November 2022

It’s a weird week. Twitter is (possibly) entering a slow death march and much of my community is reluctantly slouching over to Mastodon. I’ve started cross-posting there as well: indieweb.social/@maggie . The Elon-escapades only drive home how important it is to own and control the platform you’re publishing to. Which means writing on your own website first and cross-posting to external platforms. The IndieWeb community has a catchy acronym for this: POSSE . Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

I still don’t have a Twitter-like stream setup on this site, but I’m working on it. Tools like WebMentions and Bridgy are going to do a lot of the heavy lifting. I’m having trouble finding many tutorials or guides on how to do it though – perhaps another case of writing the piece you want to read.

I’ve been working at Ought since late August. The London ↔ SF time difference is a bit crap, but I can’t say enough good things about my fellow Oughters 🦦. It’s rare and special to work alongside such thoughtful and ambitious people. We’re in the middle of designing and prototyping some wildly different interfaces for Elicit , our AI research assistant and Ought’s main product. Users say they love the current version, but we know it could be so much better.

In other news, I bought a cheap, used laser printer and it’s drastically improved my reading experience for long articles and PDFs. Can’t recommend it enough. There are plenty going for £30-40 on eBay and you’ll finally read all those 5000-word blog posts you have bookmarked.

I’ve finally gotten back into a good writing cadence. I recently published Programming Portals and Command K Bars . Now I’m slowly chipping away at Tools for Thought as Cultural Practices, Not Computational Objects . I’ve been writing it forever, but that’s kind of the point of gardening in public. You post up loose skeletons of ideas and flesh them out over time. Nothing forces you to write like knowing people are reading your half-baked version.