Here’s a fun memory on the Dreamcast’s 25th anniversary: I remember renting the Dreamcast the summer before its launch. I think this was a promotion by either Blockbuster or Hollywood video (RIP to both).

I got to take home the console and Sonic Adventure, but no memory cards were available. So, that first night I kept the console running with the TV off all night long so I could keep my progress after school the next day.

The rental period, whatever it was (probably not more than a few days or week) went by in a flash. I was left feeling super hyped for 9/9/99.

Can you imagine a console releasing like this today?

Happy 25th anniversary to the Dreamcast 🌀which launched on an iconic 9/9/99!

mastodon.world/@vingtroi…

Interviewing Epic Games Founder/CEO Tim Sweeney and Author/Entrepreneur Neal Stephenson — MatthewBall.co

I hadn’t been keeping up with Stephenson and was surprised to see him interviewed with Sweeney, so I learned a lot about their current involvement with the Metaverse, AI, and blockchains. When you write it out like this, sounds like Stephenson is jumping on every modern tech bandwagon. But, they seem to have a shared interest in helping to create a more open Metaverse platform and tooling, so maybe there will eventually be something of substance there.

Checking out the new Reeder App which has support for Micro.blog alongside RSS, Mastodon, and other feeds. Very interesting!

Via Jim Mitchell

Atlanta City Council bans data centers along Beltline - Rough Draft Atlanta

The Atlanta City Council voted Tuesday to ban data centers along and near the Atlanta Beltline and within a half-mile of MARTA stations.

Interesting and unexpected. I’m in favor of this. Data centers are an important part of our digital infrastructure, but there’s no good reason to locate them near the city center or areas of high population.

Is my blue your blue? I got hue 179 which is bluer than 84% of the population.

Via Alex

Hilton Head, South Carolina

Testing out Threads cross posting from Micro.blog!

Finished reading: Dune by Frank Herbert 📚

Switched my site’s footer over to the IndieWeb Webring 🕸️💍, check it out on doug.pub!

A quick roundup of a few posts from across my feeds about the last ever (🥺) XOXO Festival.

ArtLung | Post-XOXO Ramble on Websites and Freedom: Everybody Comes To Ricks

During XOXO, Andy Baio said “Every one of you should have a home on the web not controlled by a billionaire.” Cabel Sasser recommended that we all “put up the dang portfolio.” Molly White asked us to think back to “when was the first time you thought the web was magic?”

Molly White | XOXO and that feeling

I mentioned that I’ve been feeling this a lot over the last few years, even as I too am witnessing what many of us think about as “the web” rotting right in front of our eyes. Working outside of that rot pile, and perhaps motivated by it, there are so many people who are excited about the potential for a better web.

Grep Jason | XOXO

This conference festival experience was incredible. There were amazing talks and demonstrations from all over the Indieweb space. From the opening party and arcade to the tear-jerker of a closing speech, it was positive and pure emotional joy the whole way through.

Kottke | Thanks, XOXO

Thanks to Craig Mod for coming all the way from Japan to share the stage with me for a too-brief chat about membership programs. In the run-up to this, Craig and I had three extensive conversations about memberships, the open web, the value of writing your own software, Walt Disney’s corporate strategy chart, and many more things.

Reading these posts, I got a dose of second hand excitement about the open web and the energy to continue to build it into the thing we all want.

In Philly for the weekend. I really like how Halide rendered the lighting in this photo.

My favorite part of the Atlanta airport. Also, an excuse to try out Halide’s Process Zero.

Red Michigan sunset.

Slug on a shroom.

The New Internet | Tailscale Blog

You can’t build modern software without networking. But the Internet makes everything hard. Is it because networking has essential complexity?

Well, maybe. But maybe it’s only complex when you built it on top of the wrong assumptions, that result in the wrong problems, that you then have to paper over. That’s the Old Internet.

Interesting article describing how Tailscale sees the future of the Internet.

I’m a Tailscale user for my personal network and I really do like how it provides peer to peer connectivity. But, I don’t think the New Internet should only have one provider.

Here’s what the web looked like in 1994 via Kottke

Announcing the Ladybird Browser Initiative

Ladybird uses a brand new engine based on web standards, without borrowing any code from other browsers. It started as a humble HTML viewer for the SerenityOS hobby project, but since then it’s grown into a full cross-platform browser project supporting Linux, macOS, and other Unix-like systems.

Cool!! Was not expecting to see a new, from scratch, browser engine come into existence!

Manu Moreale writes about fighting AI bots:

I guess there are only two options left:

1. Accept the fact that some dickheads will do whatever they want because that’s just the world we live in
2. Make everything private and only allow actual human beings access to our content

And Molly White responds:

One advantage to working on freely-licensed projects for over a decade is that I was forced to grapple with this decision far before mass scraping for AI training.

In my personal view, option 1 is almost strictly better. Option 2 is never as simple as “only allow actual human beings access” because determining who’s a human is hard.

Molly’s perspective really resonates with me. I like the comparison to open source software, where a freely licensed project could always be used by companies in for-profit products. However, what’s missing from the open web is some standards around licensing with regard to AI models. Just because something is free to read, doesn’t mean it’s free to use in any way, including ingestion into an LLM.

I’m wondering, what if there was something like the GPL, but for text and images used as training data? This might work something like: it’s ok to use my content to train your model, as long as the model you produce is freely shared back with the public. It’s not ok to train on my content if your model remains private.

Of course, there are content producers who would not be ok with their data included in any sort of AI training, and that’s totally fine. It’s their work, they can decide how to license it. What’s missing is a standard way for them to declare this (and for LLM builders to respect that).

The other aspect of Molly’s post that resonated with me is trying to fight bots while letting all the humans view your content. In my last job, I worked for a few years on our “traffic” team, which was responsible for, among other things, some technology to block bots and other crawlers. We ran these systems this for things we found abusive (like DDoS’s or bots that put too much load on our servers), rather than trying to limit access to just humans. But, the fundamental problem is shared: trying to separate legit traffic from stuff that should be blocked. It’s really not easy to do this, especially if you consider some non-human traffic important. (Like Google’s crawler!) So, you’ll most likely want to err on the side of letting things through, if you aren’t absolutely sure it’s something you want to block. Which means that any AI crawler that isn’t playing nicely (respecting robots.txt, providing a clear user-agent, etc.) will probably slip through your defenses anyway.

JWZ | Mozilla’s Original Sin:

Some will tell you that Mozilla’s worst decision was to accept funding from Google, and that may have been the first domino, but I hold that implementing DRM is what doomed them, as it led to their culture of capitulation. It demonstrated that their decisions were the decisions of a company shipping products, not those of a non-profit devoted to preserving the open web.

Sad to see Mozilla’s decline. I can’t help but wonder, which browser is left carrying the torch of the open web?

I’ve been using Safari more, as I feel it’s most aligned with my interests and tastes these days. But I’m not sure Apple is the best steward of the open web, since this platform tends to compete with their App Store platform.

So, who’s left? Certainly not Google and Chrome.