Enlightened employers will work on culture instead — Expensify’s experiment to use craft coffees and a free cocktail bar to lure employees back to the office failed spectacularly: If the best office in the entire planet can’t compete with the local coffee shop, the tightly-closed Pandora’s box of “work from anywhere” has burst open, and will never be…

AI has the potential to run our lives. We shouldn’t let it. — There are two ways to use GPS navigation in a car: The first is to use the directions as gospel. The system has found the right path for you to take; you need to follow them if you’re going to get to your destination. The second is as a kind…

An open source rubric for technology evaluation I’ve written and open sourced a rubric for assessing new technologies as part of your organization. It’s written for use in non-technical organizations in particular, but it might be useful everywhere. …

Who’s really making money from the AI boom? — Claire Anderson (hi Claire!) asked me to break down the economics of AI. How is it going to make money, and for whom? In this post I’m not going to talk too much about how the technology works, and the claims of its vendors vs the actual limitations of the…

Let’s support tightly-focused, independent newsrooms. — Doc Searls writes about what he calls wide news: Local and regional papers covered politics, government, crises, disasters, sports, fashion, travel, business, religion, births, deaths, schools, and happenings of all kinds. They had reporters assigned across all their sections. No other medium could go as wide. Doc’s argument is that…

Open source licenses fall short of modern needs. — Dave Winer poses: If you think of yourself as an “open source developer” please ask yourself this question. Are you as committed to freedom for people who use your software as you are to freedom for developers? Not just freedom to modify the source code, but freedom to do anything…

Burning out personally feels a lot like burning out professionally. — Lately I’ve found myself feeling profoundly homesick. It’s come and gone for the twelve years I’ve lived in the US full-time, but this week I’ve been feeling it pretty much as intensely as I ever have. But perhaps homesickness isn’t quite the right word. If you pushed me, I’d have…

A story about terrible software and bad local government contracts — It turns out that Cheltenham Township, the municipality where I live across the northern Philadelphia border, incurs an extra earned income tax on top of the state and federal taxes that I’m used to paying. This would have been fine if I’d had any idea that such a tax existed…

Take that, web notifications! — Website notifications are a blight. I never want a website to be able to notify me about updates; these messages are interruptive, and like the vast majority of app notifications, they tend to be part of some marketing team’s growth strategy rather than a conduit to actually useful information. (Product…