Crank.report Survey

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…

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.”

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

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.

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.

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