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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

We have built a working simulacrum of knowledge work.

The incentives almost guarantee we are in big trouble. Many workers, quite rationally, want to do well on whatever dimension they are being measured on. If they are judged by the surface-level quality of their work, then it’s no surprise most of “their” output will be written by LLMs.

Simulacrum of Knowledge Work | One Happy Fellow - blog

Ask anyone who has ever put a slide deck in front of me: I judge those proxy measures. To me those have always been a combination of how done do you think this is and how much do you care about the audience you are putting it in front of?

If an institution — or an industry — is declining, adding AI won’t magically make it better. In the cases that these Cornell researchers highlight in this piece, there were only meaningful improvements when the underlying systems were working well and the human infrastructure around the software was well-developed.

AI is not a magic wand and it won’t fix your problems

Looking forward to reading the study referenced in this article.

The first is the fear of job loss, and I feel like this is the most straightforward to deal with. Personally, I think the solution should be to share the productivity of AI with society at large, in particular since AI owes most of its abilities to training on the works of society. The easiest way would be a straight tax on AI usage, and using that tax to pay a universal basic income. There are obviously a ton of variations on this idea, but I think the general premise of sharing the gains with everyone is sound. I don’t think many would complain if they lost their job but kept their income.

The AI industry is discovering that the public hates it | Hacker News

We call this taxes.

These costs could be ignored, or even accepted, if there was a clear idea of how precisely AI would streamline and improve the workplace—or offer any tangible public benefit significant enough to make these underlying trade-offs acceptable. But the answers to these questions remain extremely tenuous. According to a February 2026 paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 80 percent of companies that have begun actively using AI have reported no impact on company productivity. A separate, widely cited 2025 MIT study revealed that 95 percent of corporate AI pilot programs received zero return.

The AI Industry Is Discovering That the Public Hates It | The New Republic

I’m not sure the calculations are the same for nonprofits because they have never been fully staffed. How to get the benefits while mitigating the costs is still a very big question.

Even companies with the biggest IT budgets will need to prove returns on AI spending over time, especially if they’re answering to shareholders on quarterly earnings calls.

AI can cost more than human workers now

Nonprofits have an opportunity to get the headcount they have NEVER been able to afford. Only if we have a new delivery model to scale adoption and use.