"it would be nice to see folks in the tech industry stop chasing their tails, desperately finding ways to apply new technologies to everything when sometimes the innovation we need is a little less technology and a little more of a personal touch."

Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I have written a slightly unhinged newsletter about forms buttondown.com/justenoughin...

Journalists - what do you really care about? We’re running a free online 2-hour workshop for journalists on 11/06 exploring exactly that; starting with your own values, before looking at how values shape coverage. Register here: www.tickettailor.com/events/commo...

Register here – What do you actually care about? A workshop for UK journalists about values – Zoom

What do you actually care about? A workshop for UK journalists about values – Zoom, Thu 11 Jun 2026 - Research consistently shows that most people value things like equality, community and connection....

tickettailor.com

Journalists: every choice you make about what to cover, how to frame it and whose voice to centre shapes what seems normal, possible or impossible in our culture. Rarely are those choices made consciously. A practical toolkit to help you understand how: valuesawarejournalism.org

fresh off the press from yours truly: oecs.mit.edu/pub/b61joemo... I offer an overview of algorithmic bias. I trace its historical roots, examine canonical scholarship and notable real-world incidents, and explore how algorithmic bias emerged as a field of study 1/

Algorithmic Bias

oecs.mit.edu

"The problem is not the tool; it is the mystique that has grown around it. Mistaking mirrors for windows is not a technological error so much as an old human one." www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Opinion | The real secret to palm reading? These ‘companions’ know it.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t understand humans. It reflects them back to themselves.

washingtonpost.com

Two new facts stand out: 1. 85% of hallucinated citations in preprints are also in the subsequent journal version (thanks, peer review!) 2. Fake cites more likely to use the names of (male) scholars who are already highly cited, creating a fake-citation Matthew effect. arxiv.org/abs/2605.07723

LLM hallucinations in the wild: Large-scale evidence from non-existent citations

Large language models (LLMs) are known to generate plausible but false information across a wide range of contexts, yet the real-world magnitude and consequences of this hallucination problem remain p...

arxiv.org

the section on high-trust micro-communities is the opportunity/hope, and feels like #atproto / #atmosphere is well-positioned to provide the infrastructure...

Eli Pariser@eli.bsky.social · 3mo ago

15 years ago, I wrote a book called The Filter Bubble, warning that algorithmic personalization was going to fracture our shared reality. I’m sharing new research because we are about to do this again, but on a far bigger and faster scale. AI is coming for the info environment, and fast.

From Social Networks to Sensemaking Networks @ronentk.me unpacks what he and @cosmik.network are up to... www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ew0C...

Going to host a Tech Talk again! I asked @trezy.codes to talk about HappyView @happyview.dev happyview.dev With the release of v2, it's an all-in-one appview - single binary, OAuth, built in backfill & indexing. Discord devchat stage for live questions + streamplace stream, May 28th, 5pm UTC

Tech Talks: HappyView the all-in-one appview

Trezy @trezy.codes is going to give us a tech talk about HappyView v2, released at the end of April https://trezy.com/blog/releasing-happyview-2-into-the-wild - hosted by @bmann.ca. You can find out ...

atmo.rsvp

Our April updates are out! (Sorry we're a bit late - in a busy stretch here) On launching @semble.so connections, and lots of community contributions 🫶 "Sense is being made" -- @joebasser.com

Cosmik Updates: April 2026

Connections feature launched; "Sense is being made"

blog.cosmik.network

Beautiful beautiful beautiful essay by @terrygodier.com: www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-i... Wonderful articulation of layering, wonderfully presented.

The Boring Internet

The internet you grew up on isn't dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is. A visual essay about what actually persists.

terrygodier.com

ATProto community, we're getting very close to VOD general availability! I've posted some draft versions of the following atproto lexicons: `place.stream.video` `place.stream.media.track` `place.stream.media.origin` Please roast my lexicons! What's good, what's bad, what makes you mad? Speak now!

super insightful reflections and lessons learnt about how to approach #localfirst development...definitely worth a read! www.smashingmagazine.com/2026/05/arch...

The Architecture Of Local-First Web Development — Smashing Magazine

An honest perspective on building local-first web apps in 2026, written for developers who’ve been doing this long enough to be skeptical of silver bullets.

smashingmagazine.com

"the technology’s main challenge is buy-in from institutions, governments, and corporations, because they would need to issue and recognize verified credentials. Without their participation, the system is limited to peer-to-peer or experimental use." news.harvard.edu/gazette/stor...

Worried about how online firms use data they get from you? — Harvard Gazette

Berkman Klein researchers unveil new tool to verify identity, let users limit information they share, where it is stored.

news.harvard.edu

Rewilding the Web will take place @schoolofppls.bsky.social on the 28/29th May! With @philosodave.bsky.social, @anil.recoil.org + Jon Crowcroft, Elena Rovenskaya, Orit Halpern, @georgien.bsky.social, @r-emrys.bsky.social, @blaine.bsky.social + others Register: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/rewilding-...

How do we guide and support intuitions for what the #Atmosphere is and how to participate...? 🤔

New on ATStore... related apps by shared lexicons 🎉 For all apps we now show other apps that use the same lexicons. Already using one app? Find others that work with the same data. Your data is portable. Now discovering where it's portable to is easy. Like @disperse.social works with:

Hey y'all, I'm looking for some work to bridge the gap while I continue working on @cartridge.dev and @happyview.dev. If you have contract work for #atproto projects (planning, code, architecture), I'd be delighted to help. DM me with details. #atproto #OpenToWork #LookingForWork

For my first blog post, I've written some thoughts on open-source, StratosFund, and financial sustainability paths for Atproto. I hope it gets some interesting conversations started. #offprint https://the-better-future.offprint.app/a/3mkommpvxr523-a-better-open-source-future

Ideas on a Financially Sustainable Atproto | Alex | Offprint

Explore a new funding model for Atproto that moves beyond grants and VC. Discover how StratosFund enables sustainable, community-driven open-source development.

the-better-future.offprint.app

Cool analytics on trending @semble.so collections from @uppy-hacker.bsky.social ! Lots of thoughtful curation is happening, and it's exciting to see how new analytics interfaces help show meaningful activity that might otherwise get lost.

"'Slop' is the word of the year" Indeed...

Petter Törnberg@pettertornberg.com · 3mo ago

Social media is no longer social. Most of it is passive viewing of videos and pictures from people we've never met. But we're still studying social media like it's 2010. We've entered the post-social media era — and research needs to catch up. osf.io/preprints/so... preprint w/ Richard Rogers

"(AI) extraction is just one dimension of the problem. The other significant problem is the way that monopolistic AI systems flatten and colonise everything, from culture and languages to economies."

Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 4mo ago

Anyway, it's about AI, the importance of plural knowledge infrastructures, the problems of cognitive offloading, and why it's really good to having ideas. If you need an incentive to click through, there's also a gratuitous picture of an elephant buttondown.com/justenoughin...

Taking slow media to a new level, I've just sent a new edition of my newsletter, only 364 days since the last one buttondown.com/justenoughin...

"I've got an idea!" On pluralism and resisting deskilling

A ramble around plural knowledges, data and AI, inspired by the wisdom from friends and colleagues in Nairobi and watching The Pitt. Plus! a random picture of an elephant

buttondown.com

just sharing a sensemaking artefact from a few weeks ago...will be interesting to compare and contrast with the discussions and narratives emerging from @atmosphereconf.org these past few days. #atproto #AtmosphereConf

it's working! (well, locally for now, but hey....) #PermissionedData #atproto

catching the live stream of @blaine.bsky.social discussing cheese, living systems and ecologies was an unexpected delightful start to my day and conclusion to the day @atmosphereconf.org #AtmosphereConf

The second installment of the ATmospheric Weather Report is here. ☀️ at-news.leaflet.pub/3mgzuvb2ah22z

Atmospheric Weather Report #2 - at://news

March 8-13 2026

at-news.leaflet.pub

this week's news is about how @tangled.org @npmx.dev and @alt.store are using open social networking protocols to build, distribute, and discover software, and how the most important part is not the code but the community building part connectedplaces.online/reports/fr15...

FR#157 – Social Software Distribution

Open social protocols are expanding beyond social media into the infrastructure developers use to build, distribute, and discover software. Three recent launches show what that looks like in practice.

connectedplaces.online

"The tyranny of the quantifiable" ....probably the most eloquently titled collection I've come across yet on @semble.so ! (and wasn't the least bit surprised to learn the phrase was sourced from a Rebecca Solnit article)