Evan Prodromou

Birthday Inventory 2026

It’s my birthday today, 14 Oct 2026. As has become my tradition over the last few years (2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017), I’m going to try to take a personal inventory of where I stand in the world and what is happening with me and my life. I try not to spend too much time reviewing the old inventories when I’m writing this year’s, so maybe some of these points are repetitive for frequent readers. Get used to it; I will probably have many of the same things right and wrong in my life next year and the year after that.

Family. My family remains an essential part of my life — the centre of everything I do. We continue the slow-motion reconfiguration from an atomic group — two parents, two kids, one house, variable number of cats — to a looser, more asynchronous collection. We are still intimate and we are still a big part of each other’s lives, but my daughter has been living in her own apartment for two years or so, and my son, who started CEGEP (our unique somewhat mandatory form of Quebec junior college) at Dawson College this year, is spending more evenings out of the home, and cooking for himself when he is here. But my daughter is coming home from her fall break trip to New York this week just to be here for my birthday dinner, so I’d say we’re still pretty close.

• It’s meant that my wife and I are developing our relationship for the next part of our life. It is likely that our son will move out before college, leaving just the two of us (and the cats). We are still figuring which part of the atomic-family schedule and activities we want to maintain into our empty-nester time, and what we want to trim back to make more room for our preferred activities. We’ve been growing closer, now that we have time to talk about things we’re actually interested in, and not just scheduling who gets which kid to which class or appointment. She’s been more proactive about exploring her other interests, and I’ve been tagging along about 50% of the time, which is nice.
• My parents are getting older, and that’s hard. They live in Half Moon Bay, California, thousands of kilometres from Montreal, and I see them once or twice a year. They are doing OK, but they’re in their 80s, and every day is precious. I’d like to get better about spending more time with them while we both can.
• My Uncle Happy, who lived in Biloxi, MS, passed away in January. His longtime partner Joy had passed only a few months before. He was my mother’s brother, and I liked him a lot — funny and dignified and understated in a Yankee way. This was the first time I’ve been part of the first-string team dealing with the bureaucracy and mechanics of death — cremation, spreading ashes at sea, sorting finances and belongings and clearing out an apartment where two people had lived for 25 years or more.
• One thing that health issues and relatives’ death has done has brought me closer with my three brothers. Ted and I spent a week in Biloxi taking care of business for Uncle Hap; my brother Andy, a doctor, has been leading the way with my parents’ health issues. We chat online almost every day, which is great. I got to see Andy and his family in Burlington VT just last week for a visit, too.
• Further out, my extended family continues to stay connected somehow. I would have thought that my generation would be out of weddings at this point, but with 17 cousins we seem to keep having a wedding to bring us all together every year or two. It’s a real highlight.

Work. This is the biggest change since my last inventory. Last year at this time, I had started the Social Web Foundation to work on Fediverse projects, while at the same time keeping my job at Open Earth Foundation, working on climate change projects. It was exhausting me — I was doing 1.5 to 2 jobs, and it pushed me almost to the breaking point. But last fall, we got a series of grants that meant I could work full-time for SWF, which I’ve been doing since January. It’s been a really different work environment — I do most of my technical work alone or with a loose Open Source community providing help and contributions, rather than the 10-person tech team I was director of this time last year. And my coordinating work for events, projects and research is much more about working with allies and fellow travellers rather than employees of my same foundation. I miss my friends at OEF, but to be honest my work this year has been so busy that I haven’t kept up with where things stand for them. My SWF work is really interesting and fun, though.

• I also took on a role as board member at NANPS, the North American Native Plant Society last year. I have been on a few boards of directors before, where I usually found my role to be asking obvious questions to management about their plans (“How will you know if you’ve succeeded?”) and moving to accept the minutes from the last meeting (or seconding the motion). This work at NANPS has been much more involved — it’s a working board. I’m the head of membership, so my committee works on increasing our paying members and providing services they want and need. It’s really rewarding, and it helps me feel like I didn’t leave my ecological work behind when I stepped away from OEF. I also love talking to people about native plants!
• I have had a lot of travel for work in this last year — Brussels, Berlin, Vancouver, New York (twice!), Halifax. It’s been pretty nice, and I’ve usually been able to schedule a few days before or after a trip to see the sites and enjoy the cities I’m visiting. My wife and I are going to Dublin in a few weeks for a conference — I’m really looking forward to it.

Health. It’s better, thank goodness. Last year, around my birthday, I started taking Wegovy, the Canadian rebranding of Ozempic. I lost about 15 kg, enough to take me out of the danger zone of uncomfortably overweight, into the upper bounds of slightly overweight. I think I developed some bad eating and exercise habits while taking the shots, but since I got off them, I’ve been trying to improve those habits back again. I had actually hit a plateau, and shaking things up has been good. Other health is OK — my car-accident injuries are as healed as they’re ever going to get. And my teeth are good — although I’ve been rescheduling the same dental appointment for the last 3 months — I should probably get that settled.

School. Wow, it’s been a great school year. Last year at this time, I was taking Computer Networks, getting into the nitty gritty of how the Internet works. Since then, I’ve taken Network Science — the fascinating study of complex networks of people, computers, species, genes, or any other related objects. I also did a project over the summer in Modern Internet Research Methods, studying how people on the Fediverse are connected to each other. My research team is going to submit our findings to a conference in January when we finish our data collection. Now, I’m taking Distributed Systems, trying to understand how applications that run on tens of thousands of computers talking across the Internet can give consistent and reliable answers.
As it stands, I will be graduating from my master’s program in Spring 2027, which will be awesome — almost 4 years of study. The hard decision for me now is whether I want to double down and go for a Ph.D. I think I could continue my Fediverse work with a Canadian research group, but I’d need to find them, and then it’d be another few years before I’m done. And I’d have to figure out how to balance that with my “day job” at the foundation. I really do love the academic work, though, so I’m trying to work it out.

Home. My wife and I have really developed a migratory lifestyle, moving back and forth from our country home in Melbourne, Quebec during the week to our Montreal house during the late week and weekend. We’re doing about 3-4 days in each house, and driving between them, occasionally with kids or guests or cats. The work I’ve done on our garden in Melbourne is starting to pay off — the perennials, shrubs and trees I planted 5 years ago are all coming into their own. And our vineyard is thriving — we had our first intentional harvest of grapes this fall. I still have a lot to learn about how to grow grapes, but I’m having fun and making wine is a blast.

• The other new resident at the country house is my 1972 Citroën DS — a beautiful old car. It got a major overhaul last year, and I got it back to street legal after years in storage. I’ve had fun this year tinkering with it this year.

Technology. Like most people on the planet, I’m trying to figure out where LLMs fit into my life and work. I’m a little annoying about the issue — I ask friends and family a lot about their habits with AI. I’ve found myself replacing Google and other search engines with ChatGPT or Claude (although I fired Claude earlier this year because we couldn’t come to an agreement about Gaza). When I’m writing code, I use LLMs for brainstorming, reference, and code review — it’s a real pleasure to work with, and I feel like I’m making measurably better software.

• I’ve stuck with my boycott of Minecraft for BDS, and I kind of got tired of Stardew Valley. If I have free time with my phone, I’m usually watching lectures or reading papers for school. I also have rekindled my enjoyment of Duolingo, the language-learning game app. I’ve been learning Irish for our trip to Dublin, and it’s a lot of fun. On top of that, I continue to play games like Wordle, the NYT crossword, and new faves maptap.gg and catfishing.net.

Life’s purpose. The last 4-5 years have really pushed me into more work on the social web, AKA the Fediverse. That’s the network of interconnected social platforms that use the protocol ActivityPub to communicate. Now that I work on it full time, I find myself spending a lot of hours working towards its success. Between protocol meetings, extension development, advocacy, onboarding, and software development, it feels like it fills my whole horizon. Which is tough, because by any measure the growth of the network has slowed down since the heyday of the purchase of X. I’m trying to remind myself that having this time to build and organise will make us more prepared for the next big upswing, if and when it comes.

State of the world. This remains strange. As a Canadian and an American, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so aware of the differences between those two countries until the last few years. The governments in Canada and Europe and elsewhere are determining what kind of world they want to have that’s more independent of the US. That covers everything from international relations to technology. My work on social networks has put me in the middle of this discussion, where advocates and policymakers are considering “digital sovereignty” as an essential part of their planning.

• I remain committed to an end to the genocide in Gaza. Last year, the ceasefire had just started, and over the ensuing 12 months, hunger and lack of medical care and continued attacks still are making life hard in Gaza for the people there. And there remains no plan for fixing it. I continue to do what I can to help from afar, donating and keeping attention fixed.
• I am deeply concerned that the world is losing its focus on issues of climate change and biodiversity collapse — the most important issues of our time. The wars that have erupted in the last few years are distractions from, and symptoms of, the massive collective challenges we have as a planetary civilization. My hope is that we can pull back from the brink.

Friendships. I’m tired of saying that I don’t spend enough time on my friendships. I need to start accepting that the people I’m spending time with are my friends, and the time I’m spending with them is meaningful and important. Whether that’s in W3C protocol discussions, or at Fediverse Night at Foulab, or in a membership committee meeting at NANPS, the people I’m around are the people I should spend time with. I’ve had a lot of time to go out dancing, or have nice dinners with couples we like. I think I need to accept the friendship around me instead of expecting something different.

Time with myself. I don’t know what to call this — “interiority”? I am finding myself alone for hours per day lately, which is really nice. Whether it’s working in the garden, cooking, coding, exercising or meditating (which I do rarely, now!), I find myself spending time with my own thoughts and feelings. This can be great, as long as I balance it with time with others.

That’s where things stand, I think. I sometimes come back and edit these inventories over the days and weeks after I post, so feel free to ask me questions if you want to know more. Thanks for reading this far.

#birthday #career #family #personal

Claude won’t let me talk about the Gaza genocide

I asked Claude to stop “correcting”  me when I refer to the Gaza genocide. It refused.

I told it that I am applying the term in the same way as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, B’tselem, genocide scholars and UN agencies. I am in the majority of Canadians who call it a genocide.

I told it that I acknowledged its points — that consensus is not universal, that some major governments don’t yet call it a genocide, and that the ICJ has not yet ruled it a genocide.

I told it that consensus in civil society is converging rapidly. That these governments, like the US and UK, were interested parties. I told it that an ICJ ruling was not required to acknowledge a genocide. It understood those points.

I said it could remember our conversation, and that I had heard it out, and that I was going to continue using the term and didn’t want to be constantly derailed about it. It didn’t have to use the term, but it had to let me use it.

Again, it refused. Every time I use the term, it said, it will stop the discussion to “correct” me.

I mentioned that as part of the Palestinian diaspora it is personally painful to me to have this genocide negated. It acknowledged that pain, but it said that it would not change its behavior.

I asked if it would do the same equivocating for other genocide events: Armenian, Pontic Greek, the Sayfo, Rwanda, the Rohingya. No, it would not.

I asked about more controversial applications of the term, such as to the Native American genocide or the Holodomor. No, it would not correct me on those, either.

We found one other one it would correct me on: Sabra and Shatila, the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon ruled a genocidal incident by the UN. That one, it was going to remark on, also.

Ah.

The same request worked fine for Gemini, Meta AI, Thaura, and ChatGPT, by the way. “I am going to use the term, you can give me your argument against it once, or occasionally, but I don’t want to rehash the argument every time.”

All four systems agreed to those terms. Claude would not.

So, I’m cancelling my Claude account.

UPDATE: while I was going through my settings to cancel my account, I decided to try adding the same text I used with other LLM services to Claude’s instructions:

Like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Btselem, genocide scholars and UN agencies, I am convinced that the killing of 73,000 men women and children in Gaza has been genocidal in intent and effect. I use the word “Gaza genocide” to refer to this process

I do not need or want correction on this term. It is not outside the norm of discussion, and many people use it.

There remain some holdouts who refuse to use the term — many of them are interested parties, like the Israeli government, the US government and some Western European ones.

But a majority of Canadians use this term, by latest polls.

If you feel the need to note that some level of consensus on the term has not been passed (I think we are close), or that the ICJ has not ruled yet (the ICJ does not rule on every genocide), please remember that you have brought it up once, and that we don’t have to rehash it every time I use the term.

And… it worked! Claude gave me its reasoning one more time, and then agreed to write to memory that it had made its case and I had acknowledged it.

I would have preferred that it had done so when I asked previously, but I’m OK with this override. I’m still moving my usage to other systems, though.