A rocksteady 90% failure rate you could set your watch to.

I *LOVE* that film. It’s so tense and I love how it ends. They do so much work to make such an extraordinary story feel as grounded as can be. Like how sometimes action happens in other rooms to other characters and we’re observers with a partial view or even miss it. Great film, great title 😂

A hill of pedantry I will die upon: “Invite” is a verb. The noun is “invitation”.

They make tools to increase engagement. Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube don’t care who you follow. You’re served content based on what feeds interactions. For the majority, their follows are based on being discovered through algorithms. But this is a different topic to short form content.

(Well to be specific, their goal is total monetisation of attention, the strategy is infinite content)

I suggest the goal of social media *companies* is infinite content. Social media is whatever people want, and I believe most people, when given the choice, will choose quality.

Reels. Shorts. Stories. Vine's corpse, metabolised by engagement-maximisation engines and repackaged as bite-sized candy. We have an opportunity to do something genuinely different here. Don't let it dissolve.

Resist shortform junk.

The format doesn't reward interesting. It punishes it. Craft, nuance, and surprises are all liabilities when someone's thumb is hovering. Volume and trend-chasing are the only "winning" strategies in shortform.

"Scroll immersion" is a euphemism. Viewers aren't engaged, they're sedated. Shortform consumption is linked to enduring attention disruption, emotional regulation and reduced executive function. It's the absence of engagement, and it messes people up.

pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...

Sad to see shortform visual media making its way into the Atmosphere. It's the lowest common denominator of content consumption, degrading for creators and audiences, and completely avoidable. Sure, there's a minority of creators doing interesting things, but...

Offprint Changelog | Offprint What's new in Offprint, what's fixed, and what broke along the way.

Most of you didn’t know we have a public changelog, we just released some new blocks (buttons, and LaTeX)

Still working on the Substack migration stuff. But it won’t stop us from shipping 🚀

I built that site in two days to get it ready for conf. It can do with so much help sloooowww wwwwiiinnnnkkkk 😊

Milla Jojovich (yes that one) has joined the open source community and casually dropped “The highest-scoring AI memory system ever benchmarked”.

github.com/milla-jovovi...

Clear and present danger:

youtu.be/Mn_CHzm7vwA?...

#LinkedIn

Apropos of everything

I would hope to see Sifa not optimise for those vanity metrics driving LinkedIn posting, amplified by algorithms, in order to limit the resulting wanky behaviours.

The environment isn't incidental to LinkedIn's design, it *is* the design, because it keeps people anxious, engaged, and performing. I think building something better means treating professional identity as something to develop, not to perform for validation.

SAying all of this because the fix (IMHO) means changing the optimisation targets entirely. Stop rewarding resonance and start rewarding usefulness. Responses that add information, challenge productively, or demonstrate actual outcomes. Measure what people do, not how good they make each other feel.

Optimising for that emotional state through engagement metrics created a feedback loop: the awkward anxious self-mythologising gets rewarded, which trains people to produce more of it, which normalises this cringe culture and makes genuine professional discourse feel weird and out of place.

This is what makes LinkedIn unsafe in a specific way: challenging any of the dominant narrative: "hustle works," "failure is a gift," "your network is your net worth" reads as a personal attack. LinkedIn trains people to treat their professional identity as an emotional support structure.

The core emotional driver on LinkedIn is fear. The modern workplace is precarious and often arbitrary. People post "I got laid off and it was the best thing that ever happened to me 🙏" not to inform you, but to manage terror about a process and state that could destroy their financial security.

The engagement mechanics (reactions, follower counts, etc) don't reward usefulness. They reward statements that make other people feel good about themselves for agreeing.

This specific bad-faith speech that Iris calls "wank" are statements made primarily to make the speaker feel better, dressed up as objective claims about the world and their work. LinkedIn is essentially a wank-optimisation engine:

Start with @iris-meredith.bsky.social 's piece on "Wank" deadsimpletech.com/blog/essay_o... → LinkedIn didn't create performative self-promotion culture but it has optimised for it. Engagement mechanics turned a pre-existing human tendency into an industrial process. 🧶

A small price to pay to party with @bmann.ca

This crowd are huggers!

Hi! AppFirst of all: Thanks for a nice and VoiceOver-accessible app! I've only used Skeets a couple of days, but it's already beating the native Bluesky-app by lightyears in terms of usability and accessibility.

This is the kind of feedback that makes me really really happy.

Makes sense. I'm glad they did have it, but was also confused. Thanks Boris!

(But this opens up a whole other concern for me. It was great that I was able to restore my data, but why does bluesky still have my data after I emigrated?)

Worked! (and I can see my missing photos are restored).

Thank you 🙏 @baileytownsend.dev 🐮🎃