Portland

It's been a minute. Let's close some tabs.

AI bots are the scourge of the internet that threatens to destroy the open nature of the internet itself, as if there weren't enough forces conspiring to do that already. Thankfully Cloudflare has declared war(ish) and started blocking them by default. Cloudflare are also proposing a marketplace where AI Bots can pay content creators to scrape their website. Not a terrible idea, after all cultural organisations are reporting AI Bots starting to overwhelming their often under resourced websites. They should probably use a service like Cloudflare, but also don't have the technical knowledge to know what to do. Perhaps the Dead Internet Theory isn't all that wild after all (I promise that all spelling mistakes are my own). Despite starting this post with some AI chat, I too, am done thinking about AI - it's exhausting, or at the very least disappointing. Also The future of web development is AI, Get on or get left behind.

Plausible appeals to the Digital Vegan in me, a open source, self hostable Google Analytics alternative. So does this RSS Server Side Reader. I've been using a self-hosted version of FreshRSS which suits my needs, but there's nothing quite like a new side project to get me out of bed in the morning. Along the same self-hosted lines, Forgejo looks like a pretty cool self-hosted alternative to Github. Not sure I want to risk self-hosting all my code though - don't want too many unfinished side projects to go up in smoke when I accidentally change a config file that deletes everything. We should probably add Penpot to the self-host list as well as an alternative to Figma. Oh, and wger, the self-hosted fitness app looks pretty cool too.

Ariel Richtman has a great read on Platform Engineering that rang true to me. I've been working adjacent to a team building a new platform lately and been thinking about it a lot in terms of a sociotechnical system.

I quite enjoyed staring at What the Hell Are People Doing. The fact that the world had cracked 8 billion people slipped me by.

Google's Threat Intelligence Group has identified North Korean IT workers as a threat. The BBC's Lazarus Heist is a pretty fascinating podcast about North Korean hacker groups and identified DPRK IT workers as an issue a couple of years ago.

I recently learnt that Victoria was first colonised in Portland. The occupation was illegal, even in the eyes of the British and the site of at least one massacre of the Gunditjmara people. Travis Lovett, one of the five commissioners for Yoorrook Justice Commission recently walked the 400km from Portland to Melbourne to draw attention to Yoorrook's final report. It's a vital truth-telling exercise and a prerequisite for a Treaty between Victoria and it's First Nations peoples.

While we're discussing colonialism, I find the theory of the Portuguese 'discovery' of Australia fascinating. Even the fact that it's just a theory is wild to me. I've know about the Dutch making it to Western Australia centuries before the British but had no idea about the Portuguese probably did as well. Of course it makes a lot of sense given their colonisation of Timor.

And just to get a little more local, I really enjoyed the Queer Histories Queer Futures podcast serious about Brunswick's, my local area, queer history.