Crank.report Survey

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 02:17:29 -0700

The argument I’ve been building through this post is that multi-agentic software development is fundamentally a distributed systems problem, and as such, it inherits impossibility results from the literature.

Multi-agentic Software Development is a Distributed Systems Problem (AGI can’t save you from it)

Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:13:56 -0700

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.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 16:08:14 -0700

Three very good things

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

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:36:06 -0700

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.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 11:10:59 -0700

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.

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:40:56 -0700

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.

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:35:16 -0700

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.

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 08:08:37 -0700

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

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

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 07:53:23 -0700

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.

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 21:12:09 -0700

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:

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:10:46 -0700

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.

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 06:59:32 -0700

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.

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 04:32:46 -0700

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

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 06:52:45 -0700

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.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 07:07:45 -0700

Hello, World - NASA

The Earth is beautiful.

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 06:12:41 -0700

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

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:55:55 -0700

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.

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 05:39:21 -0700

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

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 20:46:08 -0700

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

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 14:18:26 -0700

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.

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:35:32 -0700

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…

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:08:13 -0700

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.

More evidence doesn’t mean more justice – The limits of visual technologies in human rights cases - LSE Impact

Collecting evidence doesn’t mean it “counts.”

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 06:05:56 -0700

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.

From Mainstream to Allstream | Doc Searls Weblog

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 07:01:44 -0700

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.

We analyzed Philly street scenes and identified signs of gentrification using machine learning trained on longtime residents’ observations

This is a great model for civil society organizations to describe change.

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:56:00 -0700

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.

Don’t Let AI Write For You

I think with my fingers on the keyboard.