Crank.report Survey

To the mothers who shaped me.

Especially the three in this photo.

Communities frequently fail children across five sectors of their lived experience: ages of criminal responsibility, juvenile detention, child labor, immigration enforcement, and foster care. Policies in each area combine with economic and social conditions to limit opportunity and perpetuate harm. Examining these systems side by side reveals a pattern: children most at risk are those whose families, schools, and communities cannot buffer against structural deprivation. International comparisons demonstrate that the U.S. approach is a policy choice, not an inevitability. Countries like Norway and Sweden prioritize education, family, and social services rather than criminalization, showing that alternative paths are possible, practical, and effective.

Criminalizing Childhood: When the Justice System Fails America’s Youth - CounterPunch.org

This outlines the system’s change we need to work toward.

Ultimately, why not just build a “meta-paper,” using AI, to answer any possible question about the subject area under consideration. This meta-paper would allow the reader, using AI, to make many sorts of modifications and additions to the basic work. The meta-paper also would allow the reader to add new data, to run additional robustness checks, and to do whatever else you might think of. Once again, the canonical version of the paper evolves away.

[Will AI kill the research paper? - Marginal REVOLUTION](marginalrevolution.com/marginalr…

Thoth stores durable knowledge as entities and typed relationships, not just chat snippets. It can save, search, link, explore, visualize, and export your knowledge graph as an Obsidian-compatible wiki vault, while background extraction and Dream Cycle refine duplicates, stale confidence, missing relationships, and actionable insights.

GitHub - siddsachar/Thoth: Thoth - Personal AI Sovereignty. A local-first AI assistant with integrated tools, a personal knowledge graph, voice, vision, shell, browser automation, scheduled tasks, health tracking, and messaging channels. Run locally via Ollama or add opt-in cloud models. Your data stays on your machine. · GitHub

I’m using LM Studio for most of my local AI work. Haven’t quite graduated to doing anything more sophisticated.

Being successful with this approach to coding agents hinges on a rather crucial element: only a skilled developer who’s thinking critically, and comfortable operating at the architectural level, can spot issues in the thousands of lines of generated code, before they become a problem.

Agentic Coding is a Trap | Lars Faye

It’s like developers are now experiencing what anyone who has paid for a technology project feels.

More New-To-Me Photo Gear

At the East Bay Photo Collective Gear Sale, I bought a Nikon FE and Nikkor-Q Auto 135mm f/3.5 lens. It’s my second Nikon FE, the first I bought about 35 years ago. Anyway. New gear meant another photo walk. This one was in Berkeley’s Aquatic Park. I am learning the lens which requires using the depth of field lever, something I’m not used to doing. You can see the trial and error in a few of the shots.

These skills are designed to be small, easy to adapt, and composable. They work with any model. They’re based on decades of engineering experience. Hack around with them. Make them your own. Enjoy.

GitHub - mattpocock/skills: Skills for Real Engineers. Straight from my .claude directory. · GitHub

Interesting model to apply inside a workplace and in the nonprofit sector broadly.

But corruption also has a broader meaning. It can mean the malign use of power, the substitution of the public trust for your own private will, your own private interest. And that is more than anything else what is happening with the Supreme Court.

Jamelle Bouie via kottke

Advocates say that if made official, the new rule will prevent scores of unhoused transgender people from accessing safe emergency sleeping arrangements.

Trans people could be banned from homeless shelters soon

Another inhumane action.

Next time you’re in a design review, before you add your two cents, ask yourself the question: does this help the user, or does it help me?

Your website is not for you — Websmith Studio

This.

All six forms of psychological debt have the potential to cause damage to organizations pursuing AI integration strategies in a variety of ways: degrading employee motivation; corrupting collaboration and innovation efforts; and creating higher levels of stress and burnout.

The Psychological Costs of Adopting AI

Keeping team member agency while integrating and using AI is very important.

Taking human experience, which is beautifully ambiguous and nuanced and nondeterministic, and trying to fit it into a database shape, is inherently extractive. Nilay points out that it flattens people, which is totally true, but it also transfers ownership of that experience from their subjective truth into a centralized database that someone else controls, sets the standards for, and profits from.

Notable links: May 1, 2026

This is balance nonprofits need to struggle with as they understand how and where to use AI. How do we keep the texture of experience? How do we keep the agency of it in our community?

The beautiful thing about communities and platforms like Flickr is that they remind us that not everything on the internet has to be ephemeral, not everything on the web has to be hyper-commercial.

Why are the Artemis II photos on Flickr? - Anil Dash

Flickr was — is — one of my favorite corners on the internet.

Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet collectively told investors they will spend roughly $700 billion on capital expenditures in 2026. That is nearly double what they spent in 2025. Three of the four raised capex guidance during this week of reporting.

[What I Learned about Hyperscalers

If you are still positioning yourself as “the person who produces artifacts,” you are standing in the blast radius. If you are the person who decides what matters, what is safe, what is credible, what is worth shipping, and what should be rejected, you still matter.

How to Survive the Agentic AI Era | HackerNoon

Also applies to organizations.

A new-to-me Rangefinder

A month or two ago, I bought a Minolta Hi-matic 7s from a street vendor in downtown San Francisco. A new battery, a working light meter, and I went on a photo walk on Alameda Island. One of the best parts of a photo walk with any fixed lens camera is the way you have to move yourself to get the frame, the photo, the focus just right. I just got this attempt back today and here are a few of the shots.

Microsoft released it on January 21st, 2026 but I hadn’t tried it until today.

microsoft/VibeVoice

Good post from Simon Willison on Microsoft’s vibe voice.

The new rule from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Developmentwould eliminate protections based on gender identity and sexual orientation first introduced under Barack Obama.

snip

The proposal also removes a 2016 safeguard that banned shelters from asking invasive questions or requiring proof of a person’s body or medical history.

Donald Trump rolls back LGBTQ housing protections

Well hello there.

AI companies can’t endlessly subsidize their AI products by charging users less than it costs to actually run them.

[The AI Compute Crunch Is Here (and It