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On making my own tools: a Readwise-to-PDF Archiver

I’ve been spending time lately refining my knowledge management system. I want to be sure I’m archiving permanent PDFs of the material that is really key to the projects I’m working on—not just the stuff I save to Readwise, but the articles I actually take the time to annotate and think through.

To make that easier, I used Gemini CLI to help me build a little archiver utility. I’ve shared it on GitHub here: Readwise_PDFArchiver_Public.

This is the third workflow utility I’ve created for myself now. Each time I do this, it gets a bit easier. I’m learning how to ask for things more efficiently, I know to clarify the architecture at the beginning, and I’m getting better at working through the technical hurdles that come up.

It’s interesting to look at these three small utilities—two of them don’t use AI at all in the final code; I just used AI to write them. The other one does use it for some analysis. What AI has really opened up for me is the option to use Python for these routine tasks that just make the maintenance of my digital systems work better.

It’s about building a bespoke workflow. The trick is keeping it only on the things that are just mine, like my PKMS. Versus workflows that are shared or nested in a broader collaboration. All of it has me thinking about how I improve my own computing environment and how we have a solid set of organizational Standard Operating Procedures so that we can be orchestrated in our team-wide or organization-wide efforts.

But what if the key to serving your users best depends in large part upon training a machine learning algorithm? What if that ML algorithm needs a massive training dataset? In an age when machine learning is in its ascendancy, this is increasingly a critical design objective.

Seeing Like an Algorithm | Remains of the Day

This an older article — and long! — but if you do any kind of modeling to better understand the preferences of your users, it is well worth the read.

[Switching vendors] also applies to other layers of the tech stack (database, etc.) to various extents as well as to some other types of software, e.g. it’s trivial to export your bookmarks from one bookmark manager to another if they both have APIs or import/export capabilities — or, with a bit more effort, you can write your own.

What If Lock-In Doesn’t Matter So Much Anymore?

Another for the “how do we bring more portability and agency to the nonprofit tech stack” file. Those are also the things that bring negotiating power.

This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it. An abstraction they control and moderate. It’s about monopolizing access to information. A true Metaverse unbound by open standards and your ability to build your own corner of the web according to your needs and desires. Which – given how strong Google’s influence is on web standards – will change the shape of the standards for the technological landscape we are building the web on.

On Google declaring war on the Web

Let’s be frank: we haven’t been paying attention to context for a long time. That’s what hurts long simmering news stories, fuels mis/disinformation, dampens civic engagement.

So the question is how do we use these tools, how do we reshape them, what are we advocating for?

A demand co-op is a cooperative that pools and directs the spending power of its members. Demand determines what gets built, who survives, and where wealth flows. Most communities already have enormous spending power, but because that demand is unorganized, the value created from it is captured by outside businesses and investors. A demand co-op coordinates that spending so economic activity can build communal businesses, assets, and long-term ownership instead of constant leakage.

What is a demand co-op

This reminds me of open source bounties. I’ve been thinking a lot about to aggregate the small nonprofits served by TechSoup turn philanthropy into negotiating power. Group buying, mutualism, are all a part of the answer. I will add this to the list.

The choice reflects a broader Google strategy: Stay at the frontier, but also prioritize models cheap and fast enough to deploy across products used by billions, rather than chasing benchmark supremacy alone.

How Google plans to win the AI war

What impact does this have on the environmental impact?

AI vendors are clearly the “new new gatekeepers”. Like the previous ones, they will dominate how we learn about the world even while some of us turn to open source and liberatory alternatives. But they may not dominate how we connect and share our experiences of the world, and that’s the core of the opportunity: how do we design pro-social frameworks and spaces that sit alongside an agentic information ecosystem?

Notable links: May 15, 2026

And how do help people know the difference?

This year’s Key Recommendations in this report convey fundamental best-practice expectations for social media platform safety, privacy, and expression. As we have done for the past six years, GLAAD continues to implore social media companies to meet these basic best practices: improve content moderation; provide meaningful transparency; respect data privacy; demonstrate commitments to workforce diversity and civil discourse; and strengthen and enforce policies that protect LGBTQ people from hate, harassment, and disinformation — while also not suppressing LGBTQ content and creators.

Executive Summary – 2026 Social Media Safety Index | GLAAD

Read this with yesterday’s share on content moderation as infrastructure in mind.

Papers that are more difficult to read might be worth it if AI increased the amount of good science being produced. But this doesn’t seem to be the case. Organization Science is desk-rejecting (e.g., rejecting a paper before even sending it to peer reviewers) nearly 70% of manuscripts that made heavy use of AI. This number drops to 44% for papers written without AI.

Easy Is Overrated

Can we do this kind of analysis on grant submissions?

Without uncertainty tolerance, we risk getting stuck at what statisticians call a local maximum. Like a mountain climber standing at the top of a hill, unaware of a taller peak just out of sight, our discomfort with uncertainty can keep us wedded to a business strategy, a job, or a relationship that is safe, but not optimal. Uncertainty tolerance allows us to persist through ambiguity—and it has never been more relevant.

5 Questions to Help You Navigate Uncertainty

I refer to this kind of uncertainty as navigating with a compass, not a map. I will read How To Not Know — this post is by the author — to see if it adds to the toolkit.

Moderation is infrastructure. It must be built like roads and power grids–with deliberate choke points, fail‑safe valves, and capacity limits. In road engineering, it is the ‘design speed’ of the road that users drive, not the posted speed limit; the tighter the curves, the shorter the sightline, the more measured the pace. The same is true of platforms–architecture sets behavior more effectively than policy.

What We Will Refuse to Build Again | dangerousmeta!

How do we architect for thoughtfulness and meaningful engagement?

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.