Crank.report Survey

Perhaps most important, philanthropy must no longer treat middle America as its proving ground to test new ideas. The success of local democracy work hinges on this question: Does it aim to extract learning for the funders, or is it a genuine effort to support local communities? We have to invest in people’s capacity to solve problems by engaging them in the work.

A Second Chance to Get Rural America Right

Genuine engagement means giving up decision making to the people closest to the issue.

Three very good things

1. Radhaus in Fort Mason is delicious. Go for the deviled egg. It’s pickled with beets.
2. Richard Powers in conversation with Kim Stanley Robinsonsent me into a research rabbit hole: magical realism, science-driven fiction, and dislocation.
3. The Monsters | Berkeley Repertory Theatre is athletic, subtly, and heart-wrenching. It’s worth every minute and then some.

The plan proceeds without resistance, not because there is none, but because everything connecting the plan to the real world has been stripped out.

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying | Iran | The Guardian

Detailed, thoughtful, and applicable todo much.

I also want to write for myself. Writing is a form of thinking; it is as I’m shaping a sentence that I’m teasing out precisely what it is I believe, and what feelings and thoughts I seek to communicate.

USE IT OR LOSE IT - On the Level with Margaret Heffernan

I’m working on a research onboarding document for undergraduate and graduate interns. I’m trying to figure out to give them paths to AI without losing the part of sense making that writing and group sense making provide.

Now, the French government has decided that enough is enough. It has announced that it will shift away from proprietary technologies from outside the European Union and focus more on open-source solutions — and part of that means ditching Windows for Linux.

France’s government is ditching Windows for Linux, calling US tech dependence a strategic risk

We’ve been down this road before.

Agents that read papers and study competing projects before writing code find optimizations that code-only agents miss. The literature research pointed the agent at operator fusions present in CUDA/Metal backends but absent from CPU.

Research-Driven Agents: What Happens When Your Agent Reads Before It Codes | SkyPilot Blog

I wonder if this would apply to using agents on grants, theories of change, impact statements. That would require nonprofits to organize and structure a variety of outcomes data and related research.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

Address to the Nation on Energy and National Goals: “The Malaise Speech” | The American Presidency Project

1979. That erosion of confidence has been disastrous in the years since.

We have found that the most successful SMBs move away from transactional training toward long-term partnerships and resource-pooling with peer employers to overcome the time and capacity barriers that often stall individual efforts.

What Aspen Institute learned about upskilling at small businesses

I’m looking forward to reading this paper. I suspect there’s a lot of good insights that transfer to nonprofits.

When I’m doing my workshops with teams, the main advice I give for anyone wanting to make their text more approachable - wanting to actually use the human voice - is to add “tiny sprinklings of poetry”.

AI and the human voice: gilest.org:

The HN Arcade is a community-driven directory of games discovered from Hacker News Show HN posts. Here’s how games make it into the directory.

The HN Arcade

Now this is fun.

The combination works because each tool does what the other cannot. AI is perfect for recall and search. It is terrible at judgment. My notes are terrible for recall. I regularly cannot read my own handwriting. But they force me to process what I am hearing in real time, to decide what matters while it is happening.

Why AI Meeting Tools Can’t Replace Your Handwritten Notes

I try to maintain the habit of jotting down what I think about a meeting right after the meeting. Those are the things that stick.

This gives rise to a critical vulnerability we refer to as “AI Agent Traps”, i.e. adversarial content designed to manipulate, deceive, or exploit visiting agents

AI Agent Traps by Matija Franklin, Nenad Tomašev, Julian Jacobs, Joel Z. Leibo, Simon Osindero :: SSRN

What’s great about science is its people. The slow, stubborn, sometimes painful process by which a confused student becomes an independent thinker. If we use these tools to bypass that process in favor of faster output, we don’t just risk taking away what’s great about science. We take away the only part of it that wasn’t replaceable in the first place.

The machines are fine. I’m worried about us.

Read the whole things.

Hello, World - NASA

The Earth is beautiful.

When a non-technical person changes their store hours in a WordPress site, they can hit Save and look at the site and see that something happened. When you’re sending your command through a chatbot, you’re fundamentally trusting the chatbot to perform the action you requested, in the way that you requested it, correctly and accurately. That’s actually handing the keys to the castle to your robot butler and hoping nothing weird happens. If we’ve learned anything since the initial release of ChatGPT, LLMs are great at making weird shit happen.

The CMS is dead. Long live the CMS. | jazzsequence

While the victim is drowning in “Welcome to SaaS Product!” and “Verify your email for Newsletter You Never Asked For”, the attacker is doing something else. They’re resetting the victim’s bank password, making purchases on their accounts, or signing up for credit cards in their name. The real security alerts and confirmation emails get buried by the noise.

Your sign-up form is a weapon | Bytemash

I haven’t heard of subscription bombing before.

If it wants to continue to matter, fact-checking must stop imagining itself only as an editorial product and begin acting as a form of civic infrastructure.

Fact-checking has to go where misinformation actually spreads - Poynter

Today, the good people who act as thoughtful stewards of the web infrastructure are still showing the same generosity of spirit that has created opportunity for billions of people and connected society in ways too vast to count while —not incidentally— also creating trillions of dollars of value and countless jobs around the world. But the increasingly-extremist tycoons of Big Tech have decided that that’s not good enough.

Endgame for the Open Web | Anil Dash

Starting Wednesday, tens of thousands of humanitarian immigrants across California are no longer be eligible for food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, benefits that are still sometimes referred to as food stamps.

Thousands of Alameda County immigrants lose access to CalFresh

This is wrong. All our neighbors should have access to food.

The order directs federal officials to send the list to state election officials, and orders the attorney general to prioritize prosecution of election officials who provide federal ballots to ineligible voters. It also directs the U.S. Postal Service not to transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual not included on the “state citizenship list.”

[Executive order regarding mail in ballots | NYT Gift Link](www.nytimes.com/2026/03/3…