Watching Eurovision and I’m actually in Europe this time.

Spanish sunset in the garden

Someone must have said this already, but MCP is the new REST.

Oh this is not the future I want. Texas lawmakers propose bill HB 5510 that would make it illegal to share ANY information online about abortion medication or services. They want to silence websites, platforms, and regular people through lawsuits just for discussing healthcare options. This goes way beyond restricting care—they're trying to erase knowledge itself. A terrifying attack on both reproductive rights AND free speech.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Texas’s War on Abortion Is Now a War on Free Speech

UPDATE May 8, 2025: A committee substitute of SB 2880 passed the Texas Senate on April 30, 2025, with the provisions related to interactive compute...

Night time on the coast near Valencia.

Whenever I visit Germany or the Nordic countries i’m always surprised at that the way everybody just assumes i speak the language. It’s kind of nice, but a little weird too. My mom’s family immigrated to the US in the 1880’s but only switched to speaking English at home because of WWII. For obvious reasons of not being down with the politics of Germany at the time. After the war, they didn’t go back to speaking German, except for songs and keeping cultural traditions. It’s really interesting to be in a place where your ancestors come from. A few years ago I went to the tiny village of Plath, a couple hours north of Berlin. As far as we know that’s where my family came from. It’s a very small place, a couple hundred houses, a church, a bunch of farms, and no shops or restaurants of any kind. Honestly it didn’t look like any buildings had been built in the last 150 years. Now when I’m in Germany, like I find myself today, I just feel kind of weird and incompetent when i have to explain that i don’t speak german to everybody I interact with. A few times today, getting through the airport in Munich, they’ve just ignored my protestations that I don’t speak German and went ahead trying to tell me something in German anyway. Maybe they think i’m acting the way German’s claim they don’t speak good english but then proceed to be entirely fluent. Germany isn’t very helpful a language to speak in New Zealand, I’m going to try Te Reo first, but maybe someday i’ll spend more time with focus in a german speaking country and try and learn.

Every time i do a talk for the last year i’ve looked the state of AI tools for making presentations. I had been using beautiful.ai, it’s good, but frustrating too. For my next talk i figured i’d try again, and gamma.app came on my radar. It’s really impressive. I recommend folks check it out.

Charlando sobre Nostr y el futuro del internet.

I have no inside knowledge and am just learning about the square handleheld product right now, but if I were to try and build a competitive alternative to iOS / Android for mobile devices this feels like the right way to do it. Bottom up, with a speciality product which has value for business customers. Eventually you grow to a more consumer market slowly without needing to boil the ocean. My guess is that it’s some fork of Android with a customized OS and mini-AppStore for apps from Block. In order to compete against Google you’d need services and apps everyone wants, which is a hell of a moat. The solution that Chinese companies have for that is their consumers want different apps because western apps don’t work in china. I don’t know how you’d do it in the west. Maybe play off Europeans desire to not be dependent on American tech, maybe support Android / flutter / KMM apps? Maybe new agents will unseat the entire legacy SaaS products will dry up the Google/Apple moat. We know how much the duopoly in mobile is a fundamental threat to free speech and an open internet. Doing something about it is a lot harder. Big efforts have failed so many times, an incremental strategy might just work. https://squareup.com/us/en/hardware/handheld

Starting the long trek towards the Oslo Freedom Forum.

There’s a Bluesky related project to make a foursquare competitor using their data. We could totally do this faster with nostr.

ATProtocol Dev

Location Data on AT Protocol, the second Community Fund project

Announcing the second project under the AT Protocol Community Fund. We're bringing location data to ATProto, with initial funding by Peter Wang's S...

I’m not sure when this happened, but https://nostr.watch/ got updated and is much better now.

Wellington on a good day.

I’m so glad we’ve got a weekly recap of nostr coming out. @Nomishka View quoted note →

The last couple days we had an intense storm in Wellington with Tropical Storm level winds and now the sun has come out and I’m enjoying this granola along with a flight of coffee.

I like Claude code a lot but think of its big limitations is the way it only works with Claude sonnet 3.7. I’m really enjoying all the emerging agentic coding explosion. View quoted note →

Did Trump ask Canadians to write in his name when they vote today?! https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114415618596069518

Bluesky’s added user verification in a way that’s not entirely bad. Different entities can become verifiers. So if you run a company you can verify your own employees. Bluesky PBC also will run a verifier. I think this isn’t a terrible solution to preventing impersonation.

Bluesky

A New Form of Verification on Bluesky - Bluesky

We’re introducing a new layer of verification — a user-friendly, easily recognizable badge. Additionally, independent organizations can verify ...