Viewing profile — anildash

He was a genuinely good person, and a genuinely honest voice, in an industry that had very few back when he was one of its pioneers, and has far, far fewer of those things today. A…

Shameless plug (as a board member): If you are interested in the book that this is from, a great way to pick it up is on the EFF website, where your purchase helps EFF keep up the …

It's technically legal to take photos of people through their windows, but we don't worry about anybody but big tech creeps actually doing it on a regular basis.

It's good to care about these choices. There are also lots of ethical reasons to leave GitHub, and this makes it easier for people to choose to leave on those grounds, too. Every t…

That’s literally what the phrase means. Can’t help if people don’t know what words mean. It was phrased fine, it wasn’t _read_ well.

Addressing the usual few complaints folks always bring up: * This is from the separate independent team that works on Thunderbird, not Firefox, so there isn't any resource contenti…

Adobe doesn't provide tools explicitly designed to enable the creation of child pornography — in fact their tools try to prevent its creation — and they don't profit from the sale …

Hanging your jersey from the rafters in the Plain Text Arena. A bullpen of weary cubicle-dwellers salutes you!

I _don't_ think it was just ego. I think it was a smart strategy because formal standardization tends to bring in complexity, and just letting folks go off on their own and documen…

I was texting with John the other night while working on this piece, and reminiscing about my initial quibbles about the format, and I think I had been frustrated by just about eve…

I actually _did_ want the underscores, but enough people thought it wasn't intentional that I just gave up and changed it to italics. lol?

It took me a long time to see the variations as a plus and not a minus; as a veteran of the RSS-vs-Atom wars, I was long an advocate of Technical Correctness(tm) like any good code…

This is a good call. I know it's been suggested multiple times over the years; I wonder what the rationale was for rejecting the format, or at least having the option to render a f…

I know it seems quite absurd! I actually just added in to this piece a photo I took of the CNN screen that (I believe) was the first mention of the word "blog" that they ever put o…

I actually had a digression into "worse is better", but the piece was already pushing 5,000 words, so I figured I probably was better of leaving out such a big topic. But you're ri…

I liked Textile a lot better initially, and it came out first. And interestingly, both launched at the same time on the platform (Movable Type) where Markdown debuted. So it really…

Prince changed his name because a corporation had refused to give him control over the work he created, and wouldn't let him release work under the name that he was born with. (Sor…

People love to smugly suggest this useless advice like there aren’t literal public services from governments around the world that are being tied to these platforms, let alone the …

I actually don't think this is true. I think a lot of folks who are (understandably) angry at the Big AI companies want people not to want AI in Firefox. Which is a slightly differ…

There's more than enough critical mass on other platforms that there's no excuse for them to still be on X, and it's a shame they stay there. Journalists would go to (for example) …

Also, to be clear, I’m mostly goofing about it CLIs, and — as I mentioned in the piece — I use one every day. But yes, there are four or five billion internet users who don’t and n…

Yeah, I think there are profound security issues, but I think many folks dug into the prompt injection nightmare scenarios with the first round of “AI browsers”, so I didn’t belabo…

We wrote it in the blood from one of Peter Thiel's blood bag boys.

Not sure how many national magazines you’ve written for, but it is in fact fairly standard practice to write first-person essays in the first person. You did make up a whole bunch …

I didn't flag it.