locked away in gated “walled gardens” of online activity such as CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy, Delphi, etc.? ✓ Subscribed Each morning after our dog wakes me up sometime between 4:30…
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AVFTCN 026 - Humane’s “AI Pin” gets closer to the Star Trek:TNG Communicator
5:09 am From 1987-1994, Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) brought an updated version of the classic show to our TV sets. Through my later years in university and first years out on my own, I tuned in each week to see the latest saga of Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Data, Worf, Deanna Troi, Geordi LaForge, the Crushers, and so many more. Set 100 years after the original Star Trek series…
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Canonical enshittification
This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system."
Next will be: "We block links to other sites because they might be malicious."
Then some kind of "pivot to video."
Probably not video (though who knows?) but some other feature that a major rival has, which Twitter will attempt to defraud its captive, commodified suppliers into financing an entry into.
In case you were wondering, yes, this is canonical enshittification. Lure in business customers (publishers) by offering surpluses (algorithmic recommendation and an ensuing traffic funnel). Lock them in (by capturing their audience and blocking interop and logged-out reading).
Then rug the publishers, clawing back all the surpluses you gave them and more, draining them of all available capital and any margins they have, until they die or bite the bullet and leave.
I would also give good odds on this leading to a revivification of the "Pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month for a platinum checkmark and we'll actually show what you post to the people who asked to see it."
That will be pitched as the answer to publishers' complaints about not wanting to turn themselves into commodity Twitter inputs. It will be priced at the same (or more) as the revenues publishers expect to lose from being commodified, making it a wash.
All of this seems to me to be an "unfair and deceptive business practice" under Sec 5 of the FTC Act.
If I sign up to follow you because I want to see what you post, and Twitter shadowbans your posts unless they are formatted to maximize your dependence on Twitter, they have deceived me, and are being unfair to you.
This is *very* analogous to the Net Neutrality debate, where a platform blocks or deprioritizes the things its users ask to see, based on whether the suppliers of those things are its competitors.
I've written about how an end-to-end principle for social media could be enforced under Sec 5 of the FTCA, how it would address this kind of sleazy practice, how it would be easy to administer, and wouldn't form a barrier to entry for new market entrants:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen
AVFTCN 025 - Mozilla, Mastodon and the Fediverse - and also Pebble
5:18 am When I climb up into the crow’s nest and look out at the horizon, one of the “lands of opportunity” I continually see is the world of “decentralized social media”, and in particular Mastodon and the other services that use the ActivityPub protocol and are broadly referred to as the “Fediverse”. Subscribe For context, I first joined Mastodon back in 2016 when Twitter was going through…
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