July 4 link dump

The Internet needs more You by Arun Ravindran. The indie web is slowly staging a comeback. People are returning to personal sites, RSS readers, and hand-curated blogrolls — not out of nostalgia, but because the algorithmic feed has failed them.

SoftBank’s untitled AI goose game — eggs do not lay eggs by David Gerard. SoftBank was also the main backer of WeWork, which was almost as stupid as OpenAI. WeWork’s 2019 stock market offering failed spectacularly and SoftBank’s investment went down 90%. WeWork still exists in 2026, but it’s a lot smaller. As well as the spectacular messes, SoftBank has a pile of quietly successful portfolio companies — like ARM, which designs the chips in all the phones, and makes a bundle. These pay for the messes.

I drove the Slate Truck — there’s more to it than EV minimalism by Rani Molla. The vehicle runs counter to a broader trend in the auto industry sometimes referred to as trimflation — the push to increase margins by bundling vehicles with more technology and luxury features.

War by Other Means by John Severini. Combined with recent and forthcoming improvements to industrial automation, all signs point toward governments relying on a much smaller pool of human capital for labor and war. Accordingly, this means that a fundamental source of political power has begun to shift from the people toward the firms that make those machines. (Those firms, though, have labor forces. So the importance of labor/management issues goes up, too?)

There is minimal downside to switching to open models by Andrew Marble. (A thought-provoking comparison of desktop Linux to open* AI models. And yes, we still need open-source/Eurostack CAD.)

Sixty percent of US consumers say ‘AI’ in brand messaging is a turnoff, survey finds by Sarah Perez. (If people knew how much “AI” investment is there to implement surveillance and price discrimination/surveillance pricing, IMHO the “AI” boom would be even less popular.)

You Should Make Cross Views by Ryan Moulton. All you need is two pictures taken from two different positions shifted horizontally.

Improvements to Web for AI Should Benefit All Users by Jason Grigsby. When a site’s actions are hard for an AI agent to use, that is a gap in the page’s own semantics, and we should first seek to close it in the platform’s shared layers (HTML and ARIA), where the user, assistive technology, and agents all benefit.

The Costco theory of the internet by JA Westenberg. (But who is left who’s trusted enough to be the curator?)

The Future of Everything is Lies, I Guess by Kyle Kingsbury. (Long series on how LLMs change things.)