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The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen again - Westenberg

2026-04-27T22:38:38.000Z

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In February 1637, a single tulip bulb in Haarlem sold for 5,200 guilders - the price of a canal house on the Keizersgracht // ten times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman. The bulb was a Semper Augustus, streaked white and flame-red, and the buyer never saw it. He bought a piece of paper representing a future flower, and within 3 weeks, the market collapsed. Men who had mortgaged their workshops to buy futures on something they would never hold went home to explain it to their families. Within a century, the Dutch and English were back, inside the South Sea Company, whose directors had printed prospectuses for an undertaking they refused to describe. Within two centuries, French investors were holding the worthless scrip of John Law's Mississippi Scheme, which had promised them a share of Louisiana gold that didn't exist. By the 1840s it was railway shares, with one in ten English investors buying into lines that were never built. By the 1920s it was radio stocks. By the late 1990s it was dot-com. By 2008 it was tranched American mortgages, rated AAA by people paid by the banks that issued them. By 2021 it was JPEGs of monkeys. By 2026, it was AI stocks.

Every one of these episodes was preceded by someone writing a book about how the last one could never happen again, and every single one ended with the same sentence murmured like a prayer on the way up:

This time is different.

…But it never is.

Is it?

The claim I want to make…

Humans do near-identical things, over and over again, across history. And we do it because our cognitive equipment hasn't changed - the brain running a 21st-century civilization is a Paleolithic brain, shaped by 200,000 years on the savannah and another 10,000 years in small agricultural settlements, and it fears the same things our ancestors feared, and it wants the same things they wanted, and it fails in the same ways.

The loop itself is, in fact, our operating system.

Everything else, the political systems, the technologies, the languages, the ideologies, is the application layer. Applications change, but the operating system doesn't. When an application throws the same error message in Rome, in Berlin in 1933, in Phnom Penh in 1975, and on a Saturday afternoon in a suburban American town in 2024, the error sits in the kernel - and the kernel is not getting patched.

The bubble

The financial bubble (and by that I mean every financial bubble) is the cleanest version of the loop there is. Prices rise, greed overrides caution, debt piles on debt, and the floor gives way. Within ten years the same people, or their children, do it again. And again. And again.

Every bubble is catalogued and studied before the next one begins. Charles Mackay wrote Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds in 1841. The book became a bestseller among the same London financiers who would soon be pouring money into Latin American mining schemes that required them to invest in countries they couldn't find on a map. In 1929, Irving Fisher, one of the most published economists in America, declared that stocks had reached a permanently high plateau - and the crash began nine days later. In 2005, Alan Greenspan testified to Congress that American housing prices reflected local conditions and there was no nationwide bubble. In 2008, there was. The brain has a failure mode around probabilistic risk: it discounts low-probability catastrophic outcomes in favor of high-probability mild gains, it reads social consensus as information, and its dopamine circuit rewards the anticipation of gain more reliably than the gain itself.

The hunt feels better than the meal.

Humans pretty reliably miscalculate risk at every step of the process, but somehow the profession of finance is built on the assumption that markets aggregate these miscalculations into wisdom. They don't. They aggregate them into stampedes, and herd cognition does the rest. When everyone around you is buying, the cost of not buying is financial + social. You miss the gain, and your neighbor gets rich, and your brother-in-law mentions it at dinner. The brain treats this as a threat to status, and status, in primate terms, is survival. Solomon Asch's conformity experiments in 1951 showed that ordinary people will deny the evidence of their own eyes rather than disagree with a confident group, and bubbles are Asch experiments with money on the line.

Every bubble ends with the same discovery, which is that the asset was never worth what it traded for; every bubble starts, though, from the matching belief that this time, it is.

The strongman

The strongman arrives on schedule, and the preconditions are consistent. A frightened middle class + institutions that have stopped delivering + an establishment that has lost the trust of the people it governs. Put those pieces in a room together and within a decade someone walks in who promises to cut through all of it. Caesar in 49 BCE. Napoleon in 1799. Mussolini in 1922. Hitler in 1933. Perón in 1946. A catalogue since then that hardly needs naming. The strongman is a phenotype; he's what the interaction between primate dominance hierarchies and political instability produces. Chimpanzee troops have alpha males, and human societies have them too. Under stable conditions, the alpha position is distributed across institutions, softened by law, and rotated by elections. Under unstable conditions, the position re-concentrates around a single body. Frans de Waal watched the same sequence play out among captive chimpanzees at Arnhem; Hannah Arendt watched it play out among human beings in the twentieth century. The mechanics were the same. The stakes differed only in body count.

Apparently, the human brain under stress doesn't want deliberation; it wants authority. Uncertainty burns more energy than bad news, and so the prefrontal cortex tries to resolve ambiguity, and when it fails, it hands control to older circuits that prefer a simple answer to the right answer - any right answer. MRI studies of people presented with ambiguous political images show amygdala activation patterns close to indistinguishable from fear responses; the feeling of not knowing whether your world is safe is, in brain-chemistry terms, very close to the feeling of being in danger.

And, sooner or later, there will always someone willing to supply the simple answer. The man who says he alone can fix it believes it, because the crowd that believes it first has already told him so; what his opponents call a lie, he experiences as a revelation. The feedback loop between a frightened population and a would-be strongman runs on the same neurology in both directions: he needs them as much as they need him, and they produce each other.

The cycle tends to run thirty years from collapse to collapse. Long enough for the generation that lived through the last strongman to die, and short enough that their grandchildren are available // ready // willing to repeat the experiment.

The scapegoat

When a society is in pain, it finds someone to blame. Rarely the structure. Rarely the people who benefit most from the structure. Always someone weaker, someone already marginal, someone who can be sacrificed without the majority feeling the cost. Jews in medieval Europe during the Black Death, when entire communities were burned alive on the accusation that they had poisoned wells, and Jews again in Weimar Germany during the hyperinflation. Catholics in Elizabethan England, hunted by priest-catchers who were paid by the head, and Chinese merchants in Indonesia in 1965, and again in 1998. Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 dead in a hundred days, killed with machetes by neighbors who had lived next door for generations. Muslims in post-9/11 America. Immigrants, always, everywhere.

The mechanism was described by René Girard, a French literary critic who argued that violence against the innocent is the engine of social cohesion. His book Violence and the Sacred in 1972 laid out the structure: a community in conflict with itself discovers that it can reconcile by turning collectively on a single victim, and all that the victim has to be is unanimous. Guilt is beside the point, which is the part of this I find hardest to sit with; once the blow lands and the crowd goes quiet, the community feels cleansed. Girard's work sits uncomfortably among the more respectable social sciences because it says something his colleagues didn't want to hear: the crowd's sense of unity is purchased with the body of someone who didn't deserve to die, and the mechanism doesn't give a shit about ideology. It works for medieval Catholics, for Jacobin revolutionaries, for Nazi party members, for Twitter mobs. The crowd needs its victim, and the victim needs to be innocent enough that the guilt of destroying him is too heavy to carry, which is why the sacrifice must be followed by denial.

The scapegoat loop is neurology under pressure. The brain performs in-group and out-group sorting in under 200 milliseconds, before conscious perception arrives - a feature of human vision that kept small bands of primates alive on the savannah. A stranger at 40 meters could be trade or death. You didn't have time to think it through. Demagogues know this, or they feel it, which amounts to the same thing. They weaponize a perceptual shortcut human beings can't turn off, and they provide a face for a pain that has no face. The crowd does the rest.

The invention that eats its children

The printing press was going to democratize knowledge. And it did! But first, it launched two centuries of religious war. Johannes Gutenberg pressed his first Bible in 1455. By 1517, Luther's theses were being reproduced across Europe in weeks, and by 1618, the Thirty Years' War had begun. By its end in 1648, a third of the German-speaking population was dead. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change in 1979 documented how the technology that was supposed to bring light to the masses also industrialized the production of astrology, witch-hunting manuals, and anti-Semitic pamphlets. The press amplified everything, including the things its advocates hoped it would abolish.

Radio was going to educate the masses. It gave Hitler a direct line to every kitchen in Germany, and Father Coughlin a direct line to thirty million American listeners in the 1930s, and Radio Rwanda the tool it needed to coordinate a genocide in 1994. Television was going to create an informed electorate - but it simultaneously created a visual electorate, which turned out to be a different thing. Marshall McLuhan saw all of this in Understanding Media in 1964 and was called a charlatan for saying so.

Social media was going to connect the world.

Well, it has, and the connection is the problem.

Every new tool that reshapes a society follows the same arc: it gets pitched as utopia, adopted before anyone understands it, panicked about ten years too late, and regulated (badly) ten years after that. By the time the culture has a theory of what the tool does, the social fabric has already been re-stitched around it, in a structural mismatch between the speed of technological change and the speed of social adaptation. The brain adopting a new tool has never been the brain that understands its second-order effects, because the lag is biological. The telegraph took 50 years to saturate the industrialized world, but the internet took 20, and the smartphone took 10.

And generative AI has taken half of that to be near-ubiquitous…

The adaptation lag stays constant, meaning each new technology is more disruptive than the last. We're adopting tools - right now - that will shape the next century without having metabolized the last century's tools; the printing press hasn't been fully understood, radio hasn't been understood, television hasn't been understood, and the side effects of social media are being "lived" through in real time by people who haven't yet admitted what it's doing to us.

The war that ends all wars

Humans don't go to war despite knowing what war does, they go to war because the knowledge of what it does fades, even though it technically exists. Nobody forgot the pain of WW1. It just became less vivid…

The generation that fought swears never again, and their children believe them, but their grandchildren might not. By the fourth generation, war is an abstraction, something that happened to other people, in old photographs, with outdated weapons. William Tecumseh Sherman spent his last years giving speeches against war to audiences who listened attentively, and then sent their sons to Cuba in 1898.

The French generation that survived 1918 built the Maginot Line because it couldn't imagine living through another Somme, but their sons were overrun by a tactic that didn't exist when the walls were poured, by an enemy they had forgotten to fear. Robert McNamara, the architect of the Vietnam War, produced a documentary in 2003 called The Fog of War in which he admitted that the policies he had designed had been wrong for reasons he actually understood at the time.

The film was released during the invasion of Iraq; the lessons were on screen, broadcast to millions, but the tanks kept rolling.

You can teach someone that fire burns, but you can't make them feel the heat. A lesson that can't be felt won't prevent the behavior it describes. Wilfred Owen wrote Dulce et Decorum Est in 1917 about the sweet lie that dying for your country was noble. The poem is taught in every British secondary school; it has stopped zero wars. The interval between great-power wars in Europe from 1648 to 1945 averaged around forty years. That’s how long it takes for the generational memory of the last war to fade from the bodies of the people who vote in the next one. The post-1945 peace in Europe is the longest stretch in recorded history, which means we have a decade or two before the generation that could say "I remember" no longer exists in political life.

What happens then, is what always happens.

The moral panic

Witches in Salem, 1692, where twenty people were executed on evidence so thin the colony issued an apology within a generation. Catholics in Elizabethan London. Comic books in the 1950s, after Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent triggered a US Senate investigation and forced the creation of the Comics Code Authority. Rock and roll. Dungeons & Dragons, where a generation of American parents were convinced their children were being recruited into a satanic cult by a dice game. Video nasties in 1980s Britain. The Parents Music Resource Center, chaired by Tipper Gore in 1985, running hearings against heavy metal. Rap music. Violent video games after Columbine. Social media. TikTok. Transgender rights. I feel like I’m reciting a depressing cover of We Didn’t Start the Fire…

The moral panic follows the same sequence every time. A new thing emerges that the older generation doesn't understand, and someone somewhere claims it's destroying children. The media amplifies the fear, and legislation follows. The panic burns out.

Then, twenty years later everyone agrees it was overblown.

Then, the next one begins.

The moral panic is a reaction to a loss of control; it's the terror that arises when a parent, or a culture, realizes the next generation is building a world they can't enter. The target changes every twenty years, but the terror doesn't change at all. The sociologist Stanley Cohen named the phenomenon in 1972 in Folk Devils and Moral Panics, writing about British seaside brawls between mods and rockers. The book could have been written about anything. A manufactured villain, a media cycle, a legislative response disproportionate to the threat etc, maps cleanly onto every subsequent panic, including the ones he couldn't have predicted. QAnon is a moral panic. So is the 1980s satanic-ritual-abuse craze that it grew out of, during which adults were sent to prison for crimes that forensic evidence later showed had never occurred. A panic doesn't have to be wrong to be a panic. It just has to be out of proportion, and they almost always are.

The empire

We all think our specific empire is the exception.

Rome believed it was eternal. The Chinese dynastic system believed in the Mandate of Heaven as a stable arrangement between rulers and cosmos, which is why each new dynasty claimed to have received the mandate from the last. The British believed their empire was a civilizing force that would last centuries. The Americans believe they're not an empire at all. Every imperial project follows the same arc: expansion driven by economic need, sold to the public as ideology. Overextension, and the cost of maintenance exceeding the benefit of possession. Internal rot funded by external extraction, and the slow or sudden loss of the periphery while the center insists everything is A-OK.

Edward Gibbon began publishing The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, the same year the American colonies declared independence from the British. Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies in 1988 argued that civilizations fail when the marginal return on complexity flips negative, which is a technical way of saying that empires break when each new administrative layer costs more than it adds. The Romans kept adding layers until the layers collapsed under their own weight, and eery subsequent empire has done the same.

Empire is an emergent property of human social organization at scale. Dominance hierarchies scale, as they always have, and they always produce the same endpoint: a system too large to govern, too expensive to maintain, too proud to contract voluntarily. The final stage is denial. The senators in Honorius's Rome debated traditional agricultural policy in 410 CE while the Visigoths were sacking the city; the Ottoman Porte in 1911 was still issuing decrees about the administration of the Balkans after it had lost them; the bureaucrats of the Third Reich set a record for how many memos they were writing and sending in 30 days or so befoe Hitler’s suicide; the British government after Suez spent a decade insisting that the empire was managing an orderly transition, a phrase that meant nothing because nobody was managing anything; the Soviet Politburo in 1988 was discussing the modernization of Cuban sugar exports while their own economy imploded.

When the center begins to legislate the future of a periphery it no longer controls, the collapse is already underway.

The God cycle

Religions rise when the existing structures of meaning collapse. They institutionalize, they accumulate power and wealth, they become the thing they were founded to resist and they calcify. A new crisis of meaning arrives, and a new religion, or reformation, or spiritual movement rises up to replace them. The cycle runs from the Axial Age (Karl Jaspers's name for the period between 800 and 200 BCE when Confucius, the Buddha, Zoroaster, the Hebrew prophets, and the pre-Socratics emerged, each proposing a new relationship between the human and the cosmos) through the European Reformation, the First and Second Great Awakenings in America, the political religions of the 20th century, and the current explosion of secular faith substitutes - from Wellness to Bitcoin.

The true believers in CrossFit and the true believers in early 4th-century Arianism have more in common than either would like to admit. So do the adherents of long-form supplement protocols and the followers of Girolamo Savonarola, who burned the vanities in Florence in 1497 and was himself burned at the stake a year later. The impulse to purify the self through ritual deprivation is older than any of the current practitioners know - Bryan Johnson is reinventing the early Christian ascetic and selling it as biometrics. The brain requires narrative. When one narrative fails, it doesn't default to a net-zero narrative, it just grabs the nearest replacement, however ragged. This = a neurological need for meaning and coherence that no rational framework has ever been able to satisfy. The experiments of Michael Gazzaniga on split-brain patients in the 1960s showed that the left hemisphere of the human brain will manufacture an explanation for any observed behavior, including behaviors it didn't cause, rather than admit it doesn't know.

The brain won't tolerate a gap in the story, and if you don't give it a religion, it will invent one. The content of belief changes but the need for it doesn't, which is why the most confident atheists end up sounding the most religious. It’s the same apparatus, different idol.

The exhaustion

Deforestation in Mesopotamia by 2000 BCE left the fields salt-crusted and the population migrating; soil depletion in Roman North Africa turned the granary of the empire into desert within three centuries; the residents of Easter Island cut down every tree on the island, lost the ability to build canoes, and were reduced to eating the dead by the time Europeans arrived in 1722; the 19th-century guano trade reshaped Pacific geopolitics around bird excrement until the deposits ran out. Whale oil, coal, petroleum, silicon, compute, housing etc. And on it goes.

Every civilization finds a resource, builds itself around that resource, burns through it, and either collapses or scrambles for the next; it’s temporal discounting, the brain's systematic undervaluation of future consequences relative to present rewards, running at civilizational scale. The Atlantic cod fishery off Newfoundland was fished every year for 500 years, and then, in the decade after 1992, it collapsed and has never returned.

The Canadian government knew the catch was unsustainable in the 1980s, but the boats went out anyway. They had mortgages to pay. Every generation knows it's borrowing from the future, but no generation stops. The cognitive machinery that would allow them to care enough doesn't exist.

The revolution that becomes the thing it replaced

The French revolutionaries executed a king and installed an emperor.

The Bolsheviks overthrew a tsar and built a new one, with secret police larger and more thorough than the Okhrana had ever been. The Iranian revolution deposed the Shah in 1979 and produced a theocracy whose morality police have arrested more women than SAVAK ever did. The anticolonial movements across Africa and Asia expelled foreign rulers and produced domestic dictators within a generation. The tech companies “disrupted” monopolies and became monopolies. Every revolution promises a break from the past and delivers a reproduction of it.

This is close to structural; the act of seizing power requires the construction of hierarchies, the concentration of authority, and the suppression of dissent, the exact things the revolution was against. The tools of liberation turn out to be the tools of control…they have to be, because they're the only tools that work.

Robespierre in 1793 believed he was defending liberty by executing 17,000 people in ten months. By the time the guillotine took him too, in July 1794, the mechanics of the Terror had built a state apparatus more centralized than anything Louis XVI had commanded. Milovan Djilas, once a senior official in Tito's Yugoslavia, wrote The New Class in 1957 from his prison cell, describing how the communist revolution had produced a bureaucratic elite with privileges indistinguishable from the aristocracy it replaced. He was right, which is why he was in prison.

The revolution is in the method; you can't win by being peaceful against a state that isn't, and you can't build by refusing to govern. But the moment the revolutionaries become the government, they become the state, and the state has structural interests. Those interests don't care who's running it. George Orwell, who had seen the Spanish Civil War up close in 1937, understood this well enough to write Animal Farm about it in 1945 and Nineteen Eighty-Four about it in 1949. Both books are taught in schools, and both are cheerfully ignored in practice. The revolutionaries who most need to read them are always the ones who believe the books can't possibly be about them…

The Cassandra

Every loop has someone who sees it coming, and they're never believed.

The evidence is strong, but the warning is unwelcome, and unwelcome beats true...

Jeremiah in Jerusalem before the Babylonian conquest was ridiculed in the temple courts, and thrown into a cistern, only to be vindicated after the fact by the destruction of everything he had warned about. Cato the Elder ended every speech with Carthago delenda est until his colleagues stopped listening. Churchill in the 1930s, was frozen out of government, still warning about German rearmament to a House of Commons that preferred to discuss cricket. Eugene Stoner testified before Congress in the 1960s about the inadequacy of the M16 rifle he had designed, and the Pentagon ignored him until American soldiers in Vietnam started being found dead with their rifles in pieces in their hands. The climate scientists of the 1980s, whose testimony was televised and archived and treated, for four decades, as the background noise of cable news. The economists who called the 2008 crash, including Raghuram Rajan at Jackson Hole in 2005, and were told by Larry Summers that their analysis was "slightly Luddite." The epidemiologists who warned about pandemic preparedness in 2015, whose reports were filed, then forgotten, then pulled off the shelf in March 2020 when there was no longer time to act on them.

Accurate prediction doesn't lead to prevention.

The reason is part political: acting on a warning is expensive, and ignoring it is free, up until it isn't. But it’s equal parts cognitive: the brain treats unfamiliar threats as less real than familiar ones, regardless of probability. Shark attacks over car crashes; plane crashes over heart disease; terrorist attacks over obesity. The risks that kill us are not the risks that frighten us, because the brain evolved in an environment where the frightening things were almost always the things that killed us, and we haven't updated the pattern.

Cassandra herself, in the Iliad and the Aeneid, was cursed by Apollo to always tell the truth and never be believed. Virgil gave her the line: insani Vatis verba, “the words of a madwoman.” Even without divine curse, the outcome is the same: truth has rarely been sufficient.

The loop

The loops are caused by the species. Bad luck, bad leaders, and bad cultures show up in every story but they don't generate the pattern. The pattern is downstream of the brain that produces the stories. That's the argument.

But can the loops be broken?

So far, the answer is discouraging; but they have occasionally been lengthened. The interval between crises has been extended, the damage mitigated, and the recovery accelerated. The post-1945 international order bought 80 years of relative peace in Europe by building institutions designed to resist the strongman loop - a massive, landmark accomplishment, but an accomplishment with an expiration date, because the institutions are only as good as the generation running them, and that generation is dying off in real time.

The bubble loop has been shortened in some respects by regulation and lengthened in others by cheaper borrowing; the scapegoat loop has been softened in many places by norms of tolerance, which the current decade is stress-testing; the empire loop has been delayed for the United States by a combination of military spending and currency dominance, neither of which is permanent; the invention loop has been accelerated by every successful attempt to regulate it, because the regulation creates markets for jurisdictional arbitrage that didn't exist before.

We're very good at making the loops run faster.

We're not so good at stopping them.

The loops persist because the brain persists, and you can build a fence around a feature of human cognition. You just can't. The loops are a tendency of the species, and you can push back against a tendency within limits that go only so far.

Seeing the loop while you're inside it is a good deal harder than it sounds. Every bubble feels like a new era, and everyone saying otherwise sounds like a total bore. Every strongman feels like a savior, at least until the night he stops taking questions, and every scapegoat feels like a real enemy, because your cousin lost his job last month and somebody has to have taken it. Every war feels necessary. Every panic feels justified. Every empire feels eternal and every new God feels true. Every resource looks infinite right up until it isn’t. Every revolution feels pure for about eighteen months. Every Cassandra looks hysterical.

Every mistake of the past was made by people who were certain they weren't making it.

The move, if there is one, is the move the Trojans couldn't make, the one the Weimar voters couldn't make in 1932, the one the subprime borrowers couldn't make in 2007, the one the American cod fleet couldn't make in 1991. Treat the thing that feels obviously true with the utmost suspicion. Look for the loop in the direction you most want to walk. Ask whether the people you most agree with are the same people who would have agreed with the crowd at every previous iteration of this same mistake. It won't save you - but it might slow you down. The loop is older than any of us, and the loop has been true for 10,000 years. I think it will be true tomorrow. The only thing we get to decide is what we do with the knowledge in the interval between now and whichever loop is already closing around us.

Westenberg is designed, built and funded by my agency, Studio Self. Reach out and work with me:

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Update #2 on the Framework Saga - Kev Quirk

2026-04-27T13:41:00.000Z

In case you hadn't heard (it's all I've been going on about for a couple weeks, so you probably have heard - sorry) I spilled coffee on my Framework 13, then after lots of testing and cleaning, I confirmed that the main board was dead.

The new main board was delivered this morning, so I went ahead and got it fitted to the chassis. Problem is, I'd pissed about the partitions on the 2TB NVMe so I could dump my install on the 1TB NVMe in my new ThinkPad T480. I tried booting up and fixing the 2TB NVMe, but it was screwed, so I cut my losses and went for a re-install of Ubuntu 24.04 instead.

I'm aware that Ubuntu 26.04 LTS has been released, but I prefer to wait for the first point release before upgrading.

After 10 minutes or so, the plucky little Framework was alive!

So I spent most of the day (on my day off) configuring the fresh Ubuntu install back to how I had it before. Luckily the ThinkPad is working great, so I could use that as a reference to get everything pretty much exactly the same. After 3 or so hours work, we're back up and running with all my apps, data, and config restored.

Another issue

While setting up the laptop, I noticed that there was an issue with the screen. At first I thought it was just some residue from coffee-gate, but on closer inspection it looks like the bottom corner has somehow de-laminated.

I know this wasn't caused by the coffee spillage, as the stain would be brown. Plus the laptop would smell. I'm wondering if it's some isopropyl alcohol, or contact cleaner, from when I cleaned it out.

The only other explanation is that it has de-laminated due to the heat in the conservatory, but I doubt it. It doesn't get that hot in there, and it's only April.

This is the second problem I've had with screens on the Framework. The bottom of the screen de-laminated just a week after I got the laptop. I thought it was a fluke, and Framework support sent me a replacement immediately, but this has me thinking that the screens just aren't that good.

Can anyone else who has a Framework 13 confirm if they've had issues with the 2880x1920 display?

Final thoughts

Anyway, this is the last update in the saga. For all intents and purposes the Framework is now repaired. I'm waiting to hear back from Framework support to see if they have any recommendations, but if not, I'll probably have to buy a new screen too.

It's lovely to be back typing this post on the Framework. I've really missed this laptop, and the typing experience.

Geez this has been one expensive mistake! Take note, people - if you drink coffee around your computers, keep a lid on the cup!

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All You Fascists (Bound to Lose) - Werd I/O

2026-04-27T13:39:32.000Z

I've had "All You Fascists (Bound to Lose)" in my song rotation for a little while – for, you know, reasons.

Bette Midler's getting some coverage for her cover, so I thought I'd round up some other versions I like very much.

To begin with, here's that Bette Midler cover:

This Resistance Revival Chorus with Rhiannon Giddens version is probably my favorite: upbeat and alive.

The Billy Bragg version with Wilco is really strong too:

Nina Hagen's father Hans was a Holocaust survivor held at Moabit, and her paternal grandparents were murdered at Sachsenhausen. This is therefore a very personal cover:

Here's Ani DiFranco with Zoe Boekbinder, Gracie and Rachel, and Diane Patterson - all artists I love:

And finally, here's the great Woody Guthrie, one of my heroes, singing the original:

Theatre Review: Hadestown ★★★★★ - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-27T11:34:27.000Z

Anaïs Mitchell has created something magical. I felt like giving a standing ovation after every song. Just pure theatrical joy delivered by a cast who know how to squeeze every drop of emotion from an audience.

Perhaps it was sitting right at the front of the stalls, but the opening of Hadestown feels like dinner theatre; almost cosy in its intimacy. The first act is so busy - there are a hundred-and-one things happening on stage that it occasionally becomes overwhelming. The second act is slightly more intimate, but no less dazzling.

Having the musicians on stage lends to the feel of being in a nightclub. The stereo separation makes it easier to pick out the various musical threads and brings a lovely texture to the songs. Also, who knew a trombone could steal a show?

Lots of the cast sing in their natural accents. A roaring northern Hades versus a Mancunian Orpheus makes for quite the thrilling combination. Having subsequently listened to the Broadway cast recording, it is amazing what a positive difference it makes.

And, yes, the obligatory revolve spins the performers on a near-constant merry-go-round. When I am King of the West End, the revolve will be banned for the laze cliché that it is!

A stunning show with a killer soundtrack and a delightful set of performers.

I've written before about how the pre-show and post-show experience shapes an event. The Lyric theatre is generously sized, so plenty of space to mill about before the show, rather than being crammed into a tiny bar. The toilets weren't in too bad a condition. Once again, no set dressing in the liminal spaces. Would it have been so hard to mock up some travel posters for the eponymous station? Or have something for people to take photos with?

The themed cocktail menu was inventive but shockingly expensive, even for London prices. The programme is only a fiver and, unlike other West End shows, is full of interesting information and not just an excuse to cram in adverts - excellent value for money.

After the curtain call, we get a few more minutes with the musicians, which was delightful. On the way out there was no leaflet offering a discount on return visits (unlike Avenue Q). There is, apparently, a "Hadestown Passport" which you can get stamped every visit - although I didn't see any evidence of that.

Implicit and explicit A.I. - destructured

2026-04-27T04:00:00.000Z

In a recent forum post about Canonical’s plans for Ubuntu, technical lead Jon Seager has drawn a useful distinction between “implicit” vs. “explicit” AI. Explicit, in his schema, denotes AI features that present as AI features, e.g. deploying an AI agent. Implicit features, by contrast, look like the sort of features that were available before AI, but work differently under the hood. Segar frames this in terms of cognitive load: “Implicit AI is about enhancing existing operating system features with the use of AI, without introducing new mental models for users.”

His example is “first-class speech-to-text and text-to-speech,” which could be enhanced using LLMs, but without changing the surface-level operation of TTS as a feature. He elaborates:

I don’t see these as “AI features”, I see them as critical accessibility features that can be dramatically improved through the adoption of LLMs with minimal (if any) drawbacks. Much of this can be achieved with local inference using open source harnesses and open weight models, which are both accurate and efficient for this use case.

Which seems innocuous enough. After all, who isn’t in favor of accessibility? (That, no doubt, is why dedicated AI boosters so often use accessibility features to a11y-wash the less savory aspects of the technology, like its environmental costs.) But does AI-enhancement to TTS features really need to be implicit? And what do we lose when it is?

Consider the case of a patient making a support call to their insurance company. Technically, AI can now handle such calls, but their reliability is subject to the vagaries of LLM search and summary functions, which are often dubious, to say the least. Yet, the ability of AI chatbots to produce convincingly human-sounding responses means that auditory cues may not be sufficient to inform the caller that they should change their mental model of the call as a source of guidance. They may reasonably believe that they’re talking to an actual human with the judgment and training required to help them navigate the health insurance system, which may lead them to accept as reasonable some responses that they would have doubted had they known that they were output from an LLM.

The important point here is that our hypothetical caller’s confusion is a direct result of the very feature Seagar cites as a good candidate for implicit deployment. The ability of an AI phone agent to replicate human speech is a direct application of text-to-speech voice synthesis. Implicit deployment may seem unproblematic when you focus on the use case of a hearing-impaired person deliberately opening a TTS app, but the same implicit features can wind up misleading the user with potentially serious consequences.

The change of context makes implicit deployment almost inherently misleading, a fact that can be exploited by companies that want to be less than wholly transparent with their customers. As a practical matter, we do see AI features being deployed both implicitly and explicitly (as well as in a third class we could call “ambiguously”), and the decision of which approach to take almost always appears to favor the deployer, rather than the end user. Thus, some companies rely on improved voice synthesis and response variability to present a human face to callers, even as they remove human agents from support positions. Making the transition implicit — or, at least, ambiguous — helps obscure and soften the caller’s loss of human contact, along with any attendant loss of agency they might have had in the process of sorting out their healthcare. This practically inverts the curb cut effect: Even cases where implicit deployment feels helpful (like TTS for accessibility), it turns out there are significant use cases that entail potentially severe consequences for the end user.

I characterized Seagar’s distinction as “useful,” but there’s two sides to that coin. One side is that it gives us terminology for identifying differences in how AI is being deployed, which we can then adapt to the purposes of socially responsible tech criticism. The other is that potentially gives deployers a permission structure for misleading or deceptive practices, like replacing human phone support with undisclosed AI systems, under the auspices of deploying an “implicit AI feature.”

So when is implicit deployment legitimate? Almost never. The burden of making AI use explicit is almost always less severe than the potential consequences that could arise from not knowing that a feature uses AI. Therefore, AI deployment should only be implicit when the intent is to deceive. In all other cases, developers should err on the side of caution by deploying AI features only when the AI use can be made explicit.

Why Is Everything Proprietary These Days? - Kev Quirk

2026-04-26T19:21:00.000Z

After 10 years of loyal service, the motorbike jacket that I wear most often gave up the ghost recently and ripped. Being a piece of protective clothing, a rip isn't a good thing, so I've been shopping around for a replacement.

But you see, motorbike jackets are complex, heavy garments that are littered with protective pads. They used to come with back protectors too, but it was later decided that these were too expensive, so you had to buy one separately.

No problem, they're standardised so you buy a good one and it can last you decades. There's just a big void in the back of the jacket with a number of velcro patches that any back protector will cling to.

That's what I have in my old jacket, and I assumed it was still the same now.

So today I bought myself a new jacket. It cost me £380 (on sale!) but you can't put a price on safety, right? I also have protective trousers that zip to my jacket all the way around my waist.

But the zip on my new jacket isn't compatible with the zip on my old trousers (how the fuck can a ZIP be incompatible??) so I bought the matching trousers for the new jacket, costing another £300.

So now I'm £650 lighter in the bank, but I have good quality motorbike clothing that should last me another decade.

This evening I went to swap the back protector from my old jacket to the new, only to find that many manufacturers now have brand-specific pads for their clothing that sit in perfectly sculpted pockets.

The specific back protector (which is a bit of rubber with some holes in it) for my jacket is fifty fucking pounds. So now I'm at £700.

Fifty quid's worth of rubber, apparently

Fuck that. I've bought a generic (but good quality) one, and I'll cut it to size.

Vendor lock-in

Whether it's phones, social networks, communication platforms, printer ink, laptop chargers, smart home systems, games consoles, coffee machines, electric toothbrush heads, camera batteries, or fucking motorbike jacket back protectors. Nothing is interchangeable.

It seems that every day another piece of standardisation is being washed away, and we as consumers need to make our choices, invest, and stick to a brand. You can switch, but it's gonna cost ya!

It's fucking ridiculous.

Over and over again we get shafted, and there's not a single thing we can do about it. I'm so tempted to take the jacket back for a refund, but what do I do then? I need a jacket for riding. I'd be screwed.

Fuck bike jacket manufacturers that do this. Fuck vendor lock-in. Fuck. This.

</rant>

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Sustaining innovation has failed us. It's time to think more radically - Werd I/O

2026-04-25T21:05:49.000Z

Link: A Three Horizons Framework for Government Reform, by Jennifer Pahlka

Important analysis from Jennifer Pahlka, founder of Code for America, that is about government technology and services but could just as easily be about news and journalism.

She introduces the Three Horizons framework for thinking about change and building towards a shared vision of the future. Here, Horizon 1 is the status quo, Horizon 2 represents improvements to that system, and Horizon 3 represents an improved system rather than an optimized present.

There are four kinds of innovation: research, sustaining, breakthrough, and disruptive. The first two don’t lead us anywhere new on their own; they might provide extra capacity and create more headroom, but they aren’t systemic change. Any fundamental problems with the status quo probably won’t go away. In contrast, breakthrough innovation brings in fresh ideas to solve problems in a new way, and disruptive innovation creates new systemic models that serve people in new ways.

Jennifer’s point is that a lot of government reform work — including Code for America — has been sustaining or incremental at best, which has relieved some pressure but hasn’t really changed anything. The same problems persist.

Philanthropic funding has compounded the problem by funding that kind of innovation instead of more radical solutions. This, for me, is the key sentence in her piece:

“Funders need to ask not just whether an investment does good but whether it changes the conditions under which good can be done at scale.”

And there’s a finite window for more aggressive change. This has been created by the AI shift, changes in the US government, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other changes that have highlighted how poorly our current system has adapted.

In government, that need has become rather obvious, but it’s true in news too — another key part of our civic framework. (And this is also true for social media!) These same factors apply, and philanthropic funding has been similarly risk-averse, aiming for sustaining innovation that builds capacity rather than changing how everything works to serve people better. The fundamentals aren’t changing and they haven’t been serving us. We need to think much more radically, and we need to fund much more radically.

In that framework, it’s incredibly important to articulate what the more radical futures we could work towards actually are. Jennifer points out that there are multiple, potentially contradictory, possible futures — the point is not to coalesce into one agreed-upon Horizon 3 end state, but to be able to describe where any current change might be leading to. Where is this taking us, and why?

Let’s allow ourselves to imagine something better. And then, let’s finally go there.

AI is not a magic wand and it won’t fix your problems - Werd I/O

2026-04-25T18:47:10.000Z

Link: Why AI alone cannot fix social problems, by Deepak Varuvel Dennison and Aditya Vashistha in Rest of World

From the AI is a tool for people and not a replacement for them dept:

“AI is often framed as a tool for efficiency, but efficiency alone does not strengthen public systems without the underlying capacity being improved. Even when tasks are completed faster, the deeper constraints of the system do not automatically disappear. In many cases, AI ends up addressing the symptoms of these problems rather than their causes.”

If an institution — or an industry — is declining, adding AI won’t magically make it better. In the cases that these Cornell researchers highlight in this piece, there were only meaningful improvements when the underlying systems were working well and the human infrastructure around the software was well-developed.

Even beyond the lack of support for some regional needs (languages, dialects, accents) that created issues here, these systems worked best when the software was designed to support existing well-functioning human systems. If the human systems don’t work, if there isn’t human support, or if people are expected to adapt their processes to the needs of the software, the projects weren’t successful.

It isn’t a magic wand. There are important lessons here for news and other declining industries: adding software doesn’t absolve you of figuring out your underlying problems, and it will not solve them for you. It might even paper over them and make them worse.

It’s just another tool. Invest in your people.

The world is not a database - Werd I/O

2026-04-25T18:31:08.000Z

Link: The People Do Not Yearn For Automation, by Nilay Patel in The Verge

This piece is important to internalize — particularly for the terminally AI-pilled and people who might want to force everyone into using LLMs to do work they were previously doing themselves.

AI is incredibly unpopular, and it’s not because it’s bad at marketing. These are multi billion dollar companies that have attracted some of the brightest talent from across Silicon Valley across all disciplines. AI vendors are not underdogs who just need to get their message across.

Indeed:

“You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.”

“Software brain” is a fantastic name for a worldview that sees everything as databases that can be controlled, normalized, and optimized. As Nilay Patel puts it: “the idea that we can force the real world to act like a computer and then have AI issue that computer instructions.” This is not a new problem that has arrived with AI: we’ve been talking about people who were very good at making software who therefore thought they were geniuses who could take on any global challenge for a very long time.

Taking human experience, which is beautifully ambiguous and nuanced and nondeterministic, and trying to fit it into a database shape, is inherently extractive. Nilay points out that it flattens people, which is totally true, but it also transfers ownership of that experience from their subjective truth into a centralized database that someone else controls, sets the standards for, and profits from.

And yes: computers should support people. People shouldn’t support computers. The idea that we’ll all be left behind if we don’t pour our experiences, information, source material, communications, creativity, and all the rest of it into a computer system is absurd and offensive. By extracting that experience, flattening it, and changing ownership of it, it inherently devalues us, the humans who were its previous custodians. It certainly devalues labor, which is a problem in itself, but it also devalues all of the frictionful, living, breathing parts of being an actual human being.

The tools are useful. I think software development has probably changed forever. But they’re not useful for everything, and they’re not going to change everything. Everything isn’t a database. And if we think the world becomes better if we turn everything into one, we probably weren’t all that excited about humanity to begin with.

You can parse an .env file as an .ini with PHP - but there's a catch - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-25T11:34:15.000Z

The humble .env file is a useful and low-tech way of storing persistent environment variables. Drop the file on your server and let your PHP scripts consume it with glee.

But consume it how? There are lots of excellent parsing libraries for PHP. But isn't there a simpler way? Yes! You can use PHP's parse_ini_file() function and it works.

But…

.env and .ini have subtly different behaviour which might cause you to swear at your computer.

Let's take this example:

# This is a comment
USERNAME="edent"

Run $env = parse_ini_file( ".env" ); and you'll get back an array setting the USERNAME to be "edent". Hurrah! Works perfectly. Ship it!

But consider this:

# This is a comment
USERNAME="edent" # Don't use an @ symbol here.

It will happily tell you that the username is "edent# Don"

WTAF?

Here's the thing. The comment character for .ini is not # - it's the semicolon ;

Let me give you some other examples of things which will fuck up your parsing:

# Documentation at https:/example.com/?doc=123
DOCUMENTATION=123
# Set the password
PASSWORD=qwerty;789

That gets us back this PHP array:

[
  '# Documentation at https:/example.com/?doc' => '123',
  'DOCUMENTATION' => '123',
  'PASSWORD' => 'qwerty',
];

When the .ini is parsed, it ignores every line which doesn't have an = sign. It also treats literal semicolons as the start of a new comment until they're wrapped in quotes.

My code highlighter should show you how it is parsed:

# Documentation at https:/example.com/?doc=123
DOCUMENTATION=123
# Set the password
PASSWORD=qwerty;789

It gets worse. Consider this:

# Set the "official" name
REALNAME="Arthur, King of the Britons"

That immediately fails with PHP Warning: syntax error, unexpected '"' in envtest on line 1

You can use single quotes in pseudo-comments just fine, but if the ini parser sees a double quote without an equals then it throws a wobbly.

I'm sure there are several other gotchas as well. For example, there are certain reserved words and symbols you can't used as a key.

This will fail:

# Can we fix it? Yes we can!
FIX=true

It chokes on the exclamation point.

How to solve it (the stupid way)

The comments on an .env file start with a hash.

The comments on an .ini file start with a semicolon.

So, it is perfectly valid for a hybrid file to have its comments start with #;

Look, if it's stupid but it works…

What Have We Learned Here Today?

There's a right way and a wrong way to do .env parsing.
The wrong way works, up until the point it doesn't.
You should probably use a proper parser rather than hoping your .env looks enough like an .ini to pass muster.

On next week's show - why you shouldn't store your passwords inside a JPEG!

ThinkPad T480 Initial Thoughts - Kev Quirk

2026-04-25T10:48:00.000Z

Since my Framework had a coffee bath, I've been using a ThinkPad T480 that I picked up from eBay for £285 ($385).

This has been my main laptop for a few days now, and I have some thoughts, so I thought I'd share them since I've read mixed reviews on these plucky little laptops - everything from:

They're the best laptops in the world, EVARRRRR!

To:

They're overrated and overpriced - stop buying them!

My opinion is that the T480 is somewhere in the middle of these 2 opinions. Let's just in...

Price and condition

Like I said, I paid £285 for this laptop, which was listed as very good condition - refurbished". And I agree - the condition of the laptop is very good, especially considering it's been a corporate laptop and is 8 years old at this point.

It came with a 14" 1080p screen, 16GB RAM, a Core I5-8250U CPU (4 core, 8 thread @ 3.4GHz), a 256GB NVMe, and Windows 11 (which was promptly removed). I had a 1TB NVMe lying around, so I upgraded that first, and I've also bought a 32GB RAM upgrade costing an additional £70 ($95).

The RAM upgrade hasn't been delivered yet, so these thoughts are based on 16GB RAM.

My T480 (yes, those stickers needs to go)

Design and functionality

This laptop has bezels for days compared to my Framework, but that's to be expected. It's an old, utilitarian laptop - that didn't stop me getting a bit of a shock when I first cracked it open though. Now I've been using it a few days, the bezels don't bother me though.

I've always liked ThinkPad keyboards, and this is no exception. It works great, and has lots of travel on the keys, which I always appreciate. It's not as nice as the keyboard on my Framework, but I think that's the best keyboard I've ever used, Macbook included.

I'm not a fan of the textured finish that's all over this laptop though. It's on the case, on the keyboard, the trackpad, everywhere. It's like a slightly rubberised, gritty finish. It doesn't impact the functionality of the laptop, I'm just not a big fan of it.

The keyboard is backlit too, which I appreciate.

Battery and performance

Honestly, I was expecting the battery to be crap on the T480, being second-hand. But I was so wrong! It came with an extended battery fitted, and on checking it over, it's only had 2 charge cycles, so it brand new.

The battery will last all day, no problem at all. The other day I ran it for an entire working day, and at 15:00 it still had 61% charge left, with Ubuntu reporting another 6.5 hours of use remaining. That's incredible, in my opinion.

Ubuntu runs perfectly on this - all drivers were discovered fine, and I managed to get the fingerprint reader working with just a little bit of DuckDuckGo-fu.

Performance is good too. Everything feels snappy with no lag. Obviously it's not instant like on my Framework, but that thing is a powerhouse. Having said that, I could see myself using the T48 long-term without issue.

I'm currently running Firefox, Spotify, Obsidian, VSCodium, and a few other bits. Here's how the Ubuntu System Monitor looks:

So I'm using about half my RAM, and between 20-40% of the CPU. I don't need to upgrade the RAM, but it's nice to have the extra overhead in case I ever do need it.

I'm not much of a gamer, but the T480 will consistently run Minecraft at 40ish FPS, which is fine, and honestly better than I expected.

Final thoughts

Overall I think the T480 was good value for money. It's in really good condition, performs well, and is almost as repairable as my Framework. I think this laptop still has years of life left in it, so will it sit in a drawer once the Framework is repaired?

No, that would be a waste of both money, and a perfectly good laptop. My wife is currently using a 2014 X1 Carbon that I used for many years before switching to the Macbook M1 Air. The X1 is still going strong, but it's starting to struggle in its old age. Not to mention that my wife is still running Windows 10 on it!

So once the Framework is repaired, I'll be giving this laptop to my wife where it should continue to provide solid service for years to come, all while being a nice upgrade for her. The X1 will get the latest version of Ubuntu installed on it, and will be put out to pasture as the spare laptop for the household.

If you're on the fence about picking a T480 up, I'd say go for it. While they're no powerhouse, and won't win any beauty awards, they're a solid workhorse that still have many years of service left in them.

I'm very happy with my purchase.

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Craft and Artistry - Hey, it's Jason!

2026-04-25T00:00:00.000Z

That time I went to a show in Japan by one of my favorite artists! 😱

Notable links: April 24, 2026 - Werd I/O

2026-04-24T13:32:23.000Z

Most Fridays, I share a handful of pieces that caught my eye at the intersection of technology, media, and society.

Did I miss something important? Send me an email to let me know.

The Technological Republic, in brief

Palantir CEO Alex Karp wrote a book last year called the Technological Republic, but perhaps because it didn’t have the impact he hoped, the company posted a tweet thread (and LinkedIn post, etc) that summarizes its core points. Which are, to be clear, an argument for hard-right nationalism — complete with remilitarization and implied cultural hierarchy — and fusing Silicon Valley with the national security state.

In Karp’s world, Silicon Valley innovators have an obligation to build weapons through a kind of moral debt to the country. He also wants to see Germany and Japan re-militarized, escalating tensions that will see his company make more money through those arms sales — particularly as his manifesto declares that AI weapons, exactly of the kind he happens to sell, are an inevitable future of military action.

He says we should be more tolerant of billionaires and scrutinize their private lives less, while being less tolerant of other cultures. He declares that no nation has advanced progressive values more than the US (a tough sell in itself), but then recites a litany of anti-progressive ideas. He takes time to defend Elon Musk by name.

He also furthers the idea that people who further progressive ideas are some kind of “elite”, instead of what they actually are: people from all slices of life, including working class unions, who want to have a more inclusive, more peaceful society.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has a great Bluesky thread that lays out the issues plainly:

“Point 21 is the giveaway, some cultures produce "wonders," others are "regressive and harmful." Once you accept that hierarchy, you've quietly been given permission to apply different standards of verification to different actors. The form of verification stays, but the democratic function doesn’t.

This is what verification looks like once national identity sits above method. Rigorous when it's pointed at adversaries, conveniently absent when it's pointed at us. Symmetric, evidence-led investigation of allied conduct, exactly what Bellingcat does, becomes the thing the worldview can't tolerate”

In short, I find this offensive, often contradictory, and terrifying in equal measure. It makes clear that Palantir, its associates, and companies like it (Anduril, for example) are a threat to a democratic, peaceful, inclusive society. There’s no point in being cautious or pulling punches; it must be opposed.

“Data embassies” and safeguarding digital assets during wartime

Among the targets in the war between Iran and the US have been data centers. AWS was hit by drones, and Iran has threatened to target US tech. This piece makes the point that these buildings don’t just store vast amounts of civilian customer data: increasingly, they store military data, too. That make them an even more attractive target and makes the security consequences of an attack that much worse.

Meanwhile, data centers — including here in Pennsylvania, where I live, as well as Chile, India, and many other places around the world — have been the cause of significant objections from local populations. They push energy costs up, have a serious environmental footprint, and can even change the local climate.

So why have these giant megascale data centers at all?

““It’s very possible that we see a move away from hyperscalers to small data centers for greater safety,” [Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford] said. “Lots of small data centers with randomly distributed backup copies of data are more resilient – but harder and more complex to build, more costly to maintain, and less effective, as data needs to be kept up to date not just in one or two centers, but in many.””

The latter half of Mayer-Schoenberger’s claim is true if we cling to the same architectures. But if we embrace more decentralization on the architectural level as a founding premise, some of these inefficiencies become less of a problem. It could even be worth it to companies like AWS to build new underlying services that make decentralization easier: abstractions that allow data to be sharded across distributed data stores, and that make secure communication between distributed nodes easier.

That’s clearly necessary if we move to smaller data centers: a smaller venue can’t simply hold a copy of all the same data as the larger ones but in more places. It also opens up the possibility for mesh application layers rather than the monolithic mainframe-style architectures we’ve mostly seen on the cloud. Behind the scenes, cloud services are a sea of proprietary micro services and components; building more distributed architectures could more easily allow each component to be built, hosted, and supported by different entities.

Regardless, the change is an interesting thing to think about, and the cause for it is sobering. What does data infrastructure look like in an increasingly antagonistic world — one with more war, accelerated climate change, and authoritarian threats? Those considerations will need to be built into the internet at a backbone level, and into its applications from the ground up.

Flare Before You Focus

Corey Ford’s advice on separating flaring and focusing is something I draw on every workday: it prevents self-editing, allows more creative ideas to flourish, and helps enforce a more rigorous creative process. But as he points out here, to encourage curiosity on your team, you’ve got to model it yourself.

I have been in this meeting so many times:

“Two people, both in Focus mode, talking across each other, each trying to prove they have the sharper analysis. Everyone in the room thinks they're having a robust debate. What they're actually having is two monologues masquerading as a conversation. […] They're asking themselves, How do I make sure everyone knows I'm smart?”

The thing is, when everyone is coming into a brainstorm with genuine curiosity, and when everyone has the right to share and ideate without the outcome being predetermined, it’s genuinely more fun. It’s certainly more inclusive. And when it’s both of those things, you get more interesting ideas. If you “yes and” those ideas and model what it looks like to build with curiosity, you get more of them. It’s a virtuous circle.

Conversely, if you’re coming in with predetermined ideas, or you set the tone of a meeting to be evaluative rather than collaborative, people won’t speak up. The output becomes monocultural. Or, at its worst, you get the kind of posturing that Corey described above: a culture where people want to be recognized for being smart rather than helping to get to the best possible outcome.

It helps to be genuinely curious; playful; maybe risk being a little bit unserious. Then people start to loosen up, and that’s when the good stuff starts coming.

The Content Management System Is Dead. Long Live the Context Management System.

I thought this demo, by Hacks / Hackers founder Burt Herman, was pretty compelling. It’s obviously a proof of concept, but it points to some interesting places journalism could go, and it opens up some new platform questions in the process.

In Burt’s vision, the reader has a profile that expresses their interests, and then the newsroom curates material that is surfaced using that lens. His demo makes that more concrete: here he’s pointed an engine at communications from New York City Mayor Mamdani’s office, and set up personas like “renter in Bushwick” and “parent in Park Slope” that are served a briefing drawn from different information depending on that persona’s particular lens. A parent in Park Slope receives more information about schools in that neighborhood; a retiree in the West Village receives information about their neighborhood but also about services that pertain to them.

You can easily imagine how this might scale up to a newsroom. An engine like this doesn’t have to be limited to source material as in Burt’s demo: it could also be journalistic investigations, interviews, and net-new content created by skilled reporters. In some ways it’s a vision for a better homepage (often among the least-visited parts of a news website) more than a redefinition of journalism itself, except in the sense that surfacing more raw material is welcome.

There are so many interesting questions to consider — many of which dovetail with ideas that have been tackled outside news for years.

For example: if a reader creates a profile, where does that live? Is it on the news website, in which case they have to create a new profile every time they read another site? Or does it live in the browser, so that the user creates their profile once and consents to share it with the various sites they read? People have been working on browser-based identity, and now identity for agentic users, for a long time. It may make sense to apply that work here.

Where should the briefing live? Is it a news website’s homepage, as I’ve surmised above, or is it actually also at the browser or news reader level, drawing not just from one newsroom, but all the newsrooms a user reads? And if it’s the latter, how does the newsroom retain credit, get compensated, and build a first-party relationship with the reader?

I also think there’s an obvious business model here: when a user has created a profile for themselves, it’s just as easy to say that they’re in the market for a car, or that they enjoy single-origin coffee beans. Then you can serve useful sponsored content (like deals) to people who actually want to buy those things, which is both significantly more valuable to an advertiser and more consensual / less adversarial for a reader. It brings newsrooms very close to the Customer Commons ideas that people like Doc Searls have been talking about for many years.

I agree with Burt’s warning here:

“For publishers and journalists who ignore this: Don't be surprised when human readers stop coming to your websites and mobile apps. Not because the journalism is bad, but because it's more efficient to send an AI agent to gather what you've published, sift out what's truly relevant to the user's own context, and reassemble it in whatever format works best for them.”

What might a version of this future that centers reader needs but does it in alignment with the newsroom’s needs and values look like? It’s a good time to start experimenting.

Launching XOXO Explore

I freaking loved XOXO, the experimental festival for independent artists and creators from the internet. I attended the first one during a fraught, stressful, often sad period of my life; I’d ripped my life up to move to the US to be nearer to my terminally ill mother. I thought I knew where my life was going, and then everything was uncertain.

And here was this joyful festival of people doing things on their own terms, in their own way. I attended with my partner at the time, who was visiting back from the UK, and we discovered Portland itself in the process. We played Johann Sebastian Joust with Dan Harmon. Ben Brown, who I had followed for years, silently sidled up at an arcade and played the 1990s X-Men cabinet game with me. We had a beer with MC Frontalot. And felt home in a way I desperately needed to.

Clearly, a ton of work went into this archive site, which contains almost every talk. (One in particular was too sensitive to record.) I’m grateful that this exists. I can relive Maggie Vail and Jesse Von Doom’s CASH Music talk; relive one of my childhood heroes, Tim Schafer, talking about his work; and see talks from years I couldn’t attend by people I am in awe of like Molly White and Erin Kissane. It’s really worth plumbing the archive; it’s all good stuff.

It can’t show me the absolutely insane Q&A with the Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared team ("...How?" "Because!"), or remind me or chatting with Cory Doctorow, or let me cuddle a baby goat again. But I can remember. And this is a lovely start.

Bonus link: here’s how I wrote about the first event at the time.

Copyright and DMCA Best Practices for Fediverse Operators

A useful guide for anyone who is running their own community space — which includes folks running Mastodon instances, Bluesky hosts, RSS services, and so on. As the author explains in the preamble, there’s the potential for “massive, unpredictable financial liability”. It’s therefore really important to find ways to limit risk.

A lot of this is common sense:

“Finally, make sure that nothing you post or advertise actively encourages copyright infringement. For example, don’t post examples of users uploading copyrighted music or video without permission, or insinuate that your server is a good place for infringing content.”

Some of it is less obvious but still important. For example, responding promptly to DMCA notices — and not ignoring them regardless of technicalities — is one place where a less-savvy operator might fall over.

It’s easy to imagine compliance as a service for these kinds of operators, baked into the platforms themselves. So if you install a Mastodon instance and you could be subject to US law (which isn’t limited to instances operating in the US), there could be an easy way to set up with a service to handle all that for you. It could sit right alongside trust and safety services that are more aligned for community safety.

In wartime, megascale data centers may make way for distributed architectures - Werd I/O

2026-04-24T13:29:18.000Z

Link: “Data embassies” and safeguarding digital assets during wartime, by Rina Chandran in Rest of World

So why have these giant megascale data centers at all?

““It’s very possible that we see a move away from hyperscalers to small data centers for greater safety,” [Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford] said. “Lots of small data centers with randomly distributed backup copies of data are more resilient – but harder and more complex to build, more costly to maintain, and less effective, as data needs to be kept up to date not just in one or two centers, but in many.””

Does Mythos mean you need to shut down your Open Source repositories? - Terence Eden’s Blog

2026-04-24T11:34:30.000Z

Much Sturm und Drang in the world of Open Source with the announcement that the "Mythos" AI is now the ultimate hacker and is poised to unleash havoc on every code base.

So should you close all your Open Source projects to make them safe?

No.

Firstly, all your Open Source code has already been slurped up.

It was all ingested for "training purposes" years ago. If it was moderately interesting then it was backed-up by a digital hoarder. It has been archived by various digital libraries. Anyone who wants to do research on your code base can.

Closing now doesn't meaningfully protect you.

Secondly, most of the security holes in your systems are probably not in your code. Vulnerabilities exist throughout your supply chain. All the dependencies - your OS, libraries, and even hardware - are all richer targets for hackers. Finding a CVE in a popular library is almost certainly more worthwhile than investigating your Open Source code.

The bigger risk comes not from subtle logic bugs but from phishers, poor password hygiene, and insider threats. Securing your existing systems provides more protection than rushing to close-source your code.

Finally, closing the source of something doesn't protect you. These new AI models can easily investigate and your closed source systems and potentially penetrate them. It has always been possible to analyse websites and binaries. AI doesn't change that - although it might accelerate it.

Open Source does have risks but AI doesn't upend decades of evidence that closed-source is just as vulnerable to attackers.

In cases where the state creates code using public money, it has a responsibly to share that code. Automated threat analysis - even by hypercapabe AI - doesn't change that.

I would strongly recommend reading the UK's AI Safety Institute's evaluation of Claude Mythos Preview’s cyber capabilities and the NCSC's advice. Neither of them recommend closing down Open Source code.

XOXO Explore is fitting showcase for a brilliant experiment - Werd I/O

2026-04-24T01:44:35.000Z

Link: Launching XOXO Explore, by the Andys

Bonus link: here’s how I wrote about it at the time.

Budget friendly tech isn't what it used to be - Joel's Log Files

2026-04-23T23:26:26.000Z

Apple and affordability

A €700 laptop is not cheap, a €700 phone is not cheap. My iPhone SE from 2022 cost €500 and it wasn't cheap either given what it had to offer. The price may be lower in comparison with other products from the brand and the prices of modern technology—which are madness. They may offer a good value for the money. That seems to be the case for this laptop. But it is not cheap.

Read the Full Post by Adrián Perales on adrianperales.com

I saw this post (originally in Spanish, title and quote translated by me) which dealt with something that I used to think a lot more, but sort of accepted given my current situation, but the more I thought about it, I kind of hate it.

Back in the day, I used to watch phone reviews that recommended budget friendly devices. Stuff like the Redmi 4A and 5A were the kings of low-budget gadgets, at a price around $100 bucks. That was the first phone I ever paid for, and 18-year-old me only had half of that money, my dad to paid the rest, and even that was too much for him. He wasn’t being greedy, but my previous phone still worked, so it was not a necessary purchase.

The flagship smartphones at the time? $500 bucks or so, the base iPhone 7? $650 USD, the one with 256 GB of storage? $969 USD. We both know storage wasn’t worth that much, but even then the Apple markup was acting up. The high tier was expensive, and it still is. Like Adrian, I am extremely surprised when I see people saying the Macbook Neo is “budget-friendly.”

I’ve said before how I am often disconnected from my own culture, as a Latino who mostly interacts with American/English-speaking communities online and watches video reviews from people living there.

The people in my country who buy a Macbook Neo are either part of the upper class—or in debt. After all, owning an Apple device is a status symbol, for some reason, and even those who can’t afford it what those bragging rights.

The average person where I live has a two or three year old device that they got used from Facebook Marketplace, a chinese device from Oppo, Poco, Honor, Xiaomi or maybe Motorola. People will buy the flagship devices from these brands and think they are expensive and great quality. And yeah, they often have much better feature than Apple or Samsung products, even if riddled with tracking and advertising.

Alas, such brands are at a price people are actually willing to pay, as much as I don’t like it.

I’ve bought devices and things from China and chinese websites. Let’s talk the Miyoo Mini Plus, the Anbernic RG35XX SP, The Miyoo Mini Flip and the XTEINK X4, and all of them have been at under $70 USD. All of them are extremely affordable and found for even cheaper during sales.

Some of that price may be lowered because Chinese companies overwork people or do shady business practices, but reality is that the markup of most modern tech sold from more popular brands on this side of the globe are simply off the charts. A clear middle ground with a sensible approach can’t be that hardcan right? But no, just look at the “minimalist” devices out there, all above 300, 400, 600 bucks and they are hardly worth that much, the marketing is more expensive than the hardware itself, I suspect.

I guess most big tech review channels seem to just take this for granted, 700 bucks for an Apple laptop? Very cheap, sure.

The worst is that they barely mention actually cheap stuff. Personally, I think they realized that people who watch phone reviews for a living like to see expensive stuff—that they won’t buy—more than cheap stuff—that they won’t buy anyway, so they go and make that kind of content to appease the algorithm and get more revenue. Also cheap stuff has compromises which are often negative, so brands don’t like those to be brought up, even if at the price they are justified.

The people who genuinely look for reviews for actually budget devices are usually confined to content from smaller channels or from creators from India where those devices are more popular. Nothing wrong with that, of course, it’s a similar situation to Latin America, the concept of “budget friendly” is more akin to reality, and those reviews tend to be more honest anyway.

Right now I’m thankful for my current situation, which is rather privileged—single and without any debts—allowing me the purchasing power to consider expensive tech (as long as it isn’t Apple) among my options (although I would still probably go for whatever is cheaper or has better design). Still, I’d love if we recalibrated what “value for money” actually means, and what sort of hardware is actually enough, so we can stop allowing these companies to raise prices for no reason.

This is day 56 of #100DaysToOffload

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Untitled - Posts feed

2026-04-23T17:16:51.000Z

The user-tailored newsroom - Werd I/O

2026-04-23T13:58:43.000Z

Link: The Content Management System Is Dead. Long Live the Context Management System., by Burt Herman at Hacks / Hackers

I thought this was a pretty compelling demo. It’s obviously a proof of concept, but it points to some interesting places journalism could go, and it opens up some new platform questions in the process.

There are so many interesting questions to consider — many of which dovetail with ideas that have been tackled outside news for years.

I agree with Burt’s warning here:

“For publishers and journalists who ignore this: Don't be surprised when human readers stop coming to your websites and mobile apps. Not because the journalism is bad, but because it's more efficient to send an AI agent to gather what you've published, sift out what's truly relevant to the user's own context, and reassemble it in whatever format works best for them.”

What might a version of this future that centers reader needs but does it in alignment with the newsroom’s needs and values look like? It’s a good time to start experimenting.

Update on My Coffee Ridden Framework 13 - Kev Quirk

2026-04-23T13:43:00.000Z

A week or so ago, I talked about how I might have killed my Framework 13 by dumping a full mug of coffee over it while it was running.

In that last post I explained how I'd stripped the laptop down and was waiting for some isopropyl alcohol (IPA) to be delivered so I could more thoroughly clean it. Well dear reader, the IPA turned up, I cleaned it as best I could, and left it for 24 hours to dry off.

The next day I came back to it, re-assembled it and hit the power button with a fair amount of trepidation.

Nothing.

I think it's dead, Jim. And I can't help thinking that turning the laptop on in haste, after the first clean is what completely screwed it. Oh well, we live and learn.

In my desperation, I contacted Framework support and explained the whole saga to see if there was anything I was missing.

There wasn't. They told me that the LED pattern I was seeing when powered on was indicative of a communication error with the board, so it's dead and needed to be replaced.

Problem is, a new board is £700 (~$950) and I didn't fancy shelling out that much money out of my own pocket, so I contacted my home insurance provider to make a claim, and to be fair they were great.

A case was logged and a couple of days later I had a payout that would cover the whole amount.

The new board and a ThinkPad

The payout from the insurance was more than the repair cost, so I decided to upgrade from my current Ryzen 7 7840, to an AI 300 series board instead - nice little upgrade!

The Framework site said it would be shipped in 5 days, and would probably be subject to delays of a further 7 days due to global freight disruptions. So I bought myself a ThinkPad T480 to see me through (which I'm typing this post on) as I couldn't bear to be on MacOS for another second.

Framework overachieved again and the board is due for delivery tomorrow (Friday 24th April 2026).

Nice!

Once the board is delivered and my beloved Framework is (hopefully) working again, this nice little ThinkPad will go to my wife as an upgrade from here 2014(!) Gen 2 X1 Carbon.

How did it die?

I've had a few people reach out telling me that they'd done something similar and their device's had survived. Unfortunately I wasn't as lucky, so what happened?

I think it's because I didn't spill the coffee on my laptop, but next to it. Then as the puddle of coffee made its way over my desk and inevitably under my laptop, the spinning fan must have sucked it up and perfectly spread the coffee all over the main board.

Thanks for that. Stupid fan. 🤣️

Had I spilled the coffee on my laptop, it would have had to make its way through the keyboard and chassis before it got to the board, by which point I would have had the laptop switched off and draining.

I can't say for sure, but that's my theory.

So anyway, wish my luck with the new board, folks!

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