Tim Chambers

Iran and the Open Social Web

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:14:14 -0400

I can’t shake thinking that someone needs to build an app for phones, tablets, and laptops that is as easy to use as Signal, but under the hood uses a mix of #Reticulum, #DeltaChat, and an #OpenSocialWeb gateway.
It’s exactly what we need for this:

“Internet blackouts have become routine in Iran, imposed during anti-regime uprisings and now two wars. But this one—Iran’s fifth—was the world’s longest, according to Netblocks… some online connection is now restored, but for many Iranians, the partial reopening feels like the removal of a few bricks from the digital wall the Islamic Republic has built: Enough for Iranians to glimpse the outside world, but not enough for them to enter it, and the opening comes with the knowledge that the regime can brick the wall back up at any time.”

[www.theatlantic.com/internati…)

Open Source when it comes to AI needs to meet something....

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 11:50:17 -0400

Getting this right and crisp is super important. Open Source when it comes to #AI needs to meet something.

“he Vision sets out clear criteria for AI model openness: labeling models with proprietary licensing as ‘Weights Available’, while labeling models which are distributed under an Open Source license as ‘_Open Weights’…_Finally, the Vision adds criteria for “Open Source AI with Open Data” to describe AI systems where all assets are released free of charge under an Open Source license – including its models’ weights, deployment code, training code, and full training data.”

https://opensource.org/blog/open-source-initiative-helps-g7-deliver-vision-on-ai-openness

SpaceX: "Your 401K is the Exit Liquidty"

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:50:01 -0400

This is simply irresponsible theft. #SpaceX

“If the company lists on Nasdaq this June as expected, the stock could land in your retirement portfolio within weeks. And some of Wall Street’s loudest skeptics think that’s a problem. That’s thanks to Nasdaq’s new “Fast Entry” rule, approved March 30, which slashes the index inclusion waiting period from three months to just 15 trading days for any newly listed company whose market cap ranks in the top 40 of the Nasdaq-100…

George Noble, a former Fidelity fund manager with more than four decades on Wall Street, called the proposal ‘the most SHAMELESS structural manipulation of a major index I’ve ever seen.’

When lockup periods expire 90 to 180 days later, insiders holding the vast majority of shares can sell into artificially supported passive demand.

‘Your 401(k) is the exit liquidity,’ he wrote…

The concentration risk could get worse: former Tesla president Jon McNeill has said there is a better thatn 50% chance Musk merges Tesla with SpaceX after the IPO which would tie even more passive retirement money to a single Musk-controlled ticker.

No one’s arguing SpaceX shouldn’t go public. The argument is whether rushing the largest IPO in history into the most widely tracked indexes on Wall Street — before the market has had any real time to discover a fair price — is good for the millions of ordinary investors whose retirement savings will foot the bill.”

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-land-401-k-no-163000833.html

SpaceX: "Your 401K is the Exit Liquidty"

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:49:59 -0400

This is simply irresponsible theft. #SpaceX

George Noble, a former Fidelity fund manager with more than four decades on Wall Street, called the proposal ‘the most SHAMELESS structural manipulation of a major index I’ve ever seen.’

When lockup periods expire 90 to 180 days later, insiders holding the vast majority of shares can sell into artificially supported passive demand.

‘Your 401(k) is the exit liquidity,’ he wrote…

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/spacex-land-401-k-no-163000833.html

Build the Open Social Web From the Ground Up

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:08:24 -0400

Fully endorse this article from Newsmast. They are doing crucial work in this space and everyone that cares about the open social web should learn from their efforts.

Expecially like this:

“The web began with connections. Then it outsourced search to Google, and social to Meta, X and TikTok. We have a chance to start again and do something different. The work begins with that overused but still powerful word: community.

There’s a world of organisations, communities and inspiring people out there, and they all depend on platforms that don’t share their values. They’re wrestling with Big Tech dominance, funding gaps, and the disruption of AI. Everyone wants to move on from Big Social. But wanting to leave isn’t the same as being able to leap straight to decentralised technology.

So we need to start with tools that work for communities: safe hubs, local groups, news and content, calendars and events. Showcases for what a community makes and knows. Communities need their own platforms, with their own rules, to build their own safe spaces. And that’s just the beginning.”

https://www.blog-pat.ch/connected-community-spaces/

Build the Open Social Web From the Ground Up

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:08:22 -0400

Fully endorse this article from Newsmast. They are doing crucial work in this space and everyone that cares about the open social web should learn from their efforts.

Expecially like this:

https://www.blog-pat.ch/connected-community-spaces/

Build the Open Social Web From the Ground Up

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:08:16 -0400

Fully endorse this article from Newsmast. They are doing crucial work in this space and everyone that cares about the open social web should learn from their efforts.

Expecially like this:

https://www.blog-pat.ch/connected-community-spaces/

Build the Open Social Web From the Ground Up

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 21:08:14 -0400

Fully endorse this article from Newsmast. They are doing crucial work in this space and everyone that cares about the open social web should learn from their efforts.

Expecially like this:

https://www.blog-pat.ch/connected-community-spaces/

"The First One Is Always Free" Google Chromebooks and Students Sreen Time

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:27:32 -0400

As schools debate the merits of smartphones during school hours, the ABSOLUTELY should be rethinking how they manage the near monopooly of Chromebooks being offered to kids - massively subsidized by Google as an onramp to kid using Google Docs, YouTube, etc ad-infinimtum. Like any good dealer, the first one is always free. It’s the biggest onramp to new Google customers ever, and shows all the same risks as other screens.

“In Cambridge, where debate over the merits of screens has been especially pitched this year, school officials have batted around the idea of at least until 3rd grade.

Now a new study offers a glimpse, however limited, at the role screen time is playing in a child’s life during the hours when they’re at school, be it 6-year-olds tapping away on math games during class, or teenagers hacking their Chromebooks to text their friends.

It is just a small portion of the life of a child, who may spend hours a day engaging with a screen of one kind or another. It did not, for example, address the use of cellphones, a primary way many kids absorb screen-based content. Nor did it assess the district’s decision last year to ban the use of the phones during school days — and what impact that might be having on how kids use, or misuse, school-issued devices.

For some caregivers and district leaders, the results released this month are assuaging concerns that school is succumbing to mesmerizing tech at the expense of learning. For others, it most definitely is not.”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/28/metro/cambridge-screen-time-report/

"The First One Is Always Free" Google Chromebooks and Students Sreen Time

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:27:30 -0400

“In Cambridge, where debate over the merits of screens has been especially pitched this year, school officials have batted around the idea of at least until 3rd grade.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/28/metro/cambridge-screen-time-report/

"The First One Is Always Free" Google Chromebooks and Students Sreen Time

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:27:21 -0400

“In Cambridge, where debate over the merits of screens has been especially pitched this year, school officials have batted around the idea of at least until 3rd grade.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/28/metro/cambridge-screen-time-report/

"The First One Is Always Free" Google Chromebooks and Students Sreen Time

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 01:27:19 -0400

“In Cambridge, where debate over the merits of screens has been especially pitched this year, school officials have batted around the idea of at least until 3rd grade.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/05/28/metro/cambridge-screen-time-report/

Perpetually 5 to 10 Years Away....

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:50:24 -0400

I think “AGI” or Artifical General Intelligence will be like nuclear fusion, perpetually 5 to 10 years away.

“Ask someone in AI for their timeline, and they’ll tell you when they expect the arrival of AGI—artificial general intelligence—which is sometimes defined as AI technology that can match the abilities of humans at most tasks. As AI’s sophistication has scaled—thanks to faster computers, better algorithms, and more data—timelines have compressed. The leaders of major AI labs… have recently said they expect AGI within a few years.”

It doesn’t help that there is no consencus on the defintion of the term “AGI” itself:

“While benchmarking any intellectual ability is tough, doing so for AGI presents special challenges. That’s in part because people strongly disagree on its definition: Some define AGI by its performance on benchmarks, others by its internal workings, its economic impact, or vibes. So the first step toward measuring the intelligence of AI is agreeing on the general concept.”

https://spectrum.ieee.org/agi-benchmark

Perpetually 5 to 10 Years Away....

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:50:22 -0400

I think “AGI” or Artifical General Intelligence will be like nuclear fusion, perpetually 5 to 10 years away.

It doesn’t help that there is no consencus on the defintion of the term “AGI” itself:

https://spectrum.ieee.org/agi-benchmark

BlueSky, Standard.Site and Cross-Posting

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:17:57 -0400

I’m experimenting with this UX: Saw the post that BlueSky is now supporting longer form articles using Standard.site. Which I thinks is only good. But might it become “double plus good” if this same UX could make it so that posts that were say 500 characters, or more authored on one platform, could “POSSE” over to Bluesky in this new Standard.site mode and not just look like a link card, but as as a decent microblog post with the rest of the thread continuing in the full article.

Not sure it will work well from a user expectation level, but worth a try.

Here is an article about the new support for longer form articles on Bluesky: https://atproto.com/blog/standard-site-bluesky-timeline

BlueSky, Standard.Site and Cross-Posting

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:17:55 -0400

Not sure it will work well from a user expectation level, but worth a try.

Here is an article about the new support for longer form articles on Bluesky: https://atproto.com/blog/standard-site-bluesky-timeline

BlueSky, Standard.Site and Cross-Posting

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:17:45 -0400

Not sure it will work well from a user expectation level, but worth a try.

Here is an article about the new support for longer form articles on Bluesky: https://atproto.com/blog/standard-site-bluesky-timeline

BlueSky, Standard.Site and Cross-Posting

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:17:43 -0400

Not sure it will work well from a user expectation level, but worth a try.

Here is an article about the new support for longer form articles on Bluesky: https://atproto.com/blog/standard-site-bluesky-timeline

Indieweb Was Agentic Before It Was Cool

Sun, 31 May 2026 23:15:26 -0400

Hhypothesis: Developers who came out of the #indieweb communities are conceptually more comfortable with the #agenticweb ideas, as basically they have been doing it for years.

#POSSE, which is the beating heart of all things indieweb, isn’t LIKE agentic social and web publishing - it IS Agentic web and social publishing.

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

"Why The Filibuster Absolutely Has to Go..."

Sat, 30 May 2026 13:22:05 -0400

Josh isn’t wrong. The fillibuster was always a bad idea. Even more damaging in times like these.

“In today’s moment there’s an additional factor. If you want to reenforce and reform the federal government to make it more resistant to authoritarian assaults you very literally have to get rid of the filibuster. Otherwise, you’re limiting yourself to only the anti-authoritarian measures the authoritarians will buy into. I can’t accept that. And I can’t accept the idea that we simply do nothing. Getting rid of the filibuster follows necessarily from those two conclusions. On top of that, it shouldn’t exist in the first place. It’s bad constitutionally. It’s bad for Democrats. It’s bad for confidence in civic democracy.”

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/why-the-filibuster-absolutely-has-to-go

A Free Web

Sat, 30 May 2026 06:13:42 -0400

Like this Tim Berners-Lee quote in this article. It applies to the web, the social web and now #theagenticweb:

“Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users’ private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers’ mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising. This includes deliberately harmful content that leads to real-world violence, spreads misinformation, wreaks havoc on our psychological wellbeing and seeks to undermine social cohesion."

https://www.jonathanburdick.com/words/breaking-up-with-google

Gemini Spark is Now Live (For Some)

Fri, 29 May 2026 10:12:54 -0400

This is all all launching faster than I thought. And I tought it was going to be quick. #AgenticWeb

Solidarity and Subsidarity and the Open Social Web

Thu, 28 May 2026 18:34:22 -0400

A keen observation from Laurens, and the #OpenSocialWeb needs both of these:

“If you read that statement with the fediverse and the atmosphere in mind, this is almost a diagram of the two ways the project can fail. Subsidiarity without solidarity is fragmentation: a thousand instances each guarding their own place, with no shared obligation or collaboration, with no place to maintain the commons that is the network itself. This is exactly what we see in the fediverse right now: sure there are a lot of servers, but the collaboration between instances on things like moderation is virtually nonexistent. There is no form of federated diplomacy, or even a mental framework on how servers should interact, besides defederation when you get too annoyed with another server.

Solidarity without subsidiarity is the benevolent provider of infrastructure: one big network that takes care of everyone and quietly removes their agency.”

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr164-the-pope-on-defederation/

Sleep Targets

Wed, 27 May 2026 07:57:14 -0400

Of all the health habits I’ve been working on good sleep targets, which you’d think would be the easist, have been the trickiest for me to get right. At least not in consistant ways, long term.

And I know it is as important or more than eating well, getting right level of steps and workouts in. Maybe more as it impacts those other habits.

And there is this:

“New research, published in the journal Nature on May 13, does suggest that there’s a sleep “sweet spot” between 6.4 and 7.8 hours of sleep a night. People who hit that amount had better functioning of the immune system, brain and heart, as well as other organs, when measured on the molecular level.”

Still, work, life, stress, etc, plays a real number on me on this one.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2026/05/26/new-study-pinpoints-how-much-sleep-is-best-healthy-aging/

Google Zero

Tue, 26 May 2026 20:48:31 -0400

I had not seen this quote before. Whoa. #GoogleZero

“Conde Nast CEO Roger Lynch on TBPN saying they are assuming all search traffic will be zero from now on.”

https://www.theverge.com/google/929641/conde-nast-calls-google-zero