🦊 Friday was my last day working at 18F. It was a wonderful place to work, filled with extraordinary people, but a few things happened that made me realize I had to leave. Everything happens so much these days, so I thought I’d write down for myself what happened, and how I made my decision:

Moving on from 18F. — ethanmarcotte.com

I had a wonderful job, until I didn’t. This is about what happened—and what is still happening.

(FYI, this post gets into recent #uspol events. If that’s a stressor, or not interesting to you, I’d suggest skipping.)

You absolutely owe it to yourself to read @npub1szda...5a79’s post on “artificial intelligence”, eugenics, and the tech industry’s push to ally itself to an explicitly fascist project:

Miriam Eric Suzanne

Tech continues to be political

And the politics aren't looking great

exactly which part of the zodiac do i have to fistfight in order to fix everything

Today was a really, really hard day. But someone came sprinting when she heard me walk in the door, so that counts for something. 💜

“hey, your plagiarism machine stole from MY plagiarism machine” — tech ceos in 2025, apparently

The Verge

OpenAI has evidence that its models helped train China’s DeepSeek

Sucking in data you didn’t ask permission for? Sounds familiar.

Hey, Apple users: if you install the latest iOS, iPadOS, or macOS updates, you’ll be automatically opted into “Apple Intelligence”. If you don’t want that running on your computer, you’ll need to go into Settings to disable it. (this is far from the most pressing thing happening today, but just a heads-up)

🦊 Heck yeah, I love a good blogging challenge! Thanks so much to @npub10gp9...t9wk and @npub1r9mc...eqjq for sending it my way!

A challenge of blog questions. — ethanmarcotte.com

Jon and Naz kindly tagged me into a blogging challenge! Namely, to answer a set of questions about how I blog, and why.

#blogging

me in my twenties: oh neat, a free program me in my forties: oh neat, a free program, what horrors are concealed within