Adventures with DALL-E 2 and beyond. — I got my beta invitation to DALL-E 2, which creates art based on text prompts. You’ve probably seen them floating around the internet by now: surrealist, AI-drawn illustrations in a variety of styles. Another tool, Craiyon (formerly DALL-E Mini), had been doing the rounds as a freely-available toy. It’s fun…

A fully-public education system would benefit everybody. — One of my most controversial opinions is that private schools should not be allowed. Quite how controversial is always a surprise to me: from my perspective it feels very straightforward. In a nutshell, my argument comes down to the following complementary ideas: Every child deserves to have an equal start…

Working at the intersection of news and open source. — I didn’t make a big announcement about it, but for the last few months I’ve been working as the CTO at The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom that reports on stories at the intersection of gender, politics, and policy. It was a necessary move for me: I needed stronger work/life balance…

How I rolled my own website to sell my home. — A little earlier this year, I mentioned that I was building an indieweb real estate website. Preparing a home for sale is more difficult than I’d accounted for. Digging our worldly possessions out of it, and then ensuring that the house was in the best shape it could be, took…

Some tech firms perpetuate modern-day slavery by using prison labor. — Juneteenth is not the commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation, when President Lincoln declared that all slaves in the Confederacy were free. (Some Union slaves weren’t free until the passage of the 13th Amendment.) Instead, it celebrates the event, two and a half years later, when emancipation finally reached Galveston, Texas.

It gets under your skin — I pour myself another cup of coffee: two scoops into the Aeropress, a gentle pour of boiling water, a quick stir. I leave the plastic stirrer in the tube like a tombstone while the water percolates through the grounds. Quiet mornings are hard to come by. I had a conversation…

There’s no world where nationalists get what they want. — While I don’t think the guy who runs racist factories is necessarily the right person to buy a prominent social media company in order to “save democracy”, he’s right about one thing: if Twitter is to truly be a public square, the algorithm needs to be open sourced. Over the…

Not everything has to be a business. — I don’t think the web could happen again. A public-minded developer, operating in a public service research institution, built an open knowledge-base with no eye on profit or even productizing it. Because of its openness and simplicity, it spread to other like-minded researchers, and then beyond. It wasn’t a product…

Using the Yerkes-Dodson Law to craft a better, calmer life. — It’s no secret that I’ve been pretty stressed out. Someone I trust said that my writing lately has given the impression of “a man on the edge”. I think of it slightly differently — there’s a lot going on and I feel like I’m dealing with it in good humor…