Hey! If you care deeply about the open web, I hope you’ll consider joining our team at Fastly. We get to support open source and good internet projects ranging from Scratch to Kubernetes, Watch Duty to Mastodon, Python to Perl, Ruby to Rust, and many, many more. We’ve committed nearly $100M in resources to making the Internet better, and helping to build healthy, sustainable communities. And we haven’t wavered one bit in our inclusive hiring policies.
Jobs at Fastly
We’re always looking for humble, sharp, and creative folks to join the Fastly team. If you think you might be a fit, please apply!
This is a monumental day for the future of the social web, though it might not be obvious for a while. Mastodon matures its governance model with a great, solid non-profit
Mastodon Blog
The people should own the town square
It is more important than ever that the social web is not controlled by corporations. Today, Mastodon is taking another step towards its founding i...
 and a coalition of independents push to open up Bluesky's AT Protocol:
Free Our Feeds
Free Our Feeds
 These two moves together put the most credible players on solid ground for years to come — and set up the open platforms to enable lots of innovation just when it's needed most.
We’ve been watching the Watch Duty team do absolutely *unbelievable* technical work all week (they’re members of the Fast Forward open source program that my team at Fastly works on), handling a surge of millions of people trying to see where the LA fires are in real time. Amidst the hopelessness of the fires causing so much destruction, there’s hope in seeing people taking care of each other in this way. There are still people who do such good on the internet.
Gizmodo
Watch Duty App Creator Says He'll Never Pull an OpenAI
Gizmodo spoke with the creator of the app that provides vital alerts about evacuations.
Here's a quick piece I wrote up on how to understand DOGE as a very blatant attempt at procurement capture, a simple way of making government spending corrupt to benefit the tycoons. Please do pass it along & share any feedback!
Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture - Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
I think everyone who has an opinion, positive or negative, about LLMs, should read how @npub1gv26...tlwl summed up what’s happened in the space this year. He’s the most credible, most independent, most honest, and most technically fluent person watching the space.
Simon Willison’s Weblog
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
A lot has happened in the world of Large Language Models over the course of 2024. Here’s a review of things we figured out about the field in the...
It is such a stupid and obvious market failure that nobody has made a consumer AI LLM product that is 1. trained on consensually-acquired material 2. powered with renewable energy 3. genuinely open about its weights and models. Just achieving these things and being creator-friendly would be massive.
The NY Times refuses to cover the murder of Yeremi Colino, which took place in Manhattan the same day as the murder of the UHC CEO, because Colino was an immigrant child killed by a white supremacist who asked whether he could speak English. Just like NYPD refuses to carry out the same kind of manhunt with hourly updates on the killer. They only care about corporate tycoons, not teenagers being killed. This is how they cover for the hate crime.
Today is a great time to make @npub1m24q...d9a3 the beneficiary of your generosity, specifically to help protect privacy for activists working on vital efforts to protect human rights and reproductive rights. I'll match the first $5000 in donations, just go to eff.org/anil and be as generous as you can, then DM me so I can match it!
Hi everybody! In anticipation of doing more writing, I’ve brought all 25 years of my blog archives online, cleaned up lots of dead links, and even added a basic search capability. I hope there’s something there you find valuable! (And let me know what I should write about next.)
Anil Dash
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
I wanna say something to people who work in tech-related jobs in America: this is still a field where most people hate the rise of fascism and want to stop it. I know the media & amplification of the tycoons makes it seem like that’s the whole industry. But it’s not. And we still have power.