“The more access dads have to paternity leave, the better able they are to adjust to parenthood, helping also make them more effective co-parents as their children get older.”

when greater awareness of mental illness leads people to talk of normal life struggles in terms of “symptoms” and “diagnoses.” These sorts of labels begin to dictate how people view themselves, in ways that can become self-fulfilling.

Teenagers, who are still developing their identities, are especially prone to take psychological labels to heart. Instead of “I am nervous about X,” a teenager might say, “I can’t do X because I have anxiety” — a reframing that research shows undermines resilience by encouraging people to view everyday challenges as insurmountable.

It’s generally a sign of progress when diagnoses that were once whispered in shameful secrecy enter our everyday vocabulary and shed their stigma. But especially online, where therapy “influencers” flood social media feeds with content about trauma, panic attacks and personality disorders, greater awareness of mental health problems risks encouraging self-diagnosis and the pathologizing of commonplace emotions — what Dr. Foulkes calls “problems of living.” When teenagers gravitate toward such content on their social media feeds, algorithms serve them more of it, intensifying the feedback loop.

The web is a haystack, not a library.

Last week I analyzed roughly 14,000 feed URLs from FeedLand and Indieblog.page to find the most common feed URL patterns and locations. Dave took that list and turned it into Feed Hunter, a package for simple feed URL discovery.

If there are any common feed locations you know of not taken into account here, open an issue!

To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it).

Coming at life this way definitely entails tough choices. But it’s liberating, too, as you slowly begin to grasp that you never had any other option. There’s no point beating yourself up for failing to clear a backlog (of unread books, undone tasks, unrealized dreams) that it was always inherently unfeasible to clear in the first place.

Found my blog in this list. Cool!

And Dave Winer’s reply on Scripting.com.

New Andreessen manifesto just dropped.

We believe this is why our descendents will live in the stars.

The Secret Society of Newsletter Authors and the International League of Bloggers don’t often see eye-to-eye, but they are very clear on some rules. One of them states that when you have a birthday, you have to publish a list.

You should write because when you know that you’re going to write, it changes the way you live.

That’s the promise: you will live more curiously if you write. You will become a scientist, if not of the natural world than of whatever world you care about. More of that world will pop alive. You will see more when you look at it.

Cool site cataloging footer designs, h/t Anh.

Wow, this is a beautiful, aspirational digital garden. h/t Anh.

I’m loving this image prompt injection people are doing with GPT-4V. Much more interesting than text prompt injection, IMO.

Incredible. Here is the direct link to the archive: https://wholeearth.info

Ryan Barrett’s comparison of IndieWeb, ActivityPub, ATProto, and Nostr protocols.

I’m quoted in this article!

9-year-old blogger on why neighborhoods should have speedbumps, and the real-world difference it made for her freedom:

when construction workers installed speed bumps on the street in front of our house it was very useful to me because my parents decided to let me cross that street, and now I can go to the park and my friends house and a bunch of other places without my parents having to walk me there.

Unfortunately, there’s also a race to the bottom, and you get a lot of junk. It’s the junk that people don’t like. Marketing that they like, people don’t call junk.

A lot of car heads will say, “No, no, no, I just buy the best car.” And I would say to them, “No, you buy the car that tells your story the best way possible.”

Anybody who has actually done marketing — not worked in a marketing department and gone to meetings, but actually done marketing — has found that the only thing that matters is empathy.

COWEN: Jeff Koons — how does his work strike you? Genius, fraud, something else?

GODIN: Anyone who’s willing to go that close to bankruptcy that many times cannot be a fraud.

You don’t teach them the history of baseball, give them the baseball encyclopedia, quiz them about Abner Doubleday, and if they do well on the test, let them go to a game. What you do is get them enrolled in the journey of being a baseball fan because five minutes of it was fun, and they want it again. The next thing you know, they’re learning statistics because they want to. They’re learning facts because they want to, not because there’s going to be a test.

I like the idea of using a rewrite rule instead of robots.txt, though that still assumes the crawlers are actually their own useragent rather than emulating a regular user.

The heart of this fight boils down to whether we accept that generative AI training on copyrighted material is an inevitability. This is the stance Stephen King recently took after finding out that his work is in Books3. “Would I forbid the teaching (if that is the word) of my stories to computers? Not even if I could. I might as well be King Canute, forbidding the tide to come in. Or a Luddite trying to stop industrial progress by hammering a steam loom to pieces,” he wrote.

This was a good project to work on and I’m proud of it.

You can’t ignore when Jony Ive jumps into something.