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Tom Scott is playing to win. The intro music made me wonder if the Wendover team watch c90dventures. At one point in the episode, Adam breaks out some Scatman. This is going to be a great season.
I was late to the party, but I played Luck Be a Landlord last year and really enjoyed it. It’s a deckbuilder where you build combos by manipulating the icons in your custom slot machine. I linked above to the Steam page, but it’s on just about every platform — I played through it on iOS. TrampolineTales, the indie developer behind Luck Be a Landlord, released a demo for Maze Mice as part of Steam Next Fest. I got around to giving the demo a shot today and I loved it! The game is a slightly weird mix of Pac-Man and Vampire Survivors where time only progresses when you move. You pilot a mouse around a cardboard maze and collect XP gems to earn new weapons and passive effects. You’re being chased by cats and ghosts — the cats follow your path exactly around the maze, and the ghosts ignore walls as they move directly toward you. The time progression system is fun, and I found myself just squeezing through some tight spots by tapping the arrow keys. There’s some light strategy required to herd your foes away from the gems you want to collect. You can check out the Steam page for Maze Mice and give the demo a go on macOS or Windows. If you liked Vampire Survivors, I think you’ll have a good time with this as well.
Today, Alec Watson posted a video titled “Algorithms are breaking how we think” on his YouTube channel, Technology Connections. The whole thing is excellent and very well argued. The main thrust is: people seem increasingly less mindful about the stuff they engage with. Watson argues that this is bad, and I agree. A little while ago I watched a video by Hank Green called “$4.5M to Spray Alcoholic Rats with Bobcat Urine”. Green has been banging this drum for a while. He hits some of the same notes as Watson, but from a different angle. This last month has been a lot, and I’ve withdrawn from news and social media quite a bit because of it. Part of this is because I’ve been very busy with work, but it’s also because I’ve felt overwhelmed. There are now a lot of bad-faith actors in positions of power. Part of their game plan is to spray a mass of obviously false, intellectually shallow, enraging nonsense into the world as quickly as possible. At a certain point the bullshit seeps in if you’re soaking in it. The ability to control over what you see next is powerful. I think it would be great if more people started being a bit more choosy about who they give that control to.
Yesterday, the Mastodon team announced it would be handing over control of its project to a new non-profit organization. The timing of this announcement is perfect given everything that’s happening with WordPress, Meta, and… well, everything else. To date, I think Eugen Rochko has done an excellent job stewarding Mastodon, but I also might have said the same thing about Matt Mullenweg a few years back. Why gamble when you can set up safeguards? Not to dwell on the WordPress, but I came across a shockingly prescient post from 2010. It lays out potential conflicts of interest between Automattic and the open source WordPress community. 1 Just about every warning from this post has come to pass in the last few months. It’s exactly these sorts of things that Mastodon looks to be trying to prevent with this new organizational structure. The re-org should also give Rochko more time to focus on product design, which sounds like a win in my book. At this point, I don’t think Mastodon will ever take over the world, but it’s a cozy place with stellar 3rd-party clients. It’s also where a large contingent of the Apple/tech cohort continue to hang out. Bluesky has really taken off, but Mastodon is still a big part of my social media diet. Yesterday also saw the launch of the Free Our Feeds campaign. I’m honestly not sure what to make of this, but I think John Gruber had a great take. The organization is requesting “$30M over three years” to launch “a new public interest foundation that puts Bluesky’s underlying technology on a pathway to become an open and healthy social media ecosystem that cannot be controlled by any single company or billionaire”. Only, that’s also Bluesky’s goal. I’ve written before about my hesitations around the protocol powering Bluesky, and I think that a competing “AppView” would be welcome — but it’s unclear if that’s what Free Our Feeds is going for. They mention wanting to build a second “relay”, though I don’t know if they’re talking about a Relay in the AT Protocol sense. Another canonical Relay would be a good start, but wouldn’t counter any issues if Bluesky started going off the rails. I wish the Free Our Feeds people all the best, but I hope they provide a more detailed plan soon. Until then, I think I’ll just continue to donating to Mastodon’s Patreon. Just watch out for the comment section. It really hasn’t aged well. ↩
More in technology
Guinness is one of those beers (specifically, a stout) that people take seriously and the Guinness brand has taken full advantage of that in their marketing. They even sell a glass designed specifically for enjoying their flagship creation, which has led to a trend that the company surely appreciates: “splitting the G.” But that’s difficult […] The post This Arduino device helps ‘split the G’ on a pint of Guinness appeared first on Arduino Blog.
AI is everywhere, but most websites are still managed manually by humans using content management systems like WordPress and Drupal. These systems provide means for tagging and categorizing content. But over time, these structures degrade. Without vigilance and maintenance, taxonomies become less useful and relevant over time. Users struggle to find stuff. Ambiguity creeps in. Search results become incomplete and unreliable. And as terms proliferate, the team struggles to maintain the site, making things worse. The site stops working as well as it could. Sales, engagement, and trust suffer. And the problem only gets worse over time. Eventually, the team embarks on a redesign. But hitting the reset button only fixes things for a while. Entropy is the nature of things. Systems tend toward disorder unless we invest in keeping them organized. But it’s hard: small teams have other priorities. They’re under pressure to publish quickly. Turnover is high. Not ideal conditions for consistent tagging. Many content teams don’t have governance processes for taxonomies. Folks create new terms on the fly, often without checking whether similar ones exist. But even when teams have the structures and processes needed to do it right, content and taxonomies themselves change over time as the org’s needs and contexts evolve. The result is taxonomy drift, the gradual misalignment of the system’s structures and content. It’s a classic “boiled frog” situation: since it happens slowly, teams don’t usually recognize it until symptoms emerge. By then, the problem is harder and more expensive to fix. Avoiding taxonomy drift calls for constant attention and manual tweaking, which can be overwhelming for resource-strapped teams. But there’s good news on the horizon: this is exactly the kind of gradual, large-scale, boring challenge where AIs can shine. I’ve worked on IA redesigns for content-heavy websites and have seen the effects of taxonomy drift firsthand. Often, one person is responsible for keeping the website organized, and they’re overwhelmed. After a redesign, they face three challenges: Implementing the new taxonomy on the older corpus. Learning to use the new taxonomy in their workflows. Adapting and evolving the taxonomy so it remains useful and consistent over time. AI is well-suited to tackling these challenges. LLMs excel at pattern matching and categorizing existing text at scale. Unlike humans, AIs don’t get overwhelmed or bored when categorizing thousands of items over and over again. And with predefined taxonomies, they’re not as prone to hallucinations. I’ve been experimenting with using AI to solve taxonomy drift, and the results are promising. I’m building a product to tackle this issue, and looking implement the approach in real-world scenarios. If you or someone you know is struggling to keep a content-heavy website organized, please get in touch.
A simple question that takes some effort to answer in a satisfying way.
Tim Hardwick reporting on Gurman’s reporting in Bloomberg, which I don’t have access to, so I’m quoting the MacRumors article: While specific details are scarce, it's supposedly the biggest update to iOS since iOS 7, and the biggest update to macOS since
