Why I Am (Still) a Liberal (For Now): ‘Thin’ vs ‘thick’ liberalism, and the Cruelty Culture of 2022-era Twitter.

Yelling at clouds: ‘The Cloud’ might feel like magic but we must remember that it has a real material footprint and consequent impact.

Hundreds of ballots possibly burned after Vancouver ballot box arson: FBI investigating: Doesn’t bode well for next week’s US election.

Videos Reveal Trump Adviser’s “Shadow” Plan for Second Administration: Gone are the days when the craziest of the American political right, Russell Vought in this case, felt the need to keep their most abhorrent views hidden.

RSS and Instapaper as cup and saucer: I appreciate anyone’s efforts to make me feel OK about the amount on unread articles I saved.

The AI-nuclear weapons analogy, explained : Vox catalogues some similarities and differences between the two technologies.

The Doc Web: A deep dive into the dynamics of publishing to the web via Google Docs.

A woman, blogging: this is a political act: Blogging can be empowering, especially for people who otherwise might not have a voice - but it’s not without risk.

The AI-Generated Product Reviews Choking the Internet Are Now Illegal: The FTC makes certain types of fake reviews illegal, whether human or robots wrote them, in the US.

Smarter than ‘Ctrl+F’: Linking Directly to Web Page Content: I didn’t realise URLs already let you link to and highlight any specific piece of text on a webpage.

Ban LLMs Using First-Person Pronouns: Maybe we shouldn’t allow AI chatbots to refer to themselves as ‘I’.

Before you buy a domain name, first check to see if it’s haunted: Consider your URL haunted ‘when something in its past gives it a poor reputation among search engines’.

Needles in Project 2025’s Haystack: Some of the more disturbing phrases concealed within the ‘most soporific bureaucratic gobbledygook imaginable’ main body of the report.

Elon Musk has been in regular contact with Putin for two years, says report: Beginning to worry that one of the worst effects of a Trump victory might be Musk getting ‘official’ political power.

You’ve Already Been Living The Project 2025 Test Drive: Public school closures, library book bans and ending of child labor laws have already worked their way into the US.

Project 2025: The Wikipedia summary of a set of legislative ideas from The Heritage Foundation, most of which would ideally never see the light of day.

It turns out we should have taken Trump literally as well as seriously: Back in 2016 Vox claimed that had been a mistake to take Trump “seriously but not literally”.

Believe Him: The New York Times tells us to believe Trump when he says what he is going to do if he became president again.

The United States of Abortion Mazes: Access to abortion in each US state visualised as an interactive maze.

Facts Are Important: Abortion Is Healthcare: The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists on abortion as being a type of healthcare.

Abortion rights: Amnesty International on access to abortion being a human right.

10 Things to Know About Abortion Access Since the Dobbs Decision: Some of the impacts of the overturning of Roe vs Wade in the US.

Pluralistic: The housing crisis considered as an income crisis: ‘The American rich are the Spiders Georg of house prices.’

MrBeast Goes to Washington: Elon Musk failed to recruit MrBeast, so now he’s trying to be him.

The web and I: Ben Werdmuller on growing up during the time when the web-as-we-know it - with its ‘spirit of magic and possibility’ - was being born.