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…
What we are witnessing is a “juriscopic regime” — a dense entanglement of scopic technologies (body cameras, satellites, open‑source verification), scientific protocols and legal evidentiary horizons that together govern what can be seen, verified and acted upon as “truth” — defining who counts as an expert and what forms of knowledge are ignored as anecdotal, non-scientific or non-legal.
Collecting evidence doesn’t mean it “counts.”
But we are more numerous than ever. Our tail is long and wide. What if we get real power? We didn’t have it in 1999. We four Cluetrain authors thought we did. But Web 2.0 came along, and we got all the personal agency the platforms allowed.
Working with a multidisciplinary team of professors and students, we recently developed a new way to map gentrification in Philly neighborhoods using a combination of accounts from longtime residents, Google Street View images and machine learning.
This is a great model for civil society organizations to describe change.
The goal of writing is not to have written. It is to have increased your understanding, and then the understanding of those around you. When you are tasked to write something, your job is to go into the murkiness and come out of it with structure and understanding.
I think with my fingers on the keyboard.
I think what’s neat about this announcement is not the AI angle — AI is just there to make the process simpler for users that don’t want to code or get into the details. It’s the democratization of feed creation itself.
Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds
These places where AI puts the non-coder in control feel promising to me.
Smartfederal investments in community colleges can ensure that they continue to be engines foreconomic mobility and equip workers for the jobs available today and tomorrow.
Rahm Emanuel’s Community College Funding Plan
I would love to see this happen.
Agents change that. If an agent can read a codebase, understand it, and modify it on your behalf, then access to source code stops being a symbolic right for programmers and becomes a practical capability for far more people. Suddenly the difference between software you can change and software you can only beg starts to really matter.
AI Agents Could Make Free Software Matter Again | George London
Producing evidence for effective instruction, she argued, is the job of good government and shouldn’t hinge upon parent advocacy.
They’re Urged to Speak Out, But Education Researchers Face a High-stakes Choice | KQED
Facts still exist, but agreement about which facts matter — or even which sources to trust — has eroded. The result is less outrage than disorientation.
Vibe Coding a small sharing utility for Micro.blog
I wanted a very specific way to post to my Micro.blog account. I have a preferred format, and I wanted to be able to share a quote, a source, and a comment directly from whatever I’m reading in a browser or RSS reader.
Since I couldn’t find a tool that did exactly that, I decided to build it myself using Gemini as a coding partner.
The hardest part wasn’t the code itself—it was figuring out what to actually write the code in and how to organize it. I took a bunch of wrong turns at the start because I didn’t know enough to do anything but follow instructions. I tried tools that didn’t fit before finally landing on the right setup.
The good news is that I’ve now spent the time figuring out which tools to use. I’ve got the setup done, and I can use these same tools in the future without going through the same struggle again.
Along the way, I kept some notes and reflections in Obsidian. I’m not entirely sure how they’ll help yet, but I figured having a record of the steps would be better than nothing. I also put the project on GitHub, which meant getting that side of things updated and ready for the next time I want to build something.
If you want to see the actual messy reality of how this came together, you can check out the PROCESS.md file in the GitHub repo for this project.
You cannot ignore history
We just visited The Topology of Terror in Berlin. It makes Ben Werdmuller’s comments feel even more stark.
The White House has an app now and a Trump wants you to report people to ICE on it
Are we ready to take advantage of the portability of Filesystems?
Inputs over time:
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Synthesizing Sources from Purdue’s excellent online writing library.
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I saw Stephen Wolfram at a conference in Boston about two years ago and this (paraphrased) caught my attention: Gen AI does for words what statistics do for numbers. # What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? goes much more in depth on this idea.
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This got me started on a raft of reading: Filesystems are having a moment.
Combined, this has me thinking about how we harness the richness of content across civil society and our deep and diverse context so that we can synthesize knowledge and coordinate in new ways.
If two apps can read markdown, they can share context. If they both understand the SKILL.md format, they can share capabilities. Nobody had to sign a partnership agreement. Nobody had to attend a standards body meeting. The file format does the coordinating.
Filesystems are having a moment
This idea starts to get us at interoperability for nonprofits and all of the context and qualitative they hold.
In Berlin and reading An Honest Man by Ben Fergusson. Novels give such a feel for a place. And it’s nice to have his characters add to what I’m seeing here. 📚
A court in the US has thrown out the justice department’s attempt to gain access to the medical records of trans children.
If anyone thinks they are safe just because it’s happening to someone else this time, they are not paying attention to history.
This puts the conditions in place to criminalize being unhoused.
The conditions for detainment outlined in the order are poorly defined, which means it could be interpreted broadly to detain and involuntarily institutionalize people in public spaces. And it doesn’t detail who may make determinations on institutionalization.