Crank.report Survey

This context influences every step. Strategy and regulation shape business decisions. Customer expectations and established UX patterns shape product decisions. Existing platforms and services constrain solution design. Coding standards, frameworks, and deployment pipelines guide implementation.

“Coding is solved” misses the point - Waldek Mastykarz

Organizations do have context and arranging that context so it is accessible to a wider group of people has always been the problem of knowledge management. AI and the utility it brings to coding has just made this more clear and across more technical domains.

The problem with AI voice is not the techniques themselves. It is the overuse of them—their deployment to describe a trip to 7-Eleven with the same rhetorical flourishes once used to send men to the moon.

[JFK’s AI Voice - Marginal REVOLUTION](marginalrevolution.com/marginalr…

The Times is “sane-washing” Trump and Kennedy, working really hard to take dangerous and extreme positions and treat them as reasonable and normal.

Sane washing

This is so dangerous.

Cloudflare is simultaneously blocking AI crawlers that harvest content without paying, while building the infrastructure for agents that do pay. That is the dual bet: charge the bots that take, and give the bots that work a cheaper, purpose-built tool to work with.

Cloudflare built a browser for AI agents. It uses 7x less memory than Chromium and runs entirely on Workers.

This is interesting. I’ve been thinking a lot about html as a window into content (that description courtesy of colleague and friend John Zoltner)and how browsers will change. I hadn’t thought of browsers for a gents, however.

We are the companies, labs, and independent builders who develop, research, deploy, or operate agents. Members compare notes on what actually works, find each other, and take on the problems no single organization can fix alone.

Agent Community — open community for agent builders

Esther Dyson is behind this. I’m looking forward to digging in.

The assumption that nonprofits are too set in their ways to respond to a rapidly changing world doesn’t hold up either. The best nonprofits operate like any tech startup: reading market conditions and pivoting to where the need is greatest. This is partly out of necessity, as nonprofits, more than any other sector, need to be constantly responsive to the shifting winds of community need and donor focus. Many have to raise their entire operating budget from scratch every single year — a pressure that breeds operational discipline and adaptability.

AI’s new millionaires want to disrupt philanthropy. They should fund what already exists | Fortune

Even more true for the smallest organizations closest to the issues.

Jessica Kingsley Publishers (JKP) has launched a new ‘safety cover’ designed to help users create privacy and discretion should they happen to be reading about potentially sensitive subjects in a public or unsafe setting.

Publisher launches safety covers for LGBTQ+ books

I’m glad this available. And so sad that it needs to be.

The engraved Mac Mini is the Patagonia vest of the AI era. The Patagonia vest signalled membership in a financial elite that valued the appearance of rugged practicality over the display of wealth. The numbered Sequoia Mac Mini signals membership in an AI elite that values local inference, open-source tools, and the ability to run an agent framework on a $599 computer rather than paying for cloud API access.

Sequoia is giving away the hardware for an AI project it cannot invest in. That is the point.

Have I posted this already? T the he numbers are out of date. Still much in the article that’s dead on. We need a symbol like this, a club for civil society.

In other words, REST is a set of architectural principles for serving resources, usually over HTTP. It is so ingrained in web development, and so standardized, that it feels strange when we do not see it.

What it means for an API to be RESTful | Andros Fenollosa

I’ve been pretty interested in this as a stand-in for single sign on when no personal or secure information needs to be transmitted. It can be used to stitch together web pages that are doing something for someone using a browser.

We’ve been building a new system for running evals against different models, prompts, and harnesses, with the goal of being able to identify the most appropriate small and inexpensive models for different categories of task.

smevals - a small eval suite for evaluating models, prompts, and harnesses | Prime Radiant

Definitely a tool for the Frugal AI suite.

Finished reading: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson 📚So good that I immediately started the next book in the series. Something I rarely do. The formation of groups, interplay of power, use of AI, and control of the climate make it so applicable right now.

We made a different bet. We believed the future of professional AI would require more than general-purpose intelligence. It would require models built specifically for the domains, standards, and consequences of professional work. We believed that the distinct advantages of Thomson Reuters decades of world-class content and expertise could be best expressed in a model that we ourselves crafted.  

Thomson Reuters Built Its Own AI Model That Now Ranks Among the World’s Best - Thomson Reuters Institute

I think this applies to civil society generally and for communities of purpose within civil society, people and organizations working in food security, for example.

Something I’ve come to appreciate about MCP is that it’s much easier to reason about agent capabilities and what might go wrong than with arbitrary command execution in an open network environment - the default for most of today’s general and coding agent tools.

Stateless MCP

I wonder how this works with emerging standards like Agentic Resource Discovery.

Opposition is not a principle. The political winds will inevitably shift, leaving polarization behind. Building a better web is much more universal. Empowering people to own their identity, publish more freely, form many kinds of communities, and leave without losing everything.

Social web disconnect

The structures for community building are important.

Open models aren’t an experiment or a research project anymore. They’re now running inside the largest companies in the world – Ollama is used by 85% of the Fortune 500 – and it’s just the beginning.

Ollama: all aboard open models · Ollama Blog

I’m eager to make this more accessible to nonprofits.

The IndieWeb does not invent a platform; it defines a handful of small standards that compose with each other. The official index orders them by age and breadth of implementation.

I joined the IndieWeb, here’s what I learned | Andros Fenollosa

I’ve been thinking a lot about knowledge graphs organized in a way that showcases ownership, rests on domains, and uses existing standards. I’m not sure IndieWeb protocols provide all of the answer but likely much of it.

The best thing here is that I prepared Codex and Antigravity to be used as Claude subagents, orchestrated by Fable, using the headless nature of both. Why is it cool? Because tokens are taken from the Codex and Antigravity subscriptions, so I was not paying extra, but I instantly had much more intelligence to use.

I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens - Quesma Blog

I’ve been working a lot of frugal AI set ups. I’m eager to mimic this approach, including local models.

What is already easy for everyone will not create any lasting value for you. I don’t think building a successful startup has gotten any easier with AI. It’s just that certain parts of it have gotten faster. I don’t think speed of coding or having the right landing page copy or the right deck or presentation was ever the bottleneck in getting your startup off the ground, anyways.

Punch Yourself in the Face with Reality | Adi

But what is structure user info and use cases in a way that can be shared across makers?

Two decades of anti-LGBTQ legislation, documented bill by bill.

LGBTQ Legislation Tracking Project — LegiAlerts

Now let’s map it and put it against other community demographics to see the impact.