Darius Kazemi

"I believe that disrupting and vitiating the fundamental relationship between humans and language will undermine all semblance of social coherence."

https://www.equator.org/articles/arundhati-roy-artificial-intelligence

One thing I learned from making Twitter bots and web toys with "personality" for years is that some people desperately wanted those things to be intelligent. I would say exactly how my algorithm worked to show that it was doing nothing more than pulling random items from a set. But some would assume there was magic happening on some level anyway. There was a hunger for that to be the case, and I think LLM companies trade in sating that hunger.

https://borretti.me/article/no-man-is-an-island

Good post that gets into the futility I feel when I try to do something creative online anymore. I'm less and less motivated to do things like write a blog or build software tools. I've found myself without much of a creative community since 2020 for a variety of societal and personal reasons. My attempts at private intellectual life have crashed and burned. I really do need creative community but I don't want to feed the plagiarism machine. Not really sure what to do.

After experimenting with local LLMs for a couple years now, I'm excited to release my newest project: The Ethical Assistant! It provides all the benefits of an LLM assistant but with low energy usage, completely private, and no cost to use.

https://tinysubversions.com/ethical-assistant/

Twenty years ago we had Johnny Cash, Steve Ass, and Bob Grass. Now we've got no cash, ass, or grass -- nobody rides for free!

Discovered today that one of the most formative books of my childhood, Math For Smarty Pants (1983), is available as a full PDF online:

https://arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/mathpants.pdf

It's not a super well known book, though I bet there are plenty of Fediverse nerds who loved it as much as I did. The book was full of cool math stuff, but also wonderful cartoons and stories.

Reading the sentence "The mathematician believed that every rule probably has exceptions" at age 7 basically cemented who I am

My new favorite place to go for written recipes online is food company websites. They don't have the adware stack pop-ups or weird SEO stuff. Their monetization story is simple: they sell me ingredients, and providing recipes may cause me to buy more of their ingredients. The better the recipe, the more likely I am to give them money. The incentives are all pretty okay.

(I was struggling to find a good recipe for the semolina flour I bought. Then I remembered I could go to the company website.)

The ActivityPub Trust & Safety Task Force is looking for a new Co-Lead (I'm stepping down because I'm leading the Social Web Working Group now).

Specifically we'd like someone with trust and safety experience! Doesn't have to be paid/professional experience (volunteer moderation workers welcome). If you're interested, please leave a comment on the Github issue here:

https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety/issues/135

For more on what the TF does, check out: https://github.com/swicg/activitypub-trust-and-safety#scope-of-work

There are a lot of reasons I've been in a creative funk recently but one of them is the chilling effect where I think about the inevitable LLM plagiarism that will occur and I think, huh, do I really want to release anything publicly? I feel myself more drawn to making stuff that never goes on the internet at all.

Like, the idea of playing in a bar band around town feels more inviting than the idea of creating a cool web-based toy like I used to.

Every time I look on the back of a restaurant menu and there's not a multi paragraph narrative story about the history of the restaurant I get a little disappointed

Quick question for any New York Times columnists out there: as an Iranian-American, how many "death to America"s am I allowed to say following Trump's threat to wipe Iran's civilization off the face of the earth? One? Three? An even dozen?

I'm at a loss for words but here are some from Mayor Mamdani that will suffice for now:

"Today’s military strikes on Iran — carried out by the United States and Israel — mark a catastrophic escalation in an illegal war of aggression. Bombing cities. Killing civilians. Opening a new theater of war.

Americans do not want this. They do not want another war in pursuit of regime change. They want relief from the affordability crisis. They want peace."

https://nitter.net/NYCMayor/status/2027799160574120418

In the 24 hours since our last Hometown release, Mastodon released version 4.5.7, so we have provided a quick release to sync with 4.5.7:

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v4.5.7%2Bhometown-1.2.0

#Hometown #HometownAdmin

Hometown 1.2.0 is now available! It brings Hometown up to date with Mastodon 4.5.6, including all major features introduced in Mastodon 4.3, 4.4 and 4.5.

A million thanks to

who led the charge on this release.

https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/releases/tag/v4.5.6%2Bhometown-1.2.0

#Hometown #HometownAdmin

Feels like I constantly complain about this but man do I hate 2026-era web development stacks!!!

I often find myself looking at a project website that's serving less than a dozen static documents to the end user... why am I looking at Vite and a build process at all???

It's like looking at a McDonald's franchise supply chain (warehouses, trucks, repeatability) and saying, "Yes, that is the appropriate setup for my home kitchen, just in case I one day need to scale it to a worldwide franchise."

Me: Fine. I'll sign up to use a passkey to log in to this particular service. So many people tell me passkeys are the obvious thing to do now. Maybe the experience has gotten better in the last few years since I tried. [Signs up on desktop with 1password]

Service, a week later, on their mobile website: Please sign in with your passkey.

Me: [presses button]

Service: We couldn't find a passkey in your mobile web browser.

Me: Uhhh it's in my 1password app vault?

Service: lol what's that

My favorite thing on Bluesky is a labeler made by the Social Technologies Lab at Cornell Tech.

https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:oubsyca6hhgqhmbbk27lvs7c

It surfaces metadata on posts. Most useful to me is "This person posted more than 50 times yesterday."

It recasts a post like the one pictured. It reminds me to look at their profile and figure out if they are a real person, and are they terminally online, or engagement farming, or what. Then I might block/mute because I don't need people like that in my lifeworld.

delphitools is a collection of small, focused utilities that respect your privacy and work entirely in your browser. No data leaves your machine, no accounts required, no tracking. Just tools that do what they say.

https://tools.rmv.fyi/

Seeking advice. I have many services that require cert renewal for HTTPS. My usual workflow for nginx is:

1. set up a cron job to call certbot monthly (strictly more often than needed for a 90 day cert but I'm lazy)
2. 91 days later, re-cert fails, realize that there was a bug in my script, fix it
3. 91 days later, re-cert fails, realize there was a bug in my script, fix it
4. at this point it probably now works forever

Is there a good way to test things properly so I skip steps 2 and 3??

You discover a file on your hard drive called "eggn.ogg". You play it. What does it sound like?

I think I'm addicted to assembling uniforms for nuns... it's habit forming

I peek at Meta's Threads every now and then. Just saw an ad for an app that lets me bet on things like "what will Mr. Beast say in his next video?" though completely unclear what yes/no means in this context.

I looked it up and this is being considered A Very Serious Company by other very serious companies.

It's just lightly regulated betting, but they call it "direct investment hedging against unpredictable macroeconomic events". I hate our reality

https://www.businessinsider.com/kalshi-cnbc-deal-cnn-data-integration-partnership-2025-12

Websites that let me log in ONLY via email recovery feel like they are personally punishing me as a password manager user... like, come on, I have an awesome, one click, client side way to recall a long unique password for your website but sure, allow me to personally increase your email service bills I guess

In return I get One More Email To Deal With. Thanks pal

Here I am talking a bit about the ActivityPub Fuzzer and how it's intended to help improve interoperability on the Fediverse.

browser extension to replace ✨ with 💩

I remember a while back someone on fedi posted a little thing they built that was a personal url shortener in a single HTML page. If I remember correctly they just loaded in an array of ids and destinations and then you'd point someone to mysite.example/short?id=123 and the page would just redirect via window.location... something like that. Which one of you clever people was this?

I reimplemented it this morning but I wanna see/credit the original

Extremely pleased to announce the release of the ActivityPub Fuzzer! This is a tool that runs in a local development environment and (partially) emulates known ActivityPub software. It can even create a fake local "public fire hose" shaped like what you might see if you hooked your in-development software up to the real Fediverse.

I built this because I wanted ways to test in-progress fedi software for compatibility without actually making it live and breaking things.

https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/2025/10/01/introducing-the-asml-activitypub-fuzzer-improving-testing-in-the-fediverse/

I've learned recently that there are adults who do not know that 1mL of water weighs 1g. If you didn't before, now you know.

I'm sure other people have noted this but at some point we went from talking about "social network sites" to talking about "social media sites".

At first, the network was the thing that mattered. Then, the media was the thing that mattered.

A quick Google Trends query shows the shift might have happened around 2012:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=%22social%20network%20site%22,%22social%20media%20site%22&hl=en

if you are intolerant of people who are tolerant of people who tolerate intolerance, that's the paradox of the paradox of intolerance of tolerance of intolerance

Weird that I can't think of this off the top of my head but... who on the fedi is based in the PNW and is an implementer of / contributor to Fediverse software?

(small projects fine! tinkerers too! technical role or not! just trying to consider who I might be able to wrangle together to talk about stuff because I feel professionally isolated sometimes)

I would like to do some cheap large format (like poster size, not street sign size) printing of poems I like, to put up in my home. Anyone have any hints, tips, and tricks along those lines? Local print shops are great but too expensive for me at the moment for what would just be "text in a pleasing font on a piece of paper, but bigger"

I had to stop everything I was doing today to make this.

I made this neat little e-ink display for my kitchen with bus arrival times and hourly weather. It uses an ESP32 microcontroller device and talks to Home Assistant.

More details here:

https://community.home-assistant.io/t/use-esphome-with-e-ink-displays-to-blend-in-with-your-home-decor/435428/489?u=dariusk

I followed the guide at the top of that thread but made a bunch of changes and posted some annotated code.

"35% of the US stock market is held up by five or six companies buying GPUs."

Ed Zitron, The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

So ARPANET had a famous "Flag Day" where they switched over to TCP/IP in 1983; it required a simultaneous switchover of all host machines to the new protocol. And I know that "flag day" has since referred to big changes like that in networked systems. I assumed the name referred to some bitwise flags set in packet headers. Turns out, the term comes from Multics, when similar coordination was required for an encoding change. It happened on actual US Flag Day 1966!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_day_(computing)

I'm a week late to it but

pretty much sums up my genAI coding feelings here. In particular the piece on aesthetics (probably not the kind of aesthetics you are imagining as you read this!) is going to bounce around in my head for a while.

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

If you spend enough time in the "social media for public good" space, you'll realize there is a subset of people who essentially want to build what I call "Valhalla but for debate club members".

Their vision of a perfect social media experience is endless debate about big important ideas where people constantly get to show off how much more rational and civil they are than each other. The debate never ends. If you are obliterated in the public sphere you are reanimated. It's all in good fun.

Just as "web log" became the even more awkward "blog", I suggest we change "newsletter" into "slet"

Then we can talk about the sletosphere, have startups like sletspot and sletlines, etc. It'll be terrible, as nature intended

Klan Cookout (1983), an Apple II game where you play a person with a flamethrower trying to burn as many KKK members as possible

https://www.mobygames.com/game/138166/klan-cookout/

POV you are Nicole, but I can call you the Fediverse Chick

#justAdminThings

I made a little tool that lets you search the full text of all published Fediverse Enhancement Proposals.

https://fep-search.glitch.me/

It does so privately in your browser using a neat in-browser elasticsearch-type-thing called FlexSearch:

https://github.com/nextapps-de/flexsearch

I'm a simple man: I see a petard, I hoist it

If people at #FOSDEM social web room want to see Hometown's Article support that

mentioned... this is it!

I have a very long, possibly book-length take on LLMs that has been brewing since May 2015 but basically: wow humans love to take something that works extremely well in a certain narrow domain and then bend over backwards to insist it will solve every problem in the universe. (That's a nearly banal observation but the book length part would be tracing the technological, financial, historical, and psychological incentives that make it happen.)

I'm hearing that Nicolas Nova has died. This is a profound loss for the world. On a personal note, he was always so generous and kind to me. I remember he would give me enthusiastic encouragement for my various projects, particularly the ones related to tech history. As my work travel ramps up I was hoping to run into him at various conferences like in the pre-covid days. I'll miss him.

https://www.nicolasnova.net/

Memorial page: https://nicolasnova.org

US House Rep Nancy Mace, a noted anti trans legislator, was speaking on a panel at the Project Liberty Summit. She was disrupted by

. I was walking out of the room when it happened. It was awesome. Evan is doing okay.

https://www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2024-11-21-transgender-digital-rights-activist-confronts-hate-monger-rep-nancy-mace-at-internet-summit/

Edited to add: non TikTok version of video in my reply to this post

Starbucks has proven to me this morning that if you use burnt coffee beans it is in fact possible to burn cold brew

Hi Fediverse denizens. I've been working on a project I hope will help Fediverse devs make software that federates across ALL services, not just Mastodon-plus-a-few-others.

It's called the Fediverse Schema Observatory and before launching it, I am opening up a public comment period re: safety and privacy.

This post lays out what the software does, what data it records, and why I think it's safe to deploy:

https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/fediverseobservatory/

Please give feedback here or at the email in the post!

Me at age 13 in 1996: wow this Clerks movie is funny. I love the star wars monologue

Evil genie: so what I'm hearing is you wish for variants of that monologue to become the dominant form of mainstream cultural commentary

Me: uhhhhhhhhhh

Excited to announce that I will be at #fediforum today speed demo-ing my latest project: an ActivityPub data observatory!

This observatory does not collect any user data or metadata. Instead I am looking at the shape (aka schema) of data being sent around the fediverse. This will let software devs ask questions like "How is a Mastodon 4.2.0 image post formatted differently from a Misskey 2024.7.0 image post?"

And we'll get real answers based on data rather than on poor documentation.

A friend is raising money to help a Black trans person manage their chronic illness. I know they'd really appreciate any donations:

https://gofund.me/86e165a3

On Sep 12 the Applied Social Media Lab (where I work) is hosting “Beyond Discourse Dumpster Fires: Strategies and Tools for Better Online Civil Space" to explore new ideas for healthier and more satisfying online communication.

I'm particularly excited to hear from

!

RSVP here, online via Zoom or (limited) in-person tickets in Cambridge MA: https://brk.mn/discourse

There will also be a recording available afterwards, so those who do not use Zoom can still watch!

For sale: clown shoes. Honk honk.

Since January,

and I have been researching governance on Mastodon and Hometown servers of about 80-2000 people. That research is now available!!!

Blog post: https://write.as/fediversalist-papers/releasing-our-findings

Paper: https://fediverse-governance.github.io/

Special thanks to the participants we interviewed, you all were so great.

I just witnessed some software transcribe "Fediverse" as "Feddy bears" which.. do I need to start a new server??

putting the "posi" in "ovipositor"

I've been building a Facebook Events style event organizing system for the Fediverse. It's based on the simple, open source, privacy-respecting event organizing tool https://gath.io

The attached video is a work-in-progress preview and shows compatibility with Mastodon. My hope is to get it working with lots of software, including stuff like Friendica that supports events and calendars.

Check out more at my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/organizing-on-32729070