by Matthew Lyon  • 

Some Actions That Are Not Protesting or Voting

Not everyone can take to the streets, and anyone telling you that you need to broadcast what you’re doing is an op.

Without a Trace: How to Take Your Phone Off the Grid

Do you feel like you just ran a marathon after reading that? Do you need a moment to process? I sure did.

Quite the system we’ve built here, isn’t it?

Building a Community Privacy Plan

The EFF with a good introduction for people who want to help those they care about communicate with privacy.

40+ sources of news and information for the US in 2025

In case you’re revisiting what goes into your information diet.

You can take my em dashes from my cold, dead hands

Perhaps it’s no surprise that a new pseudoscience has developed to help real live humans spot AI generated writing. Everything from adverbs to metaphors to the Oxford comma are suspect, including my beloved em dash.

Em dashes are a sign of good typography practice — a hyphen - carries a different meaning from an en dash – or an em dash —.

The Generative AI Con

Their narrative is built on a mixture of hysteria, hype, and deeply cynical hope in the hearts of men that dream of automating away jobs that they would never, ever do themselves.

Ed’s highly linear outline structure for the opening to this piece is in many ways the opposite of spatial thinking. Anyway it’s no coincidence that many of the people so heavily into NFTs and the like are now in AI.

Tech continues to be poltical

“Tech” was always a vague and hand-waving field – a way to side-step regulations while starting an unlicensed taxi company or hotel chain. That was never my interest.

I wish more of my colleagues understood this.

Software Development is…

Software itself is the most prescriptive technology ever! It does the same thing over and over in as many copies as we choose.

Software development is wonderfully holistic. It needs one mind understanding it, implementing it, integrating it, operating it.

THE REALITY OF LONG-TERM SOFTWARE MAINTENANCE FROM THE MAINTAINER’S PERSPECTIVE

 The term software rot aptly describes how unmaintained software still degrades over time, almost like some organic substance that starts to rot, even if the actual program data is perfectly preserved.

Our first house was a farmhouse built in 1926; it was purchased by a firefighter in the 1950s, who proceeded to take it through at least seven different unpermitted remodeling projects, each of which seemed — to us who bought the house in 2014 — like they were performed to satisfy particular, immediate needs, without thought for how the particular project would integrate into the whole or how it would impede future development.

Sound familiar?