One thing that didn't come up at the Berkman reunion, as far as I know, was the incredible coincidence that at the same time we were booting up academic and political blogging and podcasting out of Berkman on Mass Ave, on the other side of Cambridge St, Mark Zuckerberg and his undergrad pals were booting up what would eventually make them billionaires, aka The Face Book. What if we had met, or known about each other? #
Something happened on the drive to Boston last week that makes we wary of trusting the FSD feature of my Tesla model Y. I was on the NY State Thruway going north, a few miles south of the exit for I-90E to Boston, in FSD mode, in the right lane, when I see a hundred yards or so ahead a car with flashing lights in the shoulder. Before waiting to see what FSD would do, I signaled a left turn, which is a clever feature that tells the FSD software to switch lanes. It started to do so, then the software must've noticed the car with the flashing lights and inbetween the two lanes it hit the brakes hard, and slowed us down to a dangerous speed, esp if there had been a car behind us. But there was absolutely no danger. The car in the shoulder wasn't even close enough to make a difference if we had remained in the right lane, but we were leaving it. And it tried to stop us in no man's land. Insane. Anyone seeing this behavior would have thought I was drunk. So next time something like that happens if I'm in FSD mode, I'm going to cancel it by turning the steering wheel slightly and taking over fully. I have trouble believing people who let this thing drive without overriding it regularly.#
Nice to see Thread Writer for Bluesky getting traction. It's a rewrite of thread.center which I wrote for Twitter, which Twitter never noticed before shutting it down. One of these days there will be a platform that really pays attention to what developers create and makes sure users learn about them. Twitter was not that company. Like most tech companies they spent their dev relations money on the wrong things. #