This series is a place to collect interesting things I’ve seen, read, or heard, along with some brief thoughts (often incomplete and/or inconclusive) that they provoked.

AI Agent Lands PRs in Major OSS Projects, Targets Maintainers via Cold Outreach – socket.dev

Back in February this report landed in a security blog, and I found it fascinating. As is usual for me, it’s at the intersection of human behaviour with technological automation that the real interesting problems lie.

This is part one of a series where I document how I’m making this site more interoperable with IndieWeb tools and standards. I’ll update this notice to link to part 2 once I’ve written it

Interoperability is the heart of what makes the digital world work.

In my first job I worked with academic libraries to make research more openly available, sharing data about all forms of research outputs across the globe through the use of open data formats. These community-owned standards ensured that thousands of different systems globally could communicate, making each other aware of new findings in a field, and bringing the gobal academic community into closer contact.¹

In 1623 the German Wilhelm Schickard produced the first known designs for a mechanical calculator. Twenty years later Blaise Pascal produced a machine of an improved design, aiming to help with the large amount of tedious arithmetic required in his role as a tax collector.

The interest in mechanical calculation showed no sign of reducing in the subsequent centuries, as generations of people worldwide followed in Pascal and Wilhelm’s footsteps, subscribing to their view that offloading mental energy to a machine would be a relief.