Ron Bronson
@ronbronson.com
Studying social infrastructure and the mechanics of public life. | ronbronson.dev Asst. Prof. of Practice in Urban Tech at UMich. Digital Statecraft @ gpo.delivery. Prev: 18F.gov, PDX Digital Corps
i'm sure i've said this before but i had a friend in the early 00s who said something like "you know how some kid at recess would make an insane claim like the teenage mutant ninja turtles are really the new kids on the block? and you just kinda had to believe him? now it's so easy to call bullshit"
Super rad to finally make it to @pdx.atproto.camp meetup. Great energy, welcoming space & some cool ideas flowing about. Very neat.
I don't really have many group chats, I have a lot of one-off convos, but have participated in bespoke side chats in different tools they just tend to center around a few consistent themes. Noisier times than the Web 2.0 shift, people are exhausted in ways they weren't before it's not 2006 anymore
brendan@schlage.town · yesterdayOverlapping context-specific communities, on a whole spectrum of public commons to cozy private spaces, all interoperable in a global network — yeahhhh we've got a big opportunity here!
sherwood hs legend Adley Rutschman heading to Boston in an inter-division trade. I take back what I said about none of the GMs these days have any steel, that's an old school baseball trade right there. Overpay but you have to dealing a guy to a division rival
Yeah lots of silly projects or tall tasks that were too expensive or too time consuming got cheaper and easiet than ever, but a lot of orgs don't have good instincts on how to leverage the surplus capacity
mtsw@mtsw.bsky.social · 3d agoA weird downstream effect of LLMs I predict will start having an impact soon is that they are very helpful for fixing a lot of stuff that would not have been worth fixing when information about how to fix them was harder to get.
Skubal to the Dodgers says more about the other GMs in the league than it does about LA.
Anyway, since I’m always annoying my own brain by trying to come up with clearer and more specific wording for my own opinions: I reject the notion that LLMs can be deployed “responsibly” at scale and believe that anybody claiming otherwise is fooling themselves, conning you, or possibly both
The sensation of sharing trip pics with a friend not on social media almost felt like sharing physical pics in a photo album.
Moda Center almost completely sold out tonight because of the indiana Fever in town. Top 5 in attendance their first year it's an expansion boost, but all the teams here in women's league do that. Thorns still #2 in NWSL attendance too and the honeymoon has long been over.
There’s nothing wrong with making hobby prototype projects, but it can be informative to understand what the actual needs are in a space as determined by the actual customers (and figure out what the people already serving the customers have tried or not) before investing a bunch of time in building
All the commentary from Mayo's improbable GAA All-Ireland football win over the weekend were great even if you never watched gaelic football or hurling at 2am on a color tv way back when ESPN was still good.
Gavan Reilly@gavreilly.com · last wk.“The famine is over! The curse be damned!! Hit the nuclear button! Mayo have won the All-Ireland!!” An all-time great sports commentary moment from Stephen Grealis and Martin McHugh on Mayo’s Midwest Radio. #gaa
“Hansard’s music was about embracing wonder alongside restlessness, about letting in the light alongside the dark, about trying to sort out the beauty & pain that comes with it all being too much to take.” Remembering Glen Hansard 🖤 www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...
Glen Hansard's Greatest Subject Was Life Itself
Our tribute to Glen Hansard, the Irish singer-songwriter who was so much more than the guy from 'Once' and the Swell Season
rollingstone.com
Tumblr discovery got people book deals. Twitter made people famous. Tiktok influences the charts. MySpace intro'd us to our favorite bands. Vine! Clubhouse! platforms made some of the audience able to monetize for a bit privacy, ownership are compelling but not at scale. \hottake
Ron Bronson@ronbronson.com · 7d agoThe AT revolution is super cool, but it's not reaching normal people. The generation that played in web 2.0 have aged out of tinkering. It's noisier now too, but there's an even bigger part people are missing....
People want to login and use a thing and have it feel immersive and easy. They don't have the bandwidth to care about the stack, but if people can't find them passively it can feel like too much friction (costs be damned)
Eli Mallon@iame.li · last wk.There's this verb "distribution" used in the context of sentences like "Substack solved distribution" and I don't get it. What does it mean?
I would like to bring more of the fruits of the AT Protocol to the people who don't care about protocols, which is most people. www.wrecka.ge/launching-a-...
Launching a Cloud Atlas
The right questions to arrive with—and the right structure for what comes out of the interviews—are not completely obvious. So I’ve been spending some time thinking about clouds.
wrecka.ge
just saw that "wolf like me" is in karafun and it never occurred to me to do that as a karaoke song because like...who could conjure tunde like that but damn. also sidenote, it's cool they had a run as "greatest rock band in the world" even for a little while www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlHr...
TV On The Radio - Wolf Like Me (Live on Letterman)
YouTube video by TVOnTheRadioVEVO
youtube.com
Going to add this story to my Public Mechanics syllabus for the Fall.
Willamette Week@wweek.com · last wk.The Brooklyn Park water slide in Southeast Portland—used by youthful summer day campers for nearly 50 years—was shut down after coming to the attention of Portland Parks and Recreation.
The construction of the modern tech worker as someone who is fundamentally disconnected from the essential nature of their own work is a monstrous achievement
missing all the pre-substack proliferation of good writing online. talking about this era feels like talking about going to the ponderosa in the 80s, like a fever dream.
Mar Hicks@histoftech.bsky.social · last wk.Yes. Once again thinking about Kate Losse’s work: modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-m...
fandom has run wild, and it's left everyone softer than a foster freeze cone
Saeed Jones@theferocity.bsky.social · last wk.I’ve been thinking a lot about how we’re losing recipes re: criticism. Even reviews of Morrison’s novels in the 90s that were ultimately positive would include barbs that I think would shock people today. A lot going on there, but popular criticism used to be just as tough as Emily’s review.
interesting to notice the similiarties between GAA gaelic football and Aussie rules. I know about international rules football, but I just hadn't seen enough gaelic football closely
today in AI, my mom said apparently the doctors office used an AI agent to do a phone intake the other day. She called them because she didn't feel comfortable giving it info without knowing if it was a scam and the ppl were like "yeah, the agent will assess whether you should be seen by a person."
If netball and basketball can exist in Commonwealth countries, the US can get over this weird insistence that girls can't play baseball. It's always driven me crazy. www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...
Women’s Pro Baseball Has to Outgrow Softball’s Shadow
The Women’s Professional Baseball League is almost ready to play ball. Last week, it unveiled the names of its inaugural franchises, and first pitch is Aug. 1. That’s the easy part.
bloomberg.com
"LLMs mean you don't have to know things, you can just do things" assumes a clean separation that probably doesn't exist. You know what you want to do in part because of what you know / understand
