Table of contents:

1. The internet is bad
2. The invention of the automobile
3. Tools for Conviviality & the industrialization of the Web
4. The Web we want
5. So where do we go from here?
6. Denouement

Illich’s thesis is that technology and its derived tools should serve people in a way that enhances their freedom, creativity, independence, and will.
The distillation of those principles on the web through manual code, hand-built social networks, and blogs, points luminously to one answer to the question of how the Internet can best serve humans:

1. Start small
2. Reduce friction to publish
3. Don't worry about design (unless you want to)
4. Use the IndieWeb
5. Join us in sharing what you've made

For a software release, it is relevant to include what the software is doing.

I just have no idea what three quarters of these projects actually do. When you announce a new release, please give us (your adoring but slightly confused audience) just a tiny bit of context. What the software does, why the release is cool and what it requires to work.

Sometime around the 2020 era, we lost the right to be mediocre at things we love.

No longer can you just bake bread...you must start a sourdough side hustle lol. Wanna stay fit and go jogging or running? Nah, you gotta optimize your biometrics for a marathon. What my point is that every hobby has been enshittified and gentrified into a brand opportunity.

This strange infatuation with optimization culture is killing the human spirit.

So this new year, starting tomorrow, one of my resolutions is to do something bad but fun. Maybe I write a terrible poem. I like to draw and paint, so perhaps I will draw a horse that looks like a table or sing off-key in the showers or in front of my loved ones. The algorithm driving the mainstream social media wants me to be a polished product, but my humanity lives in these messy, unoptimized, cringe-inducing joyful failures.

I will try to reclaim the right to be an amateur. Will you join me?

Our little planet just can't stop chatting about nonsense, and scramblers know only one use for information: to perceive it. They can't help but listen to all our yapping that only wastes their precious brain cycles and reduces their chances of survival. No peaceful species would do this.

For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. [...] The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity. In contrast, AI made all media cheap. But AI only talks in response. So a human must use it.

"There's nothing wrong with using AI. because the transaction between the AI and the user is fully consensual. But whenever you propagate AI output, you're at risk of legitimizing it with your good name, providing it with a fake proof-of-thought." It can be fine because the output is owned, but in other cases, it's not. Our scrambler brain feels betrayed in this case.

A contact page that avoid contact, exactly.

The problem was, they were thinking about their inspiration sites from an aesthetic point of view, not from a user experience perspective

I see this example so much! https://res.cloudinary.com/nicchan/image/upload/w_752,h_718,c_lfill,f_auto/v1765177043/contact

The discounting rates led the client to undervalue the team and treat them as executors rather than experts. They argue that clients (and sometimes designers) often dismiss early design phases like discovery, and wireframing as boring hurdles to reach visual branding, but it's so much important! The takeaway is that service providers should educate clients on why these foundational steps matter, because understanding the “why” and getting structure right is essential for good design—even if it’s less exciting than prototyping or visual identity.

#blogging

By blogging, I’m putting a body of work out there that communicates my values and ethos. While much of the details of my client work has to remain private, these posts can be public, and hopefully they can help me find people who resonate with what I have to offer. Or you know, just be bold enough to communicate ‘Fuck off’ to those who don’t!

Modern technology is abusive, but FOSS is certainly no silver bullet. [...] People have been trained to be abused by software and by hardware, to ignore their needs, to accept any change as inevitable

There are things avoidable: Internet-connected beds, AI browsers, unrepairable devices, requiring smartphones, NFTs, The Metaverse, update changes, ads, Meta-owned, Apple Vision pro, Copilot PCs

nothing sold by powerful grifters is "the future" no matter how much they wish that were true.

The driving factor is what constitutes a desirable future and which actions get us closer or further from that.

Generic software design: It’s “designing to the problem”: the kind of advice you give when you have a reasonable understanding of the domain, but very little knowledge of the existing codebase. [...] When you’re doing real work, concrete factors dominate generic factors.

In large codebases:

• consistency is more important than "good design". Read Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases.
• Real codebases are typically full of complex, hard-to-predict consequences.
• Large shared codebases never reflect a single design, but are always in some intermediate state between different software designs. How the codebase will hang together after an individual change is thus way more important than the "north star"

The majority of software engineering work is done on systems that cannot be safely rewritten.

1. Generic software design advice is useful for building brand-new project
2. Generic software design advice is useful for tie-breaking concrete design decisions.
3. Generic software design principles can also guide company-wide architectural decisions.

We won’t sell you data, pinky promise… - in early 2025 a formal Firefox Terms of Use was introduced, which included a clause granting Mozilla a “non-exclusive, royalty-free, worldwide licence” to use user-entered data. At the same time, they quietly removed explicit “never sell user data” language from privacy messaging. Brilliant.

Firefox's leadership is out of touch with their users

Les gens choisissent

• Shein vs La Redoute
• Amazon vs Carrefour
• Starlink vs Eutelsat
• Tesla ou BYD vs Renault Zoé
• ChatGPT vs Mistral
• Netflix vs Salto

Simplement parce que c'est mieux, plus efficace, moins cher

La souveraineté ne peut pas servir d'excuse à l'échec

"social network" are not social and their content are built to be temporary.
That's why Pixelfeld is used differently from Mastodon.

AI companies are losing money fast and are going to go under. One of the most obvious ways to compensate for this is through advertising.

Except that you won't be able to detect this advertising, since it will be mixed in with the content.

What is the best VPN?
How do you treat a skin problem?
You won't be able to tell if the answer has been biased. You won't be able to tell if the AI is really giving the best “advice” or if it's advertising a brand of skin cream or a molecule from a large laboratory.
Extend this to economics and politics, and—as with online ad auctions—it's the highest bidder that will be able to influence you.

And all these AI companies are desperately in need of money.

All is in the title. There are many misuse of weak encryption showed as examples.

Building an independent web browsers. It's technically feasible and could cost 50-70 millions per year. In comparison, the national space agency costs 7-8 billions and the European union planned 300 millions in digital architecture over the next years.

The Europe rely currently heavily on US technologies, even Firefox is in the US.

Servo is an example of web browser built with 5 engineers, funded by a small company and individual donations.

The core challenge isn’t technical; it’s institutional. It can work though: CERN, European Space Agency, the Internet Engineering Task Force.

Success here would demonstrate that democratic societies can coordinate effectively on complex technical infrastructure and pass the first hurdle. Failure would reveal institutional gaps that need addressing before attempting more ambitious digital sovereignty goals.

Testing sucks because you try to test implementation details. This results in you writing tests to pass your code. That’s not useful, because…

Instead, you should…

1. Write an empty test, with one comment for each external behavior your code should display.
2. Write the code to test each comment below it.
3. Then write the actual code to make it so.

Rust is not just great, it's inevitable. [...] like solar

If you compare this map of solar energy potential from Global Solar Atlas to this table of current solar capacity, you will easily see that we are still at the beginning of the solar revolution.

The same is true for Rust. Improved reliability, reduced time-to-market, far lower costs. Which rational actor wouldn't want that? As the Cloudflare, Proton and Signal case studies have demonstrated, investing in Rust today will yield far better returns than other technological investments you can make

An interview of Jon Gjengset.

Topics covered:
• Rust salaries and job market trends in 2025
• AI’s impact on Rust development and software engineering
• Why Rust adoption is growing
• Rust vs Go and C++ — performance, safety, and real-world trade-offs
• The borrow checker and how it makes you a better programmer
• Why AI can’t (yet) replace software engineers

Gaming on Linux has never been easier and Windows is tiring (OneDrive push, Recall, Cortana and AI, Office 365 subscriptions)

« Si vous n’avez rien à cacher, vous n’avez rien à craindre »

La question est celle de la légitimité d’un pouvoir – étatique ou privé – à s’immiscer dans nos vies sans justification, sans limite et sans contrôle.

Le juriste Daniel Solove a démontré que l’argument « rien à cacher » n’a recours qu’à un seul type de préjudice : la découverte d’une activité illégale. Mais la réalité est infiniment plus complexe. L’agrégation de données « innocentes » – vos achats, vos trajets, vos recherches internet – peut servir à vous discriminer pour une assurance, vous refuser un emploi, vous placer sur une liste de surveillance. Vous n’aviez rien à cacher. Le système a créé quelque chose à vous reprocher.

La reconnaissance faciale provoque des faux-positifs: l’innocent devient soudainement coupable par décret algorithmique. Ces algorithmes sont biaisés, par exemple pour identifier le genre des femmes à peau foncée qui a 43 fois plus d'erreurs.

"rien à cacher" est donc un argument de privilégié. [...]