"The right historical parallel is the assembly line. It didn’t replace workers. It restructured what they did, removing the overhead of moving parts between stations so each person could focus on the work only they could do. Wh... crank.report/2026/04/21/the-right-his...
"I also want to delegate work and get different model perspectives on the same draft, spec, or implementation, instead of relying on a single vendor’s subagents."
A lightweight way to make agents talk without paying for API usage
This... crank.report/2026/04/20/i-also-want-t...
Leafy wooded scene.
"I think the second organizational casualty is “the system”. When speed is the priority, there’s no incentive to improve or invest in the shared system (e.g. a design system or codebase) under a tight deadline."
When moving f... crank.report/2026/04/19/i-think-the-s...
Finished reading: Things Become Other Things by Craig Mod 📚I was expecting a lot from this book. And it was so much more.
A diagram showing the VDA framework and the Arc of Democracy. At the top, three icons label the essential elements of democracy: Verification (tick), Deliberation (speech bubble), and Accountability (magnifying glass). Arrows descend from each through three horizontal bands representing the arc: Substantial (truth tested, voices included, power constrained), Performative (forms remain but substance is weak, rituals without consequence), and Simulated (appearance maintained but functions inverted: propaganda as verification, polarisation as deliberation, scapegoating as accountability). A vertical arrow on the left marks the arc's direction: improvements, decline, collapse. A column on the right maps counterpublics onto the same three states: functional counterpublics act in a substantial way, hollow counterpublics in a performative way, disordered counterpublics in a simulated way. The bands shift from grey through pink to red as democracy moves toward simulation.
A society that runs on this stack doesn't stop holding elections, or debating, or running investigations. The forms stay, but what goes is their capacity to constrain power. The arc bends toward simulation, carried out in the language of defending democracy.
"Look, although my 30 mins walk-and-talk was nonlinear and all over the place, what I asked Claude to do was highly structured: I asked it to create docs for the technical architecture, design system, goals, and ways of workin... crank.report/2026/04/19/look-although...
"It turns out that the best place for personal AIs to run is on a computer. Maybe a virtual computer in the cloud, but ideally your computer. That way they can see the docs that you can see, and use the tools that you can use, and so what... crank.report/2026/04/19/it-turns-out-...
Even in wartime, the public interest is best served by defending the space to tell the truth, not by silencing speech. www.eff.org/deeplinks/2...
"Yet as a historian of early 20th-century Latin America, I believe the Trump administration’s approach to Latin America more closely resembles an older pattern of U.S. policy. Between 1900 and the mid-1930s, U.S. forces intervened in one ... crank.report/2026/04/18/yet-as-a-hist...
"In response, a growing number of practitioners are experimenting with strategies that go beyond placement and retention to ask a more fundamental question: what makes a job worth having? Job quality strategies — which address wage... crank.report/2026/04/18/in-response-a...
"Our research has identified a link between those two developments, which means that trout, bass, perch and whitefish may become less common in unstocked lakes. But pike and walleye anglers may be in for a trophy-sized surprise."
... crank.report/2026/04/15/our-research-...
"Brevity was always a discipline. Now it’s a statement. When everything around you is excessive by default, choosing fewer words takes courage. It says: I thought about this. I edited. I respected your time more than I needed to... crank.report/2026/04/15/brevity-was-a...
"In a world where custom code can be created far more easily than it could in the past, communities can more easily build bespoke spaces for themselves."
One size fits none; let communities build for themselves
"The argument I’ve been building through this post is that multi-agentic software development is fundamentally a distributed systems problem, and as such, it inherits impossibility results from the literature."
Multi-agentic Sof... crank.report/2026/04/14/the-argument-...
"Perhaps most important, philanthropy must no longer treat middle America as its proving ground to test new ideas. The success of local democracy work hinges on this question: Does it aim to extract learning for the fun... crank.report/2026/04/12/perhaps-most-...
Three very good things: crank.report/2026/04/11/three-very-go...
"The plan proceeds without resistance, not because there is none, but because everything connecting the plan to the real world has been stripped out."
AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying | Iran | The Guardian
Detailed, thoughtful, and applicable todo much.
"I also want to write for myself. Writing is a form of thinking; it is as I’m shaping a sentence that I’m teasing out precisely what it is I believe, and what feelings and thoughts I seek to communicate."
USE IT OR LOSE IT - On the Level... crank.report/2026/04/11/i-also-want-t...
"Now, the French government has decided that enough is enough. It has announced that it will shift away from proprietary technologies from outside the European Union and focus more on open-source solutions — and part of that means... crank.report/2026/04/11/now-the-frenc...
If only there were some kind of democratic process we could use
"Agents that read papers and study competing projects before writing code find optimizations that code-only agents miss. The literature research pointed the agent at operator fusions present in CUDA/Metal backends but absent from CP... crank.report/2026/04/10/agents-that-r...
"The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning... crank.report/2026/04/10/the-threat-is...
"We have found that the most successful SMBs move away from transactional training toward long-term partnerships and resource-pooling with peer employers to overcome the time and capacity barriers that often stall individual efforts."
W... crank.report/2026/04/10/we-have-found...
"When I’m doing my workshops with teams, the main advice I give for anyone wanting to make their text more approachable - wanting to actually use the human voice - is to add “tiny sprinklings of poetry”."
AI and the human voice: gilest.org:
"The HN Arcade is a community-driven directory of games discovered from Hacker News Show HN posts. Here’s how games make it into the directory."
The HN Arcade
Now this is fun.
"The combination works because each tool does what the other cannot. AI is perfect for recall and search. It is terrible at judgment. My notes are terrible for recall. I regularly cannot read my own handwriting. But they forc... crank.report/2026/04/09/the-combinati...
"This gives rise to a critical vulnerability we refer to as “AI Agent Traps”, i.e. adversarial content designed to manipulate, deceive, or exploit visiting agents"
AI Agent Traps by Matija Franklin, Nenad Tomašev, Julian Jacobs, Joel Z. Leibo, Simon Osindero :: SSRN
Data is the fuel of cyber resilience.
The #CyberPeaceTracer uses #AI to track and analyze cyberattacks targeting #civilsociety. We’ve recorded 843,977 cyber incidents affecting NGOs.
Have you experienced a #cyberattack?
🔗Report it here: incident.protect.ngo
🔗Explore the data: cyberpeacetracer.ngo
"What’s great about science is its people. The slow, stubborn, sometimes painful process by which a confused student becomes an independent thinker. If we use these tools to bypass that process in favor of faster output, we don’t j... crank.report/2026/04/05/whats-great-a...
